I went this afternoon to the discussion about online courses at UCSC. I wanted to hear what people had to say about the usefulness of having commercial enterprises delivering credit units in oversubscribed courses at a public university.

It was a strange meeting, as the decision to introduce online courses via the Coursera platform has already been taken at UCSC. Without any illusions, according to the Executive Vice-Chancellor, who said it was not about saving money, but more about making available to more people new kinds of learning experience. I’m not sure what the nature of the pilot project is, only that UCSC will begin by offering three courses. One on C++, another on the (very) early automated teaching of literacy, and the third one on the Nazi concentration camps (I can’t use the word “holocaust” which to me is still attached to its Greek and churchy meaning, “a whole-burnt offering” or sacrifice). One can check the basic syllabi on Coursera’s page. Back to the discussion this afternoon which was in any case a posteriori, about “what it meant for faculty”, and how to adapt to it. “Discussion” is not the right word, actually, as the public could only ask questions via written notes. None of my four scribbled questions made it.

Koller, one of the founders of Coursera, a private company developing instruction software, argued this new “platform” was real innovation. She did this essentially by claiming that there hadn’t been any innovation since the printing press in the education field. So, in a kind of underhanded way, we were to infer that…. TADDAH! here was innovation, finally. I thought codices in the second century in Greco-Roman society, that was real innovation. While the computer often sends me madly scrolling, in a back to antiquity sort of move, in searching for example for great photos of a Dead Sea Scroll text! Books and public libraries, that was and is innovation! No matter, she sounded excited also about the possibility of offering new ways of “knowledge delivery”. To deliver knowledge, wow, this is vocabulary that sounds awfully ancient to my fatigued ears, as dated at least as the end-of-nineteenth century positivism. Not only that, but she was clearly excited by the idea we could and should provide access to all kinds of learners, at various speeds, in all places, and encourage peer interaction, etc. I believe in that too, absolutely, but I think it can and should be done freely without creating a for-profit company. Why didn’t she create a non-profit, if she believes so much in this concept? Along that line, she presented the moral argument consisting of saying that we (we in the western societies, I suppose?) have a duty to bring knowledge to poor nations and people who have been deprived so far of this human right. The missionary factor. I almost cried. Can only be good, right?

This is exactly the type of argument brought by the advocates of the green revolution in the sixties, or by Monsanto, Pioneer and other crop genetics companies when trying to impose their innovations on the market and having to convince the public and politicians these innovations would be the miracle cure for hunger. Needless to say, not only is this approach demeaning of people, it is also hypocritical. Better distribution of the plethora of existing food, or of the riches of our educational and cultural resources (beginning with those of the putative countries we have a “duty to share our knowledge with”) is first of all a political question. No question, we should share what we have (and in all directions, meaning we should learn from others, and stop being fake missionaries). But doesn’t that moral duty of sharing and openness also include open sourcing? Do we need Coursera et al for this? No we don’t, or at least UCSC doesn’t.