[Draft version. Submitted as an opinion piece to Communications of the ACM, cacm.acm.org. Version: 1/30/13 4:42 PM]

As the media’s infatuation with MOOCs continues unabated, some academics seem to be succumbing to the hand-wringing about whether MOOCs will destroy higher education as we know it (Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?, Moshe Vardi, CACM 55(11), Nov. 2012).  Should we want to “put the MOOC genie back in the bottle,” as Dr. Vardi suggests?  I argue that a close, systematic, and sustained look at how MOOCs are actually being used should persuade the careful observer that MOOCs can strengthen academia.

Note that I don’t say “MOOCs will strengthen academia”.  They certainly can, but whether they do depends on how they are received and used by academics.  Full disclosure: besides being a MOOC instructor myself, I’m the newly appointed co-director of Berkeley’s online education programs, which have recently been extended to include MOOCs.  But I’m not cheering for MOOCs because I have this position; rather, I agreed to take the position because I’m excited about the possibilities of MOOCs and other online education.

To help my colleagues explore the potential benefits to our students and ourselves, let me offer counterexamples to some “MOOC myths” in recent media coverage.  While most myths are based on a kernel of truth and may be true of at least some MOOCs, they are just as often untrue and it’s a disservice to interested readers to present them as foregone conclusions or faits accomplis.

In a recent pilot program at San José State University in California, students in an analog circuits course used MIT-authored MOOC lectures and homework assignments created by Prof. Anant Agarwal .  The students’ in-classroom time was spent working on lab and design problems with local faculty and TAs.  The students in this SPOC (Small, Private Online Course) scored 5 percentage points higher on the first exam and 10 points on the second exam than the previous cohort that had used the traditional material.  Even more strikingly, the proportion of students receiving credit for the course (“C” or better grade) increased from 59% to 91%.  So educational quality arguably increased, and costs were lowered by helping students graduate more quickly, rather than by firing people.  Productivity was enhanced because the on-campus instructors shifted their time from what they perceived as a lower-value activity—creating and delivering lectures on content that hasn’t changed much—to the higher-value activity of working directly with students on the material.  Several of my colleagues in the California State University system and the community college system have expressed  similar enthusiasm.  And at the risk of alienating colleagues, if a particular instructor really offers no value at all over a digitally-delivered MOOC, it is worth asking some questions about the value proposition of the traditional course in that case.

This assertion is true, but it implicitly and incorrectly assumes that replicating the classroom experience is the proper goal for an online course.  As educators, a better question for us to ask is this: What can be delivered effectively through this medium in a way that helps our on-campus students, and has the valuable side effect of helping the hundreds of thousands who won’t have the privilege of attending our universities in person?  (Indeed, many of our MOOC students reported that our course was better than anything available at the brick-and-mortar campuses to which they had access.)

For example, rather than asking whether automatic graders (which, by the way, have been around since at least 1960 ) can replace individual instructor attention, we can ask: When can they relieve teaching staff of drudgery, allowing scarce instructor time to focus on higher-value interactions such as tutoring and design reviews?  Rather than worrying whether MOOC-based social networking will replace face-to-face peer interactions, we can ask and experimentally answer: Under what conditions and with what types of material do online communities help foster learning, and how can social networking technology help foster both online and in-person community building?  Rather than ominously predicting a “winner take all” effect in which one particular MOOC comes to dominate all instruction in a given subject, we can, like Prof. Doug Fisher and others , selectively adapt the content for use in our own on-campus courses, as we do with textbooks.  And learning activities that don’t appear to be “MOOCable”—discussion-based learning, open-ended design projects, and so on—can just be omitted, as we’ve done in our software engineering course, whose MOOC version lacks the on-campus course’s open-ended design project. Indeed, at universities on the quarter system, it’s common to offer a two-quarter sequence in which the first quarter focuses on well-circumscribed assignments and the second quarter focuses on a design project, since a single quarter can’t cover both.  The first course clearly has value despite lacking a design project.  By analogy, MOOCs that don’t offer “the same” experience as a complete residential course also have value, and our job as educators is to make judgments about where that value lies and how to combine it with the other education modalities we offer our students.

The very scale of MOOCs offers us new and unprecedented opportunities to improve our on-campus courses using techniques that just don’t work at smaller scales, and were previously reserved for  ”high stakes” exams such as the GRE or SAT .  Exploratory factor analysis  lets us identify questions that test comparable concepts, giving instructors a way to vary exam content. Item response theory  allows us to discover which questions are more difficult (in the statistical sense that higher-performing students are more likely to get them right).  A/B testing gives us a controlled way to evaluate which approaches have better effects on learning outcomes, just as high-volume e-commerce sites evaluate which user experience results in more purchases.  None of these techniques works on classroom-sized cohorts (say, 200 or fewer students), but we are applying all of them to our current MOOC.  Indeed, not all instructors will be eager to receive the avalance of MOOC data telling us what’s not working in our courses and how we can improve them, but our sense at Berkeley is that MOOCs may well raise the bar for acceptable teaching on campus, as well as improve the recognition of good teaching, perhaps bringing the era recycled PowerPoint  slides finally to a close.

In addition, in each of four offerings of our software engineering MOOC totalling over 100,000 enrollees, about 8%, or nearly 32,000 total, identified themselves as instructors, suggesting that MOOCs may be even more effective than traditional textbooks at “teaching the teachers” and getting innovative new pedagogy out to a large audience.  In fact, our faculty colleagues who are classroom-testing our unconventional new textbook Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS & Cloud Computing are all doing so in conjunction with our MOOC (EdX CS 169.1x), so that they can take advantage of the autograders, screencasts and other materials.

How much will students pay for certificates and proctored exams?  How much will employers pay to recruit top MOOC students?  The answers are still uncertain, yet it would hardly be the first time that venture capital was poured into enterprises before the business models were well understood.  And nonprofits such as EdX provide an alternative for institutions uncomfortable with a deep partnership with a for-profit entity.  An important decision for universities to make is how and with whom they want to structure a partnership around online education if they believe it is of long-term strategic importance.

Forunately, at the moment the uncertainty about revenue models doesn’t seem to bother those who have been driving MOOC creation:  passionate faculty, most of whom are receiving little or nothing for the hundreds of hours of extra work required to create a MOOC.  They are driven instead by the kind of recognition that comes from creating a textbook—another educational instrument with uncertain revenue generation potential.

Setting aside the fact that most of us who teach already use textbooks written by others, one could raise a similar complaint about the printing press.  Books used to be laboriously and lovingly crafted by hand; the printing press made them cheap to manufacture but generic in appearance.  Receiving a book used to be part of a social ritual that included interactions with learned persons; the printing press gave rise to bookshops where anyone could transact in books without such an interaction.  Yet these objections don’t make the printing press a bad idea: unbundling the book’s content from its context benefited all of us by creating vastly more readers and by giving voices to authors who would never have had one.  (And while the printing press certainly made it easier to get bad writing published, handcrafted books were also far from uniform in the quality of their content!)

In a similar way, MOOCs won’t replace high-quality face-to-face instruction, but we can reach many more learners, leading to a net social and economic benefit, and we can give great teachers a more prominent voice than they have had since Socrates.

Conclusion

MOOCs represent a new technology opportunity whose potential pedagogical impact needs to be researched.  To be sure, many bad experiments will be tried—some are probably already underway—and many worthy experiments will fail or have a different outcome than desired.  But if failed experiments were an obstacle to doing world-changing research, we academics would probably choose a different job.