I just completed the Coursera MOOC on the History and Future of HE with the wonderful Cathy Davidson. All MOOCs have to have an identifiable front persona even though it’s impossible that any of these courses could be the work of only one person and to be fair, in this course Davidson often showed us who was behind the camera.
The last task was to outline our own vision of an ideal university. In this I dared to suggest that government should foot the bill. Even though we had been alerted to a piece of OECD research during the course which shows that the US government makes a net profit on graduates even after taking into account costs, it was still provocative of me to suggest it. My own view is that it is completely arbitrary to be OK with government funding of primary school and secondary school but not of HE. This is especially as long as HE delivers clear advantages which it still seems to according to the OECD. Another reason for including this in my model of an ideal HE institution was having benefited from such an arrangement myself in the UK in the 70’s. My peer reviewer commented:
With Government paying all the costs, do you think students have enough invested to be serious about their learning?
An emphatic YES! is my response. The point is that it is not just about the money. Students are investing their time and that surely is as great a statement of commitment as the money? My recollection of my student days, when both fees and most living costs were paid by government, is that very few abused the system. In fact, I can’t recall anyone abusing the system, only a few lost souls who started and decided that they weren’t suitable and therefore spent an extra year at public expense by transferring to a more suitable course. I think the thinking goes something like this (heavy irony warning):
| Level of Government funding for education | Verdict |
| None | Underdeveloped |
| Up to primary | Developing |
| Up to secondary | Developed |
| Up to HE | Delusional socialist utopia |
The truly ironic thing is that in the US, which was the reference location throughout the course, there is actually a great deal of government support both for the institution and for the students but it seems to have slipped the public consciousness to such an extent that full funding seems like an extreme view. I wasn’t surprised by the reaction to that proposition but I was also taken aback by another comment to my plan that had included evidence-based pedagogy. The response I got to that was:
My personal belief is that evidence-based pedagogy is totally against the ideology of this course. In Europe the concept is very critisised.
Perhaps our understanding of the phrase evidence-based pedagogy differs. Maybe my peer reviewer thought I was referring to big data-driven approaches taken by the new giant ed-tech companies such as Coursera itself, when actually I was thinking of the, I assume, more objective HE instigated research summarised by the likes of John Hattie. Hattie found that feedback is THE most effective learning intervention and so I was proposing that this should also be at the heart of my new HE institution.
Since Coursera uses anonymous peer review I could not engage directly with the people who wrote those comments but those are the two which jumped out at me most.
It just seems odd to me that my lived reality is someone else’s fool’s paradise!