If the MOOC’s came into an ideal, democratic educational environment, they would be another excellent tool to engage students and to bring content to wider and wider audiences. The real benefit of online education is its ability to serve those populations who have been underserved: adults and other non-traditional students who aren’t able to access an onground campus.
Unfortunately, online education has come to an educational industry in severe crisis. Schools are underfunded, the administrative machine has bloated, and 70% of faculty in higher education are part-time or non-tenure track (this causes a whole host of other issues that affect student outcomes). Used properly and sparingly, the mooc could be a good supplement, but most administrators will look to it as an opportunity to further the trajectory of the all-administrative university that downplays faculty involvement and treats college like a cash-cow factory. I’m sure some university leaders have even conceived of a future where only a handful of star professors actually teach. Why hire 100 tenure track faculty when you can just hire 1 to teach all the lectures?
The reason small classes are good is that a teacher can actually get to know on a personal level his or her students. That means the teacher can assess the student holistically by looking at the entire person, not just one sliver. When a student and a teacher get to know one another, lots of great things happen (which is why we homeschool). The major flaw with the MOOC is that there is no personal interaction. A student will essentially have to become an autodidact—which is fine—but we all have to learn from our mentors first before we can learn to teach ourselves. To be truly democratic, online education needs to bring more and more expert teachers into “close†contact with more and more students in ratios that are reasonable, say, 1:15 (or something like that). I’m sure what most big universities envision is a MOOC taught in sections by contingent faculty, and this only repeats on a larger scale the same issues plaguing academia right now: too few qualified faculty teaching too many students.