David Youngberg (an assistant professor of economics at Bethany College) in the Chronicle:
When I decided to become a professor, I was comforted by its employment projections. Professors hired to teach the baby boomers are retiring: It'll be a seller's market. Now I'm told Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC's, threaten that rosy future. One person can teach the whole world with a cheap Webcam and an Internet connection. ...
I was scared. So in early 2012 I joined 90,000 other students who enrolled in one or both of Udacity's first two courses. I selected CS101: Building a Search Engine. What with video lectures, online discussion boards, and learning from the field's top minds, it was easy to believe that online education was the beginning of the end for the ivory tower. But I came to realize that MOOC's have five fundamental problems. ...
If only one or two of these issues existed, the days of higher education as we know it would be numbered. Udacity is already looking at test centers to combat cheating, in the event that its courses are ever offered for credit. Students could get recommendations from organizations outside of an online university. MOOC graduates might become common enough to overcome their seditious signal. It's theoretically possible to build a robot to grade papers. An arms race between students isn't inevitable if building practical skills is emphasized more than getting good grades. But together these complications prevent online education from inevitably usurping us. A professor is simply more economical.
All this assumes that the classroom won't stay conventional. There's a lot to learn from online education, and if the academy doesn't adapt, this new medium will flourish despite its challenges. Professors must harness the advantages MOOC's use so well: online resources, regular practice questions, and a forum for students (perhaps from multiple institutions to capture some of those economies of scale). And we'll have to cut costs in uncomfortable places (no sabbaticals, less tenure, smaller salaries).
That said, here is an energy and environmental economics MOOC that looks worth checking out at udemy: http://www.udemy.com/economics-of-energy-and-the-environment/. The instructor is Ben Ho, a frequent commenter at this blog. The course was done as part of the http://facultyproject.org/ that udemy sponsored.
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