5-25-13
San Jose State professors fire back at online class offer
Historians in the Newstags: MOOCs, San Jose State University, CSU, online classes
In a nationwide push to experiment with online university courses, San Jose State stands at the forefront, making deals with private sector startups to package lectures from Ivy League professors and opening some for-credit classes to the masses.
Now, a counterrevolution is underway.
In recent weeks, humanities professors -- feeling the withering of their departments and fearing virtual demotions -- have begun to resist calls to abandon traditional teaching methods. In an open letter to a Harvard University professor who offered San Jose State his online social justice course, Cal State philosophy professors argue that momentum is building to dismantle college as we know it, a concern echoing through academic halls nationwide....
The letter resonated with Bruce Reynolds, a San Jose State history professor nearing retirement. He said he and his colleagues are frustrated that traditional teaching methods have been dismissed as passe.
"The philosophy department letter was what woke people up, I think," he said....
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel