After the Gold Rush: MOOCs, money, and the
education of Richard McKenzie
By Steve Kolowich, June 5, 2016
On February 21, 2013, Richard McKenzie stood in a California yacht club and
prepared to address a modest audience. He was there to talk to members of a
local Rotary Club about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a technological
wonder that would soon shake the windows and rattle the walls of college
campuses the world over.
A few dozen people had shown up. Mr. McKenzie, an emeritus professor of
economics at the University of California at Irvine’s business school, was
there to warn them: Don’t buy the hype.
This was not the message Mr. McKenzie had planned to deliver when he
pitched the talk two months earlier. Back then he had been convinced that the
free, online courses were about to change higher education, and also his own
life.
He had spent the fall and winter watching the registration count for his
course "Microeconomics for Managers" the way most economists watch a
stock ticker. It climbed by hundreds per day: to 10,000, then 20,000, then
30,000 — more students than he had taught in 45 years in the classroom, and
more than were enrolled on the Irvine campus.
It had stoked his ambition. Nobody knew what kind of fame or fortune might
lie in store for those who staked out territory on the right side of the
revolution, but as far as anyone could tell, the potential was huge.
"There is the bragging rights that go with the new course (‘I can now
teach tens of thousands of students a quarter’)," the professor wrote that
winter in an email to a colleague, as well as "potential financial
benefits" from the sale of textbooks and other course materials.
That was before everything fell apart. Before he became overwhelmed by the
unwieldiness of a massive online classroom. Before the chief executive of his
university’s corporate partner badmouthed him. Before his bosses took her side.
Before he lost his intellectual property, then his dignity. Before he decided
to sue...
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