Dive Summary:
- In an editorial, Tom Katsouleas, Dean of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, argues that MOOCs and the challenges they pose will serve to enhance the overall state of education.
- Katsouleas claims that although learning and teaching have been greatly augmented by their emergence, MOOCs will not spell the end of universities as institutions of higher education.
- For example, Katsouleas argues that MOOCs are not possible without universities and the professors they recompense; he adds that the educational experience at universities is not wholly comparable to MOOCs, like the experience of a live concert compared to a CD.
From the article:
"... I’d like to offer a couple of metaphors for higher education today. One is to celebrate the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) like the onset of the textbooks coupled with public libraries. In theory, this opened the totality of human knowledge to everyone. In reality though, a lot of knowledge is stored in the minds of scholars pushing the edges of their fields. Which means that at the PhD level, research universities play the roles of powering innovation and passing their knowledge on to the next generation. But those roles are subsidized by the undergraduate and Masters education that pays the salaries of the faculty. ..."
