MOOCs -- this time it's different

Timothy Taylor highlights an interesting passage from this paper by Michael S. McPherson and Lawrence S. Bacow.

     "Berland (1992), citing a popular commentator named Waldeman Kaempffert writing in 1924, reported that “there were visions of radio producing ‘a super radio orchestra’ and ‘a super radio university’ wherein ‘every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.’” Craig (2000) reports that “the enthusiasm for radio education during the early days of broadcasting was palpable. Many universities set up broadcast stations as part of their extension programs and in order to provide their engineering and journalism students with experience in radio. By 1925 there were 128 educational stations across the country, mostly run by tertiary institutions” (p. 2831). The enthusiasm didn’t last—by 1931 the number of educational stations was down to 49, most low-powered (p. 2839). This was in part the result of cumbersome regulation, perhaps induced by commercial interests; but the student self-control problem ... likely played a role as well. As NBC representative Janice Waller observed, “Even those listeners who clamored for educational programs, Waller found, secretly preferred to listen to comedians such as Jack Benny. These “intellectually dishonest” people “want to appear very highbrow before for their friends . . . but down inside, and within the confines of their own homes, they are, frankly, bored if forced to listen to the majority of educational programs” (as quoted in Craig 2000, pp. 2865–66).

    "The excitement in the late 1950s about educational television outshone even the earlier enthusiasm for radio. An article by Schwarzwalder (1959, pp. 181–182) has an eerily familiar ring: “Educational Television can extend teaching to thousands, hundreds of thousands and, potentially, even millions. . . . As Professor Siepman wrote some weeks ago in The New York Times, ‘with impressive regularity the results come in. Those taught by television seem to do at least as well as those taught in the conventional way.’ . . . The implications of these facts to a beleaguered democracy desperately in need of more education for more of its people are immense. We shall ignore these implications at our national peril.” Schwartzman goes on to claim that any subject, including physics, manual skills, and the arts can be taught by television, and even cites experiments that show “that the discussion technique can be adapted to television.”"