Re: [xmca] The business of education

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

And lots of people marvel at the progress, Helena.
bait and switch.... and pay taxes like Apple!
:-)
mike

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello -- the letter from Meister is really worth reading. It explains why
> MOOCs need the CSU system (and other public higher education connections)
> more than CSU needs MOOCs.
>
> Although short-term, the linkup with Coursera to offer MOOCs in various
> disciplines appears to solve the immediate problem of how to expand access
> to already crowded, booked-up, high-tuition face to face classrooms, it
> solves a different problem for Coursera and other big MOOC companies.
>
> That problem is, long-term ‹ and this is an important problem, since
> Coursera, like the other MOOC companies, is a private company, like
> Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo,  Amazon, etc. -- how to make money. Right now
> MOOCs are free, or at least some are free. How can they figure out how
> much to charge? How much are they "worth" --?
>
> The  simplest way to figure that out would be to hook up with a state
> university and say, "Our class is worth three credits at San Jose State,
> and tuition at San Jose State for three credits is $2,400, so our class
> should cost $2,400."  But it can get much, much  more fine-grained than
> that, since all kinds of personal information gets collected when someone
> enrolls in a class.
>
> Bottom line- without the hookup to established institutions, all the MOOCs
> offer is celebrity teachers doing what are essentially TV shows or
> audiotape classes (you may have noticed that the price on Great
> Teacher-type audio tapes have crashed from $299 to less than $100
> recently). So no matter how celebrated a professor is, it's the hookup to
> an institution that makes it possible to establish market value. And make
> huge money in the long run.
>
> Which is basically gutting the public education system and transferring
> its authority to  exchange credits for tuition to a private company.
>
> Another argument for free public higher education -- the only way that
> public education can compete against a for-profit system.
>
>
> Helena
>
>
>
> On 5/11/13 1:30 PM, "mike cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >The following letter from the UC faculty association president seems worth
> >distributing. Fraught futures.
> >mike
> >
> >
> >
> >CUCFA President Meister's Open Letter to Coursera Founder Daphne Koller
> > http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php
> >
> >......
>
>
> >http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.ph<http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php>
> >__________________________________________
>
>
>
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