I get that this is an attempt to head off accrediting agencies stepping in to set standards, but there is a third way that doesn’t even seem to occur to PCAST, in part because it also doesn’t occur to the Administration’s current Education Secretary: that higher education is best approached as a public, not market-driven, good and that decisions should follow from that insight.

But once you get to the letter, it leads with the MOOCs = efficiency gains and cost reductions. Other possibilities get mentioned here and there, but that’s the big frame it offers. This is precisely what was pernicious about the craze for MOOCs a year ago,
and what is pernicious in general about one kind of address to the issues around higher education.

Cost reductions from technology use, if they come, are best seen as Christmas presents, unexpected positive additions. When the first and last rationale of technological innovation is to save money, not only does that sideline all the really transformative uses that do not save money, it tends to produce a drive towards cost reduction that continues whether or not the technology worked.

The letter is not just stuck in the discussion of a year ago. It is giving too much of an endorsement to the wrong kind of interest in MOOCs and would have been doing so if it had come out last year.

The memo has plenty of problems. You’re right that it doesn’t capture the evolution of the debate over the past year, and while it recognizes that nothing in MOOCs is fundamentally new, it fails to acknowledge the cMOOC precedents. And I wish that, in addition to recognizing that there will be multiple forms of MOOCs with different price points, it had expressed a preference for openness and affordability. That’s an important area where the government should put a thumb on the scale, lest we recreate the obscene oligopolies of textbooks and academic journal publishing. Overall, though, it’s primarily a call for more research, and more sharing of research about MOOCs. That’s a good thing, no?

Your worries about MOOCs, and your points about the other directions they could go, are valid. I just hate to see MOOC skeptics make the same kinds of generalizations that they rightly criticize from the MOOC boosters.