There has been a lot of hype about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), raising breathless predictions of radical transformation of higher education. Such predictions produce excitement and alarm in about equal measure. It is worth taking a sober look at what MOOCs are and what they might mean for a college like Dickinson.

As their name suggests, MOOCs use the Internet to deliver courses to very large numbers of participants. Most media attention has been directed to xMOOCs, which are those of the kind provided by Coursera, Udacity and others. These usually feature video lectures by prominent faculty, combined with the kind of assignments that can be graded easily or automatically, such as multiple choice quizzes. If there is interaction between learners and instructors, it is most commonly volunteer teaching assistants rather than the headline lecturer who take that on. This model clearly favors instructivist learning, or the one-way transmission of information. Other models include connectivist MOOCs of the kind pioneered by George Siemens and others in Canada (in one of which Professor Webb has participated). These build networks of learners, fostering peer-to-peer connections, and facilitating differing learning goals and speeds.

The successes of all kinds of MOOCs so far are ambiguous. At their best, MOOCs can unleash the potential of the Internet for inexpensive, easy sharing of materials and many-to-many communication—including social media and free online tools—to build global learning communities that otherwise would not be possible. More than five million people world-wide have registered for these types of online courses, according to A.J. Jacobs in the April 21 issue of The New York Times.

However, they suffer from very low completion rates, among other problems. We need to guard against the seductiveness of low-cost or apparently free online education that is not, in fact, education. At their worst, MOOCs will be a reduction of education to delivery of content without meaningful opportunity for critical discussion, thoughtful collaboration or rigorous assessment. To offer mere transmission of information and the most basic level of testing is to leverage the power of the Internet to promote a reductive, instrumentalized, mass-production model of education. The potential is so much greater.

A question we invite Dickinsonians to consider is whether MOOCs are compatible with a liberal arts education. We believe they can be. They cannot replicate the benefits of a physically co-located learning community of our kind. But done right, particularly in the connectivist mode, they can foster some of the skills and attitudes we value. MOOCs can provide a space for promoting critical thinking, the exploration of diverse topics, and creative engagement with ideas and people on a global scale. We need to be open to the possibilities. We should prepare to learn from the failures that will inevitably emerge as MOOCs evolve, without turning our back on their potential. Those of us committed to a useful liberal arts education should work to ensure there is space for the kind of learning we care about within the universe of MOOCs.