Liberal Arts and
MOOCs
Tracy Mitrano
Cornell University
Question?
Are MOOCs the end of traditional not-for-profit(NFP) higher
education or the beginning of its renaissance?
What can the liberal arts contribute to MOOCs?
MOOC
 Massive (very large numbers of people, e.g. the first had
over 150,000)
 Open (free to the user, anyone with an Internet connection
can participate)
 On-line (Internet, including mobile)
 Course (open to interpretation, for example “semester” or
only a few weeks, but typical in the sense of covering
defined content)
Distance Education
 MOOCs might be thought of as a subset of distance
education
 Distance education is at least as old as correspondence
courses via USPS
 Military use throughout much of the 20th century
 Closed-Circuit television enhanced technology
Internet Distance Education
 Both for-profit (FP) and NFP sector have sprung up riding the
tide of the Internet
 Early large-scale experiments such as Fathom in the NFP
“elite” schools sectors spent many millions but did not find
their worth
 Some smaller-scale operations still in existence, such as
eCornell
 Professional education (MBA) and training
“Information Technology will
Transform Education!”
 To date, that idea has not been realized
 Rather, higher education has absorbed technology into its
structure, hierarchy and traditions
 Including the concepts and strictures of “classes,” “credit
hour,” “degrees” (as the critical credential), and even “sage
on the stage” delivery with SMART Boards and LMS
Example from Copyright
 TEACH Act of 2001, amendment of copyright, designed to
bring distance, on-line, Internet education in sync with
section 110, face-to-face exception.
 Little used, however, because of the complicated,
ambiguous terms, such as “session times” and the
authentication requirement
 Most institutions have fallen back on Fair Use
Precursors to MOOCs
 Global Internet and Information Economy
 Greater speed, storage, reduced size and entry costs to get
on the Internet
 Mobile Technologies
 Open software movement
 Earlier examples:
 MIT OpenCourseWare
 Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative
Boom!
 Professor Thrun and a basic Computer Science course
 Stanford professor, uses a platform to open to anyone who
wants to take it
 Greater than 150,000 students, more than 25,000 complete
the course
 Issues a letter to certify accomplishment
Take Off!
 Udacity
 Professor Thrun’s FP company
 Coursera
 Stanford graduates create FP company, MOOC platform
 Bandwagon phenomenon, jump start distance ed
 edX
 MIT/Harvard, NFP and not “MOOC” per see
 UC Berkeley, Wellesley, but not Amherst!
 CornellX, May 2013
Early Reports
 Lots of hype, uncertainty, experimentation
 Not a simple approach to teaching, takes lots of preparation
and lead time
 Basic technical requirements: platform, robust network,
video, LMS, etc.
Opportunities
 Branding and marketing for institution as well as professors
 Experiment with distance or blended as well as life-long
learning
 In the heartland of liberal arts, four year degree education
 Highlight notable areas of research or great professors,
strengths of the institution as well as enhance the outreach,
public service missions
 Either get in the game or stay in the game as higher
education becomes more global
Challenges
 Assessment and grading
 Peer grading and lots of teaching assistants
 Academic Integrity
 Physical test centers
 “Signature Track” with keystroke authentication
 Credit Hour, Credentials, Badges, Accreditation
 Range of opinion about ultimate affects on higher education
 Harvard Faculty Letter of Protest
 UC San Jose faculty protest
How do MOOCs fit into global
higher education landscape?
 MOOCs reinforce the trends of an international,
information economy
 Component of the challenge of NFP HE, insofar as it
challenges price, credit hour and traditional
credentials
 Thomas Friedman: Best of education garnered
via mobile devices to eager learners around the
world
 But without attention to the challenge of how
to fund, accredit and credential
Global University
 Collaborative Courses, classrooms,
instructors, communication with researchers
around the world
 Deploy technology to teach differently:
 Flipped classrooms
 Professor as a guide, not sage
 Use MOOCs as “homework” or
foundational material, prerequisites for
advanced learning
The Liberal Arts Perspective
 Let’s really transform education!
 Make learning relevant, meaningful and interactive
 Broaden students’ perspectives on the world in which they live

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and will have to operate
Combine with foreign travel, appreciation and understanding
of global cultures
Active learning and undergraduate research
Combine learning with service through problem-solving
Treat education as holistic, and in turn, experience education
as treating students, educators – including staff – as whole
persons!
Digital and Information
Competency
 Berkeley-Cornell Model
 Goal: Incorporate undergraduate research into course work
and objectives
 Active learning
 Group process and presentation
 Digital and information literacy
 Means: “Clusters” that function as a team

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Faculty
Teaching Assistants
Librarians
Information Technology Professionals
CIS 515: “Culture, Law and
Politics of the Internet”
 Worked with IT staff:
 Create an alternative to institutional LMS to be open on
the Internet for students to write reviews of books, blog,
interact with authors and other students from other
institutions (Berkman Center at Harvard)
 Videotape Moot Court Competition
 Consult and support students in presentation delivery
 PowerPoint
 3D conceptualization
 Interclass messaging
CIS 515: “Culture, Law and
Politics of the Internet”
 Worked with Academic (Law) Librarian:
 Offered basic legal research instruction
 Created Moot Court competition using Internet legal
issues as the topics
 Jurisdiction
 Intellectual property
 Copyright
 Trademark
 Administrative Commercial and Communications Law
 FTC/FCC
 Net Neutrality
Simulated Product Design
Demo
 Presentation integrating the work of Internet legal scholar Lessig’s
“four factors” (law, technology, social norms, market) analysis.
 Legal research expanded with basic digital literacy skills to do
advance search and use of reference librarians generally per
specialized data bases and search techniques based on
research principles, i.e. evaluation of resources and critical
thinking skills
 Flipped Classroom, real-time messaging, videotaped
presentation for post-mortem analysis
 Evaluation included cluster input about reference research,
analysis, presentation mode and lessons learned
 Peer grading
 Group/individual analysis
Moot Court
 Used the Official Moot Court room in Cornell Law
School
 Student took the exercise very seriously:
 Dressed the part
 Learned the basic procedural protocol for addressing the
court (appellate = timed presentations, judges interrupt,
three light system to manage time, proper address to
judges, etc.)
 Performed the necessary research, wrote the briefs and
delivered oral argument
 Used all the resources: IT, librarians, TA.
Last Day of Class
“Put the course site behind authentication!
I had a job interview, and the interviewer
asked me about my moot court competition
case!”
How Cool Would It Be …
 Collaborative work with other professors, in other
institutions, internationally?
 Whether teaching “basic” undergraduate material, for
example, foreign language, or essential humanities, i.e.
how American history is taught in the U.S. with a
professor, class and students in Beijing?
 Introducing multi-dimensional perspective: history,
literature, art, culture, music, economic, social, political
and ideological perspectives?
From Discipline Approach to
Problem-Solving
 How to work toward environmental sustainability
on a comprehensive scale, including prevention of
global warming and of the extinction of many
species
 How to create international jurisdiction and
substantive law in order to settle legal disputes
 How to shape a developmental model of a global
economy that distributes resources—including
education—equitably and fairly around the world
Examples:
 How to inculcate an understanding of local or
national culture, history, and traditions sufficiently to
encourage tolerance of each others religions,
manners, and mores?
 How to deploy all layers (physical, logical, and
applications) of the Internet while also developing
international governing bodies and policy principles
for information and communications technologies,
including search engines and the repositories of
information and knowledge?
 How to optimize agricultural research on a global
scale in order to eliminate starvation and hunger?
Examples:
 How to research, manage, and treat disease—and thus
provide reasonable health care, including pharmaceuticals—
around the world?
 How to understand the human condition through the study
of cross-cultural and trans historical art, literature,
languages, and humanities?
 How to integrate archeology, history, literature, language,
geography, sociology and science?
Examples:
 How to live the ethics of scientific research, whether
it be the exploration of outer space (and its expenses,
given other needs), particle and nuclear physics (and
the creation of such devastatingly destructive
technologies), Internet and data networking
technologies (the use of highly flawed proprietary
operating systems without consequence to the
companies making profit, notwithstanding the
consequences that result to users from those flaws),
or genomics and the creation of species for which we
do not yet know all of the intended, or unintended,
consequences?
Will this approach change
undergraduate education?
I hope so!
Do These Changes Signal the
End of Liberal Arts?
No!
These changes should reinvigorate and enrich
the meaning of liberal arts education, making it
consistent with the demands of international
markets and societies, give pedagogical meaning
to how technology has the potential to transform
education, make education relevant and inculcate
global citizenship.