Who are Mooc's most likely to help?

December 20, 2012 timothywstanley@me.com

Here's the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all. "The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous," says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. ... Getting them to and through college takes advisers, counselors, and learning-disability experts -- a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention conversation has had a "tech guy" fixation on mere content delivery, she says. "It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it." Amid the talk of disruptive innovation, "the real disruption is the changing demographics of this country," Trinity's president says. Waves of minority students, especially Hispanics, are arriving on campus, many at those lower-tier colleges, having come from schools that didn't prepare them for college work. "The real problem here is that higher education has to repeat a whole lot of lower education," Ms. McGuire says. "That has been drag on everyone."

Edward Tenner, "Who are MOOCs Most Likely to Help?" The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/VTn8uR