With all the crowing today in the New York Times about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how Georgia Tech will soon be offering a master’s degree in computer science entirely by computer, this not-mentioned-anywhere-at-all comment by Bill Gates last week is interesting:
What have you learned so far about MOOCs, or massive open online courses? Are they a superior alternative to traditional classrooms, or is this the best available solution for students who can’t attend a traditional university?
If you look at who’s used MOOCs so far, it’s an elite phenomenon. The completion rates are very low, and the effect on employability is very low. Yes, it’s promising and exciting. But this notion that “just don’t go to school, just connect to a MOOC,” that’s like telling somebody to read the textbook. You’d have to couple that with student support, study groups, lab activity, and the credential. And until you complete that equation, MOOCs have not changed higher ed.
This is a pretty serious qualification on all of the general enthusiasm for these damned things. Gates has been a major player in the online excitement market as applied to education, and when he comes out and says that you need traditional college to finish the job that’s news.
Except it isn’t. Nowhere in the media is this comment being covered. It’s almost a retraction on his part of his earlier boosterism. And by extension, the same pedagogical concerns can be made about online education in general.
This is something to keep in mind as our own Burbank Unified School District flies into the future with our Measure S funds in their palms.
To the new curriculums!
Burbank, California 
What’s a mooc?
Fascinating to see how education has been substituted for the trendy while the classical knowledge has been relegated to some dusty shelf. The classic served us so well for so long and look at creativity and inventiveness under the classic education system yet today what do we hace ? Trendy just doesn’t work it is the absence of true knowledge.