Big fish eat little fish?

Jonathan Rees:

In other words, the little fish (a.k.a all-online start-ups) will eventually eat the big fish (or all the big fish’s fish food) and the strategy will fail. The disruptors will in turn be disrupted themselves. This is indeed a very slippery slope

In the meantime, we will all have to cope with the fact that education technology has just become weaponized. Arizona State is now the first predator university. They are willing to re-define what education is so that they can get more students from anywhere. If they don’t kill other universities by taking all their students with a cheap freshmen year, they’ll just steal their fish food by underselling 25% of the education that those schools provide and leaving them a quarter malnourished. The result is that schools which stick to reasonable standards with respect to the frequency and possibility of teacher/student interaction now have to fear for their very existence.

While this is good for nobody, it is especially bad for faculty at all levels. Remember the good old days of MOOCs when the only people teaching those courses were going to be the best of the best – the superprofessors? Well, now that edX sees deflected tuition money on the table, they’ve thrown out that particular aspiration. No disrespect to the faculty of Arizona State University (which I’m sure has more than a few really outstanding professors on it), but I find it hard to believe that students are gonna say to themselves, “I need to take all my MOOCs from ASU because they have the best professors in every field.”

What we have here then are mostly ordinary faculty agreeing to participate in a scheme to steal the bread and butter of other ordinary faculty so that they won’t have their bread and butter stolen first. While I understand that the first rule of academia is every man and woman for themselves, in the long run the only folks who will benefit from this kind of inter-professional death match will be (to use a name coined by my old friend Historiann) the Lords of MOOC Creation…and whoever controls the endowments of Harvard and MIT.