A STUDENT MOOCING
As
everyone who reads a newspaper or a blog knows by now, Marissa Mayer, CEO of
Yahoo, has put an end to perhaps the most valuable perk in Silicon Valley,
permission to work from home.
That model seemed to make perfect sense in an internet company; doesn’t
it simply fulfill the core promise of the internet itself, that interaction on
line can be as rewarding and effective as face-to-face contact? Mayer’s reasoning was interesting: she admitted that working from home was
more productive than shlepping into the office and hanging out by the water
cooler, but, she said, it was less innovative. For innovation, you need that water cooler, or cafeteria, or
couches in hallways, or any place that encourages 24-year-old whiz kids to
excite each other with new ideas, to improve and refine and think of new uses
for the company’s products.
That’s not
a new idea; Steve Jobs, when he designed Apple’s new headquarters, made sure
that even going to the bathroom routed you past watering holes and gathering
spots. I don’t remember Walter
Isaacson, in his biography of Jobs, mentioning any real or expected decline in
productivity, so we don’t know whether that would have been a successful
trade-off for the Magus of McIntosh. But, in a Times’s
op-ed page last week titled “In Defense of Telecommuting,” a sociology
professor from UT-Austin commented that the powers-that-be at our large
research universities, “among the most successful engines of innovation in our
economy,” never have to artificially enforce face-time between faculty members.
“To give one small example,” she
wrote, “two of my colleagues, at Cornell University, a demographer and
geographer, recently came up with the idea for a study to improve the retention
of women working in science while chatting during their children’s after-school
swim lessons.”
Ah,
yes. But what works at Cornell (my
undergraduate school) might not work at NYU (my current employer). Ithaca, NY, is at best a medium-sized
town, with a somewhat limited palette of restaurants, cultural and sporting
events, and pools that offer children’s swim lessons; in my day, and I imagine
now, wherever faculty happened to find themselves off-campus, other faculty
would have found their own ways there.
Ithaca, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Austin, and State College, PA, are, to
varying degrees, almost suffocatingly insular places, but Boston, New York, San
Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia (think Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and
Penn) are geographically and culturally polyglot and diverse. If I’m not eating in the vicinity of
Astor Place, I almost never run into my colleagues or my students. The same was even more true of Brooklyn College, where I taught from
1967 to 1998: it was, and is, a
commuter school, and though there are a cafeteria and lounges, they’re almost
empty; faculty and students met in
the classroom for 75 minutes, and then either retreated to their offices, if
they had them, went home.
All this
connects to the Next Big Thing in education – MOOCs, the clumsy acronym for
Massive Open Online Courses, in which a superstar professor lectures to
thousands of enrolled students worldwide, who will eventually take online exams
and receive course credit without ever having set foot on the campus (which
might itself be virtual).
Why not
take this to its extreme: just
have the students read a book and pass quizzes on it. No, say the innovators of this potentially huge money-maker,
that would defeat the principle of collegiality. After each lecture, the students will have the opportunity
to interact with their teacher, advancing ideas and asking questions.
Are they
kidding? Picture the virtual
classroom as if it were a real place the size of, say, Madison Square Garden --
20,000 students, 7,000 of them with hands in the air. I’ve taught lecture courses at NYU with as many as 120
students in them, and I didn’t field questions and queries after I was done
speaking; I had three TAs, each of whom met two sections of 20 students once a
week, to do that. How many TAs
will a big-time MOOC require?
Where will they come from?
Mine were graduate students studying for Ph.Ds in English, but in a
virtual university, they’ll be on-line too. So, at least in one model, there’s no face-to-face contact
at all.
Is that so
bad? How would Baxter Hathaway’s
creative writing class at Cornell all those years back have suffered if each of
us students had submitted our stories and poems online and discussed them via
teleconference (which hadn’t yet been invented)? Here’s how: I’d
never have met my fellow student Tom Pynchon, never have had coffee with him
after class, never have picked one of the most subtle, original and powerful
minds I’ve ever encountered. College
– at least a humanities college – isn’t a place where you’re trained to
regurgitate factoids. It’s a place
where you find your cohort, the people who shape your character and outlook and
become your friends. There are no
friendships in the MOOC landscape.
