It’s probably no surprise that computer science is the
most popular subject offered by massive open online course provider Coursera with nearly 9.5 million
people enrolled. Humanities, as a distant second, may come as more of a stunner.
Nearly four million people have taken humanities
courses, according to information from the company. The numbers may be inflated somewhat because of the highly
popular “Walking Dead” course, but they are still ahead of business and
management (3.5 million), economics and finance (3.3 million) and information,
tech, and design (2.4 million).
The fact that humanities are so popular as MOOCs and
yet were basically ignored during a panel discussion featuring Coursera
co-founder Daphne Koller at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, last
June caught the attention and ire of attendee, blogger, and UBC associate
professor Jon Beasley-Murray. He wrote that the model for online learning is dominated by science and points a finger
at the people responsible.
“The arts and humanities should have a vital role,
critical and self-reflexive, that would complicate current discussion of
technology in the classroom, and more broadly enhance our understanding of the
university’s main challenges and possibilities in a global, wired world,” Beasley-Murray
wrote. “But what we get instead is knee-jerk enthusiasm and self-defeating
short-termism. This is not the fault of the sciences themselves—they should
clearly and obviously be part of the conversation, too. It is, rather, the
fault of an administration and senior management that has for some reason lost
faith in its own mission and its own values, and in the people that it employs
to think about and even question that mission and those values.”
