BOOKS, ARTICLES , AND ITEMS OF ACADEMIC INTEREST

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

Robert L. Jackson

Published online: 4 May 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

The Rise of MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are finding their way into regular

course offerings. In the March 4 Chronicle of Higher Education Jeffrey

R. Young worries that the new “‘Bandwidth Divide’ Could Bar Some

People from Online Learning” because they can’t afford it. (According

to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an estimated 44 percent of

American adults do not have broadband at home.) Assuming access can

somehow be gained—for example, at the local library—free online

courses are beginning to yield college credit via “challenge exams.”

These exams are similar to those of the College Board’s College Level

Examination Program (CLEP), and they are accepted for credit by many

U.S. colleges. Sometimes they can also receive recommendation for

credit from the American Council on Education (ACE).

According to Paul Fain in the February 4 Inside Higher Ed, “Free

Course, Inexpensive Exam,” last year Excelsior College provided 18,000

students with online credit-bearing exams, compared to the 76,000 (of

98,000 examinees) who received credit for CLEP exams. Two

educational providers, the Saylor Foundation (nonprofit) and Education

Portal (for-profit) seem to be eagerly adapting MOOCs to their own

purposes: finding the brick-and-mortar institutions as well as the online

courses that most reasonably fit their instruction-to-examination model.

This works well with general education courses, which are constrained to a

Acad. Quest. (2013) 26:244–248DOI 10.1007/s12129-013-9358-3

Robert L. Jackson is associate provost and associate professor of English and education at The King’sCollege, New York, NY 10014; rjackson@tkc.edu.

“standardized approach…helping students master content,” rather than

emphasizing “professors’ individual teaching styles with the material.”

Meanwhile, in the February 14 Inside Higher Ed, Pamela Tate of the

Council for Adult and Experiential Learning worries in “The Right Path to

MOOC Credit?” that a handful of Coursera MOOCs were recommended

for credit by the ACE. For Tate, several questions remain: “[H]ow many

MOOC courses will really be worth college credit, where will the credits be

accepted, and for how long will college credits even be the primary

measurement of learning?”

Tate suspects that prestigious institutions will not be immediately ready

to accept the ACE credit recommendations, leaving the less well-known

institutions to decide for themselves whether MOOC credits should be

added to their students’ transcripts. She also foresees a bottleneck at ACE if

a flood of courses suddenly seek credit-bearing status. (Currently, only five

courses from Coursera receive the recommendation.)

To avoid the cumbersome, inefficient method of accreditation, Tate

recommends the best way forward: “a portfolio assessment of student

learning.”Tate leads an organization that advocates for “experiential learning,”

e.g., portfolio assessment, so her enthusiasm for the approach isn’t wholly a

surprise. The point, however, bears consideration: If higher education is in the

midst of radical institutional changes, providers capable of accommodating the

necessary logistics of such a change, including delivery platforms, accreditors,

etc., are needed. It’s intriguing to wonder which of today’s supporting cottage

industries may become tomorrow’s industry leaders (think of Bill Gates’s

operating system contract with IBM).

The Shape of Online Education

Several projects have aimed at nailing down how online education affects

traditional forms of instruction. Noteworthy among these projects is“Online Learning in Higher Education” (Education Next, Spring 2013),by William G. Bowen, Thomas I. Nygren, Kelly A. Lack, and MatthewM. Chingos, with its randomized trials comparing hybrid courses totraditional classes.

The classroomwith a “hybrid format” simply provided computer-guided

instruction in introductory statistics, which included one hour of in-person

instruction weekly, as compared to the typical three to four hours of

face-to-face instruction. The results show similar student achievement

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest 245

across various metrics, leading the authors to conclude that there is “the

potential to reduce instructor compensation costs quite substantially.”Despite promising results, the authors acknowledge that there is “no

compelling evidence that online learning systems available today—not

even highly interactive systems, which are very few in number—can

deliver improved educational outcomes across the board, at scale, on

campuses other than the one where the system was born, and on a

sustainable basis.” Their real pitch is for a sizeable investment from a

“major foundation, government, or [the] private sector” to initiate a

“system-wide approach” to the development of online education.

Otherwise, very few can afford to enter the cyberspace race.

Indeed, Bowen and colleagues call for rigorous testing of the best

models of online education to determine cost-effectiveness and improved

learning outcomes for all types of students—a standard they would never

demand for traditional education. The authors also recognize a national loss

of confidence in higher education, and they believe that implementing

adaptive online systems may help to recover some of the public’s goodwill:

“We are persuaded that well-designed interactive systems in higher

education have the potential to achieve at least equivalent educational

outcomes while opening up the possibility of freeing up significant

resources that could be redeployed more productively.”

Reflecting on Dworkin

One of the most influential philosophers of our age, Ronald Dworkin, passed

away in London on February 14 at the age of eighty-one. In

“Remembering Ronald Dworkin,” (Chronicle of Higher Education,

February 19, 2013) former Dworkin student Jeremy Waldron, a

professor of law at NYU, recalls the inspiration his Oxford mentor

provided for his graduate disputations on the nature of law. Waldron

learned “what it was like to argue seriously…what it meant to be

responded to as someone worth arguing with. Everything I have written

bears the improving mark of those rigorous sessions.”

The February 14 obituary by Adam Liptak in the New York

Times recalls that Dworkin, a regular contributor to the New York

Review of Books along with other mainstream periodicals, was a

determined critic of legal positivism who sought to apply “moral

intelligence to difficult problems” (Waldron’s words).

246 Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

Dworkin’s moral prescriptions dovetailed with his politics. As

University of Iowa law professor Robert Miller explains in

“Thanatopsis for Ronald Dworkin” (First Things, February 18, 2013):

“On virtually every issue that divides liberals and conservatives, whether

momentous ones like abortion or ephemeral ones like recounting votes

in Florida in 2000, Dworkin was an intellectual champion of the left.”

Take affirmative action. Arguing in “Affirmative Action: Is It Fair?”

(Journal of Black Higher Education, Summer 2000) with citations from

Bowen and Bok’s The Shape of the River (1998), Dworkin claimed that it

would be “ironic [and] sad if the Court reverses its own long-standing

ruling now, because dramatic evidence of the value of affirmative action in

elite higher education has just become available.”

In 2000, Dworkin assumed that the benefits of affirmative action

were easily demonstrable, but the work of Dartmouth psychologist

Rogers Elliot and Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono shows otherwise.

Clearly, the late philosopher’s devotion to a certain political vision

compromised his ability to discern the reality of racial preferences in our

society.

Furthermore, former ACLU director Aryeh Neier commented in

“Remembering Ronald Dworkin” (The Nation, February 22, 2013):

“Dworkin connected freedom of speech to the idea of democracy, not as a

means to an end but as an intrinsic characteristic of a system in which all

may take part in self-government”—which limits a democratic majority

from imposing its will on those who have no voice in the deliberative

decisions. But Dworkin remained oblivious to how the advance of

affirmative action undercut the idea of an honest public square, one where

the freedom of speech he championed would not be censored by the

ideological commitments of an elite asserting its will over others.

Like a House of Cards

Some Academic Questions readers will be familiar with the new Netflix

streaming television series House of Cards. For those who have yet to

see this inside-the-beltway drama, the show follows a cast of cutthroats

led by Machiavellian South Carolina congressman Frank Underwood,

played by Kevin Spacey, and will entertain those who enjoy a political

thriller. (The original storyline was penned by British politician turned

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest 247

novelist Michael Dobbs, whose 1989 novel by the same name spawned

a BBC serial drama.)

In “3 Higher Ed Lessons fromNetflix’s ‘House of Cards,’” a February 6

Inside Higher Ed essay, Joshua Kim argues that “streaming TV” may

demonstrate some keen insights for adapting traditional post-secondary

institutions to a changing educational marketplace. First, Kim believes that

Netflix understands the importance of investing in talent—i.e., Kevin

Spacey—for the long-term value: “The key is that I’m willing to pay for

quality.” And, the quality of higher education must prove itself, or lose its

competitive advantage. Second, he applauds Netflix’s experimentation with

a new delivery model, offering all thirteen episodes at once, for those who

enjoy “binge viewing.” Kims thinks such innovations appeal to the

increasingly discriminating consumer, placing Netflix ahead of the next

wave of digital entertainment. While a calculated risk, it’s a move, Kim

suggests, that distinguishes the best from the rest—and the kind of

risk-taking necessary to innovate higher education. Third, Kim explains that

while the Netflix platform is well-established, that’s not enough. The

company’s advantage is situated in an increasingly competitive environment,

of which Kim warns America’s colleges and universities to take note:

“[W]e cannot trade-off investments in our platforms (campuses, technology

infrastructure, etc.) with investments in our talent.”

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