Every educator from Socrates to Neil Degrasse Tyson has known that the way to produce high quality education is with small class sizes. The highest quality of all is achieved with one-on-one mentoring, as any Olympic athlete could tell you.

Naturally, a balance must be struck, but ANY innovation whose effect is to change the teacher-student ratio should be regarded with deep suspicion and considered guilty of harming education until proven innocent.

One of my weakest courses recently was a Marketing course where they left a very solid and traditional textbook to move to an Open Course text which was a collaboration of several different professors at various schools. The new one was barely readable and with lots of holes in major concepts. In the end the professor excerpted several long passages from the old text and released them as a PDF but there were still large concepts not covered in the PDF, lectures or the open course that were still on the tests which had not been re-written to the inferior text. Supplemental reading don't necessarily work when the issue in this case was missing fundamental concepts. While I love etextbooks in general and prefer low cost options when I must buy one would rather pay more for a good one than be stuck with a horrible one. I lobbied hard post course about the deficiencies but no change.

I wish that more instructors cared about quality. Too many just go with the proprietary text (rarely an open text) with little consideration of the price to students. The cost to students is one aspect of quality. An important one in my opinion that is all too often ignored by instructors who choose them. There are a growing number of excellent quality controlled open texts. Instructors should keep their eyes open. Like proprietary texts some of the open texts lack quality. If that is, the case then do like Peter and pick another one, but don't just presume that the costly text is better. Quite often it isn't. Also, there are growing open online open alternatives to texts. At least check the open texts out before stiffing the students for a high priced text that may be unnecessary.

When it hit that UVA was joining this consortium, it reminded me of when the UVA Library joined a handful of other institutions in the Google Books scanning project. None of the participants really had any idea how it would function, what value there was in it for the institution, how to manage the data in the long term, etc. Major decisions are often made because it looks "cool." It appears prestigious to be part of a consortium of several great universities, without any consideration of what the final product is.

It is sad to see that the marketing has been successfull: you disregard the original MOOC movement completely in the current hype over the institutional and commercial MOOCs. They are about connecting people, diversity and openenness and have a very different pedagogical model than the Corsera et al. ones. Here a link to some research related to the learning experience on these connectivist MOOCs. http://bit.ly/QdtFjs

People who think online videos are going to replace colleges clearly don't know what it is that makes higher education valuable. I think universities are under illusion that colleges are supposed to teach knowledge or technical skills, which is stupid because the institutions (especially the R1s) don't invest much money in, or value effective teaching, and most of the information that is being taught can be learned on one's own if one had the desire. As an instructor, I try to help my students want to learn, listen and interact with others, and think logically, but this teaching philosophy doesn't always align with other instructors I know.

I am very grateful to Beki Grinter for posted link to this article on Facebook, as it is so pertinent for me at present as I'm MOOC-ing myself come the autumn :-/ I commented on her post there, but will repeat and expand things here too.

I am right behind you on the economic arguments. Since the mid 1990s University management have seen the web and online learning as a golden bullet to cut costs (at that time with early VLEs such as Lotus Learning Spaces). What they always forgot is that the easy thing to deliver remotely is content, but this is already delivered efficiently in traditional lectures - 200 student learning hours per lecturer presentation hour, enough to make any university finance officers rub their hands. It is the rest of the stuff, labs, seminars, problem classes, office hours that are the expensive (and probably most valuable) parts of education ... and then of course there is assessment :-/

In the open HCI course I'm doing in October http://hcicourse.com/ I will be trying to experiment a bit with the format, in particular seeing how open materials can compliment existing face-to-face classes at other institutions than my own - that is allowing and encouraging others to use parts of the online course in their own teaching.

One of the reasons I am able to do this is that it is not something being dictated from 'on high' at my institution (University of Birmingham), but more bottom up from me. In fact, there are drivers (as ever), as I work part-time for Talis.com, but they are interested in learning about the software and system implications of MOOCs, not promoting their brand through the course, or using it to sell some message about them.

So I have unusual freedom to experiment ... and I have no idea how it will go, but hopefully it will add another data point in the MOOC research landscape.

Today it's Coursera, Coursites, Moodle, WizIQ, Wikispaces Wikieducator, Mightybell or Mentormob. Tomorrow it's going to be on facebook. MOOCs are a marketing strategy that brings numbers and ratings. Forget about quality. Money is not there. You go where there's money. We are driven by money because that's how we pay the bills. So, let's improve MOOCs by adding quality to the equation.