You’re at GSU, aren’t you? I used to go there. I could be wrong, but this more than anything else you said feels like it. I often felt like the quality of the students and the quality of professors were mismatched.
I’m not unsympathetic, but I think tenure is going the way of the dodo no matter what we do. It’s been around less than a century from my understanding. While its value is indisputable; financially, it’s a luxury. This is true whether MOOCs exist or not. As for programming, it is becoming more necessary and more ubiquitous as everyday objects turn into computers, but programming has an odd quirk: It is an incredibly democratic field. There’s a long tradition of computer programmers being largely self-taught. With programming, the problem reveals itself to be social. It’s what anti-capitalists have been saying for a while now. If everyone goes to college and “does the right thing” we’ll have a lot of doctors and engineers scrubbing toilets and serving Starbucks. The solution isn’t to engage in rent-seeking, the solution is to dispense with rent-seeking at the societal level. It’s rent-seeking in part that contributes to the inequities that make this economy so bad for the middle class in the first place.
Do I think MOOCs will replace a traditional classroom setting? At GSU, many people don’t attend math classes anymore unless they have to. Basic math up to calculus is essentially farmed out to Pearson Publishing in the form of interactive computer assignments- and they work. Students hate them, but I’m confident that it’s because they’re not used to them, and the technology hasn’t worked out all of its bugs. Humanities is more difficult because “right” answers are difficult to assess, even for humans. That being said, the formal university system as we know it is still somewhat young. Universal literacy is still young, as is universal secondary education. I don’t claim to have the answers here. It’s a giant tangled can of worms complicated by the interests of various classes and professions and heavily peppered by a mythological 1950s idea of a level playing field.
