Thread by @ShriramKMurthi

@maxsnew @samth To begin with, imagine if someone wrote an article about education from the perspective of videoconf tools. You'd think that's a tiny part of what goes into education, and maybe this is missing the big picture. Ditto an economics perspective. »

@maxsnew @samth Why would an emergency shift to online "accelerate a permanent shift"? If you have a building problem and someone brings in a temp trailer, do people assume we'll stay in the trailer forever? But the very phrase assumes a strong trend that doesn't really exist. »

@maxsnew @samth This old trope about "online superstars" has been played out. This is what everyone thought about MOOCs, too. And yes, there's a bit of preferential attachment. But it didn't put everyone else out of business. »

@maxsnew @samth More deeply, it assumes nobody innovates, or that everyone finds the same instruction valuable, etc. I'll never forget the prof who chose my crappy videos over a slick Stanford/Coursera set because her students found them much more authentic. »

@maxsnew @samth There are also studies that show that mixing in locals (e.g., having Indians appear in videos in India) leads to much better outcomes. These are all things that strike against the "superstar" theory. Teaching isn't just theater. »

@maxsnew @samth Next, there's the issue of what really differentiates online vs in-person. This is written again from a very classical, old-fashioned view of education: there's the superstar on video vs an intimate collegial system in person. Easy to form that model. But it's wrong. »

@maxsnew @samth What we've learned from MOOC research is that most people don't learn well online, and it's very much a "rich become richer" world. And that's despite most MOOCs being taught by superstars. It has helped us learn what a campus actually provides. »

@maxsnew @samth It's not really "tutors, mentors and role models". It's mainly structure and peer pressure and focus. People suck at those things. My browser has a dozen tabs more interesting than the Coursera course I'm currently taking. Campus cuts through all that. »

@maxsnew @samth Surely by now everyone knows that what we're doing is not "online teaching" but rather emergency delivery through an ill-suited medium for the original instructional design. The article never says this. It just says results have "been ugly". »

@maxsnew @samth That's a bit like asking for a bulldozer and getting a Ferrari instead. A Ferrari is awesome, but still, if you try to bulldoze with a Ferrari, the results will be "ugly". I'd have liked to see the author demonstrate more nuance about a CENTRAL point of their article. »

@maxsnew @samth Then they say many universities "offer high-quality lectures online". (Interesting choice of word: lectures, not courses. And I've seen some of these. They are slick videos but not necessarily high-quality.) There's no indication of why we should think these offerings are good. »

@maxsnew @samth But more to the point, who's using them? That's what the MOOC demographics show. It's not at all the audience he thinks it is! In fact, that audience largely does not succeed very much. So what are we supposed to gain from these online courses? »

@maxsnew @samth Then we're back to superstars and making "lesser lecturers obsolete", all tropes we went through in 2012. (Yes, I'm reading top-to-bottom.) But education doesn't quite work that way. Issues of connection, authenticity, style, etc. all make a difference. »

@maxsnew @samth Finally, 2/3 of the way in, there's acknowledgment that MOOCs did not disrupt (even though you remove this para and everything in this article is the exact same argument as was made at MOOC peak). But the author hasn't bothered to understand *why*. »

@maxsnew @samth It's telling that most/all of the *research* links are to *economics* journals. Here's the abstract of the article telling us why MOOCs failed. I glanced through the paper. There's just one para about this; it's anecdotal; no cites to research. Rest is econ. »

@maxsnew @samth It's almost as if the econs think learning has little to do with the success or failure of education. Of course econ is *relevant*. But it's not like econ is 99% and ed is 1% of the explanation. And econ doesn't explain why ed *succeeds* (it explains plans, not outcomes). »

@maxsnew @samth Basically the article is a paean to an "artisanal" model of education. Not like I'm not sensitive to it: I teach at an Ivy League. But it's based on speculation, not facts or findings. And the actual world of ed outcomes is way more complicated than the article thinks. »

@maxsnew @samth I'm not saying the danger the article points out won't come to pass, where only the rich get the artisanal experience. Sure, some will say "We did find this spring, let's cut costs". But those aren't economists: they're politicians. They run on polemic, not rational analysis. »

@maxsnew @samth I'm running out of steam to go sentence by sentence, so let me cut to the conclusions. This is where an op ed should shine. There are two necessary changes to avoid tragedy. Great. What are they? Here's where we get deep insight from an expert. »

@maxsnew @samth Um. »

@maxsnew @samth Yeah. Okay. And because we're not done with platitudes, see whether you can spot more MOOC-era tropes in the conclusion: »

@maxsnew @samth I mean, I don't know who needed to be told that, or which teacher is smacking themselves upside the head for not thinking it. And what technology "enabled" us to go online? Is Zoom what is going to free up "precious class time"? »

@maxsnew @samth These are statements so anodyne they're in the "not even wrong" category. Which at least may be an improvement over what came earlier. »

@maxsnew @samth I've taught a MOOC; I teach online every year; I get economics; I think a lot about the role of a place like Brown; I'm finely tuned to what happens in schools. I know the role money plays. But money ≠ economics. »

@maxsnew @samth The real world actions here are based on a toxic mix of politics and sociology. In that world, I don't know what I was supposed to learn from this oped, which didn't even summarize what we know, and made the categorical error of mistaking education for economics + opinion. •