Free like beer or free like grace?

Altruism

More than anything else, I am blown away by the presence of altruism in the creation and sharing of MOOCs. And it seems to go from top to bottom. The course I'm taking is a re-purposing of a UC Berkeley fourth-year computer science course, so it isn't a creation from a blank sheet of paper, but it is clear that the two professors leading this course have put an immense amount of work into adapting it as a MOOC. Programming an autograder, editing videos, reshaping the course to function without the face-to-face feedback loop. I don't know what the real total is, nor how much they might have been able to "encourage" teaching and research assistants to do, but I can make a wild guess. I'd be willing to bet that a direct monetization would end up somewhere in the range between the yearly salaries of a tenured seminary professor and their dean.

And then there is the effort of the "community TAs". This time through the course there are 50 of them, each of which spends (guessing from their activity in the forums) maybe six to eight hours a week for a seven week course (that comes to 2500 hours, if you are counting). Finally, there are the class members. There is an altruism of learning and co-learning going on. While you don't share solutions on-line, a lot of very broad "hinting" goes from more advanced to less advanced students.

Judging from the metrics that are available from the system from which you download homework assignments, there are at least 2000 students in this class. There is no charge from Coursera for participation. Since its not at all clear what the business plan of any of the currently successful MOOC providers might be, and because people like John Doerr are known to engage in disruptive philanthropy, I can at least wonder if even the VCs aren't engaged in a bit of altruism. And if that's not enough, Coursera has promised to open source their software platform so that others can use and change it.

Oh--and if you look at Coursera's jobs page it's there as well:

Come help us give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We have many hard technical problems that we'd like your help to solve, and by joining us, we hope that you'll help empower millions of people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

 This is a culture of giving from abundance.

Altruistic Scientists and Engineers???

Now for the hard question:  If you look at the content of MOOCs, you will find that it is overwhelmingly in the science and engineering categories. It's worth noting that I can't find any courses in (from narrow to broad) theology, religious studies, psychology, philosophy, or indeed any of what we might call "helping profession studies." While we might have some excuses in categorizations of "early adopters" or what used to be caricatured as "engineers vs. artsmen" back in the dark ages at one of my alma maters, the University of Toronto, I think that the answer, in the baldest possible terms, is:

Engineers are more altruistic than ministers.

Artists, Craftsmen, and Technocrats

About fifteen years ago, one of Henry Mintzberg's students at McGill University in Montreal, PQ, rewrote and published her dissertation: Patricia Pitcher, The Drama of Leadership (New York: John Wiley, 1997). If you want the dissertation, because Canada (at least until the regency of the Harper Government®) believed that information wants to be free (as in grace), you can get it from Theses Canada. Pitcher's work is right up with Drucker and Mintzberg, and if you want to understand, from the management perspective, why theological education is in a tailspin, the only book you need to read is Drama of Leadership.

And no, I'm not associated with McGill, Pitcher, John Wiley, or Amazon.com.

A one sentence summary: Artists envision and example change, Craftsmen make change happen, and Technocrats tell everybody else to change.

Until the the technocrats (people like Steve Balmer, John Sculley, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Larry Ellison, to list just a few very well known names) consolidated their hold on the (micro-)computer world, you could walk through the halls of technology firms, asking the question, "why are you here?" and overwhelmingly on the engineering side you'd hear "Because we want to make the world better," "Because we want to improve people's working lives," or "Because understanding this algorithm will make a more elegant solution." All of those are Artist and Craftsman answers. Now that is drowned out by "IPO," "Market Share," and "to die with the most toys"-- Technocrat answers.

Revenge of the Nerds

One of the reasons that MOOCs are dominated by engineers and scientists is that they are places where artist- and craftsman-teachers can share their world-changing passions without administrators and faculty meetings. Instructors get nothing of their efforts except the joy of teaching -- oh, and important for artists, applause from people who actually appreciate and understand what they are about.

In many ways, MOOCs are attempts to find a way back to the model of the medieval university: a community where teaching students and exploring ideas was paramount, rather than the management-driven model of the modern university where ladder-climbing and politics are the key determinants of success.

The question for me, as someone concerned with adult Christian formation in the Anglican tradition, becomes:
How can we gather enough altruistic, artistic, and craftsman-like thinkers to leave behind the John Sculleys of theological education? And frankly, where do we find an ecclesiastical Kleiner-Perkins who is willing to leave the 1950's ("The Episcopal Church Welcomes You") and the 1980's ("The Emergent Church") behind and somehow get to a baptismal community for the twenty-first century?