Category Archives: on assessment

On the political philoshophy of assessment

ChatGPT, on assessment

assessing ChatGPT as student

Leave a comment

I have started organizing my blog posts in view of a possible publication. This is involving re-reading and re-indexing. In this process I found a series of posts published in 2011 “on assessment” following a small conference at Teachers College that a preparatory gathering that was part of the large “Commission on the Future of Assessment” led by Ed Gordon. I do not have the full list of participants but they included Ray McDermott, Robbie McClintock, Aaron Hung, Gus Andrews. At the time, I wrote 5 posts and one article (Varenne 2013) that developed our perennial themes reflected in this blog: a continuing exploration of the tension between State and the individual in their local assemblies. In brief, one the one hand, in the world of schooling, the State determines what is the “right” answer to a question to which the teacher knows the answer where “right” means that the teacher authorizes the student to move on to the next step. In brief, local assemblies look for, and find, ways to bypass the State as they inscribe an alternate “next” as a plausible, if not always consequential, new “right-for-current-purposes.”

In the last post of the 2011 series, I played at imagining something that, then, appeared to be a flight of “science fiction.” I imagined a world where “Google” (standing of any kind of search “engine”) would keep in its memory our searches and would base next searches on the basis of these earlier ones thereby helping one find faster some obscure matter one was searching for. This “imagined” technology would analyze our interests and, perhaps, even tell us not to search further into disallowed topics as a kind of mentor.

Fourteen years later, much of this is not science fiction anymore. It is our everyday life. I would date the social facting of this brave new world with the explosion of ChatGPT in the Fall 2024—when students mentioned it, I explored it, and was told by my grandson that he had already used it to flesh out a story of his. What may still be missing in this world is a mentor.

Given ChatGPT’s claim to authoritative, “intelligent,” knowledge, it is fair to assess it as a professor would any student claiming the status. So, as stereotypical teacher in a stereotypical lesson, asking students question to which I know the answer and checking how close is the answer to being “right,” I asked ChatGPT: what is emile durkheim best known for? ChatGPT answered (excerpt, full answer):

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology and for establishing sociology as an academic discipline distinct from philosophy and psychology. His major contributions include:
1. Theory of Social Facts …
2. Division of Labor and Solidarity …
3. Study of Suicide …
4. Religion and Collective Consciousness …
5. Education and Morality…
In short: Durkheim is best known for demonstrating that society shapes individual behavior, for introducing systematic methods to study social phenomena, and for foundational works on social facts, solidarity, suicide, and religion.

This answer passes as “right” (B+ if given by a doctoral student in anthropology) though not particularly imaginative, or indicative that everyone of these statements was controversial. So, to probe whether my exam question was too vague, and knowing the answer, I asked: Which aspects of Durkhem did Talcott Parsons emphasize? ChatGPT answered (excerpt, full answer):

Talcott Parsons emphasized Émile Durkheim primarily as a theorist of normative order, social integration, and moral regulation, selectively reading Durkheim in ways that supported Parsons’s own project of structural functionalism. Here are the main aspects Parsons highlighted:
1. Social Order and Norms …
2. Action Governed by Values (Not Just Interests) …
3. Social Facts as Moral Constraints …
4. Integration as the Core Social Problem …
5. Religion as a Moral System …
Parsons tended to soften or neglect:
Durkheim’s attention to conflict and coercion
The emotional, ritual, and ecstatic dimensions of religion
Durkheim’s methodological radicalism (“treat social facts as things”)
In One Sentence:
Parsons emphasized Durkheim as a theorist of normative integration and moral order, transforming him into a cornerstone of consensus-oriented functionalism, while muting Durkheim’s sharper edges around power, conflict, and crisis.

This answer also passes as “right” (A- if given by a doctoral student in anthropology), though, again somewhat lacking in caveats. The answer may be deemed overly “declarative” by some assessors. So, to probe further into weeds most social scientists would not consider useful, I then asked a question I did not expect ChatGPT to answer as expertly (for the full answer go to): What are the main aspects of Garfinkel’s critique of Parsons’ take on Durkheim? ChatGPT answered, in 612 words of which I only quote the last (excerpt, full answer):

III. The fundamental divergence (in one contrast)
Parsons Garfinkel
Norms explain action Action produces norms
Values are internalized Accountability is displayed
Order is systemic Order is local and practical
Actor is norm-following Actor is methodically competent
Durkheim = moral consensus Durkheim = practical moral workBottom line: Garfinkel’s critique is not that Parsons misunderstood Durkheim entirely, but that he domesticated him. Garfinkel’s Durkheim: is not a theorist of value systems, but a theorist of how moral order is accomplished in practice.

This answer if fully right in my world and I would rate it a doctoral student “A.”

Except that I suddenly had a doubt: did ChatGPT know that I am the one who was asking the question? This came to me as I noticed that it exactly summarizes what I teach, publish, and blog. Much of this is open to everyone… These concluding sentences are what makes me wonder:

This reinterpretation profoundly reshaped sociology, influencing conversation analysis, studies of work, education (including McDermott & Varenne), and the micro-foundations of social order.
If you’d like, I can:
trace this argument directly through Studies in Ethnomethodology
connect this to McDermott’s classroom analyses as Durkheimian ethnomethodology

I felt spooked: CG has read our work and is quoting it back to us! However, and I did not dig further, it is, also, an interpretation: After all, for many years of his careers, and possibly onto now, McDermott would not have claimed Durkheim (about whom he may have learned through secondary discussion of Parsons’s take–the most common in the 1960s and 70s when we were doctoral students at Stanford and Chicago)—or might have considered him irrelevant.

In any event, the sequence of answer makes ChatGPT appear almost “intelligent” and altogther compliant. I do not have to worry that it will discuss with itself (as I know students do among themselves) about Varenne’s odd interests.

That leaves us with at least two set of further questions. Among the faculty at TC, as it appears is the case in all schools around the world, there is much emphasis on one type of “danger”: that our students, when asked an exam question will put this question to ChatGPT who will give an unimpeachable answer the students can then pass as their own. ChatGPT can now be used as glorified Cliff Notes!

However this danger is only a threat to our claim that only we, university professors, can properly assess student knowledge for any purpose of the State, leading to degrees with “rights and privileges thereunto attached” (as the diplomas, will, candidly, state). Much on this will be written (along with bemoaning “grade inflation) so I will focus again on my 2011 thought experiment:

What if ChatGPT gets used as a tool for education away from State control?

References

Varenne, Hervé, G. Andrews, A. Hung, and S. Wessler   2013     “Polities and politics of ongoing assessments: Evidence from video-gaming and blogging.” in Discourse 2.0. Edited by D. Tannen and A. Trester, Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics series. Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press. pp. 27-46.

Actor-Network, ethnomethodology, on assessment, on schooling policy, parentings

Policy? or Politics?

Leave a comment

Could the hegemony of “policy” be coming to an end?

For many years state officials, “private” foundations, benevolent billionaires, academia and a certain elite media have been telling everyone else what is what in “education”.  (For one sense of this set look at Brill’s 2010 story in  the New York Times magazine).  In the world of academia where I live, this will have been the decade of “data-driven” “policy” “studies.”  We keep being told, repeatedly, such “narratives” (stories? fiction?) as:

In Rhode Island schools, a multidisciplinary effort helps teachers to quickly understand what skills their students have already grasped and which subjects need more attention. In Houston, a regional alliance has noticed signs of students going off-track on higher-level math skills and acted to intervene.

What do these stories have in common? Success here derives from access to data, or big data as it’s sometimes called. The examples above come from the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit effort driving education outcomes through hard numbers.
(GovTech November 2014, retrieved in December 2015)

What interests me here, of course, is the hint of an “actor-network” of local schools and a corporation “e.Republic, Inc.” “The nation’s only smart media and research company focused exclusively on public sector innovation for state and local government and education” (retrieved in December 2015)

One problem with just sketching an actor-network (an excellent thing to do) is that it can end with an altogether static map and little sense of the movements through it, or the temporalities that assemble and then sometimes dissemble the network.

So, recently, I have tried to write about such networks as acting (and revealing themselves) through crowded conversations (deliberations).  I am experimenting with generalizing conversational analyses (somewhat like Latour generalized ethnomethodology when he moved from looking at the production of knowledge in short interactions among a few people (Garfinkel et al. 1981;  Goodwin 1995), to looking at a laboratory (Latour 1979), to looking at the scientific enterprise as a whole (Latour 1987).

And so, once upon a time, we had Senator Kennedy and President Bush (as symbolic leaders) producing “No child left behind” after very long conversations that started at least 20 to 30 years earlier –unless it is 200 years (Varenne 2007, 2011).

And then, a few years later, President Obama and Arnie Duncan, his secretary of education, started new conversations which, among other things,  privileged “data-driven policy.”  I am necessarily wrong in suggesting that they were the sole authors who literally started these long-turn taking sequences.  But they can stand as markers of a new sequence with somewhat different participants and discursive order as the original metaphor (a child is like a sponge) developed into practical conceit (regulations, the attendant bureaucracies, the texts to be produced among the various actors, etc.).
Continue reading Policy? or Politics? →

about Teachers College, apprenticeships, learning/teaching, on assessment, schooling and the production of class

On grades as statements: to whom?

Leave a comment

Ray McDermott and Jean Lave once told me that they asked Rancière whether his writing influenced his teaching.  As they tell it, he looked surprised and answered something like “not at all!”  A reader of Successful Failure once asked me whether I still gave grades.  Besides stuttering, I said something like: “I am required to (by my university and New York State)” and/or “students would not accept my not giving them grades.”

Continue reading On grades as statements: to whom? →

on assessment, on schooling policy, schooling and the production of class

On education on Lake Wobegon

Leave a comment

Everytime I introduce my work with Ray McDermott, I echo something he probably says more eloquently than I: “What schools all about? They are about determining which 50% of children are below average!”  Given that much of this is done through testing, and that the good test “discriminates,” then I sometimes say, to provoke, that schools are all about discrimination.

Such statements grab the attention of students, but I am not always quite convinced that the answer is more than a provocative quip.

And then I read paragraphs like one that introduced a recent story in the New York Times:

Ohio seems to have taken a page from Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. Last month, state officials releasing an early batch of test scores declared that two-thirds of students at most grade levels were proficient on reading and math tests given last spring under the new Common Core requirements. (October 6, 2015)

The story is of course not about how successful the schools of Lake Wobegon or Ohio are.  The story is about “the problem that a lot of policy makers and educators were trying to solve,” as “Karen Nussle, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a Common Core advocacy group,” is quoted as saying.  As summarized by the New York Times, “The Common Core was devised by experts convened by state education commissioners and governors to set uniform benchmarks for learning. … But as the results from the first Common Core tests have rolled out, education officials again seem to be subtly broadening definitions of success.”

In other words, as McDermott and I argued, success if indeed defined by failure (1998).  It is necessary to fail students in order to demonstrate that other students are successful.  It cannot be that all children (or even most, or even more than some measure of the average) should be “proficient.”  The label must apply only to a certain percentage.

The “debate” (though the New York Times is not really debating as the article clearly sides with Common Core policy makers) is thus about labels, statistical uniformity, comparability across the United States—and forms of unacceptable tinkering if not cheating.

The debate is not about learning, and even less about education.

“Only in America” am I tempted to say, except that, actually, there is something interesting going on here that a call to political theories of cultural arbitrary (as all theories of culture, from Boas onwards have been, when taken strictly) should highlight.  The story is also about a political struggle among the elites about precisely how America should work, in general, and in the detail of the lives of politicians, schools administrators, principals, teachers, parents and other adult who might express opinions or vote about all this—not to mention university professors designing tests, billionaires funding “school reform,” union leaders and many others.

I make this list to bring attention to the evidence that all these people, in the worlds that they inhabit will talk and act in ways that will often make problems for each other, and that they will do that purposefully (systematically and deliberately to cross-reference Cremin and my take on “education”).  In relatively neutral language they are conversing (which is not quite the same thing as “negotiating”) often with the hope of producing something different than the probable or expectable.  They are not simply acting in terms of their dispositions (habitus, etc.).

I make the list also to move further than where Ray McDermott and I were when we completed Successful Failure.  As Jill Koyama (2008) noted, we mentioned “America” but did not quite show how it actually produced what we observed, in temporality.  We had essentially worked by drawing a structural model of a historical moment (“culture”) that emphasized the relationship between democracy, meritocracy, the institutions that they produced, and the consequences for individuals (to simplify of course).  We were directly inspired by Louis Dumont (1980 [1961]) on the relationship between individualism and racism.

This kind of (Lévi-Straussian) structuralism can be helpful, but it never was able to specify how what was modeled actually came into reality in the day to day life of those caught by the culture.  So, more or less explicitly, social theorists implied or stated that what was modeled was real and powerful enough to generate what could be observed.  McDermott and I wrote extensively against this move to “structuring structures” (to quote Bourdieu’s jargon).  But we did not quite find a way to state how the democratic fight against birth privilege ends up producing discriminatory tests, the failing of teachers who do not “add value” to children and all other policies justified by calls to the discovery and reward of individual merit.

Thus my interest in following what the New York Times reports, and how it writes its reports.  I take these as statements within a conversation, in the same spirit as McDermott wrote about Rosa’s “I could read it”: the statement makes sense given the conditions but it is not produced by the conditions.  The conditions are set by earlier statements, most of them made by other people, far away and long dead, as McDermott and I like to say.  But the actual statement (act) is produced by a particular person, caught together with specific persons (consociates), at a given time.  In that perspective, it makes sense for bureaucrats in Ohio to move the boundary between proficient or not.  And it also makes sense for others powers-that-be to try and move it back.

What of course no theory of culture can answer is “why should it make sense?”  except perhaps if “a” culture (epoch, episteme, …) is understood, again, as a statement making sense in terms of earlier statements (culture…).  Thus, the shift to democracy, meritocracy, schools, testing, might be seen as a response to earlier discourses and institutions for elite production.  How to move the conversation to its next statement is our problem, as political actors and, I would say, as educators attempting to convince various audiences that they are on a track that may only make matters worse.

References

Dumont, Louis 1980 [1961] “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’.” Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Tr. by M. Sainsbury. Rev. ed.. In his Homo hierarchicus

Koyama, Jill 2010 Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

 

America, on assessment, on love, popular culture

Dreaming of diverging

Leave a comment

Movie posterFor any number of reasons, my wife Susan and I went to see Divergent last Friday.  We were, by far, the oldest people in the theater.  I was, about, the only male (except for a few fathers perhaps).  Everybody else was a 12(+-2)-year-old girl.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, then you are not into Hollywood generated mass popular culture, or middle-brow cultures concerned with “gender” either.  If “divergent” means to you something that it did not mean a few weeks ago then, as an intellectual adult (one of my readers, as I imagine them), I assume you also know that it is, among other things, the second (after The Hunger Games) of Hollywood responses to the accusation that there were no big budget, action adventure movies with girls as heroines.  So, in the kind of brief synopsis that start this kind of commentary, Divergent is about a 16-year-old girl who violently restores a threatened order and then moves on into the wilderness—and 12-year-old girls know about that.
Continue reading Dreaming of diverging →

about Teachers College, authority and power, Governing power, on assessment, on schooling policy

Sorting out how the Powers-that-Be yield their power by watching local wardens

Leave a comment

Those who follow this blog may remember that I had to contribute my two bits to a discussion about “promoting diversity” in our department, programs, teaching, etc. (February 25, 2014).  I may also heave mentioned a while back that I was charged to write an “Assessment of Learning Outcomes” report for the programs in anthropology.

Note the passive voice in “I had to…,” “I was charged.”  I started the diversity entry with a reference to the “Powers that Be” (PtBs).  Those, of course, are Latourian black boxes.  But that is not saying much, yet.  Actually, the particular acts that triggered my own activity where made by various individuals (deans, department chairs, etc.) who were very specifically told to tell me that I no choice but to perform the tasks whether as faculty member (for the diversity thing) or a program coordinator (for the assessment thing).  Still, none of these individuals originated the requirement that I do “it.”  As they all said, apologetically often, is that they were “passing on” the requirement from higher (? The right metaphor?) up.

This could be a call to “follow the network” of particular people told to ask other particular people to do the specific things (and they are very specific indeed).  I tried to do something like that once (2007).  It could also be a call to reveal the “bricolage” (to put it as blandly as possible) that “Those Who are Told” (TWaTs [?!]) must engage in to produce what the PtBs will accept as good enough for the current purposes.  Jill Koyama (2010) did some of this in relation to administrators, teachers, and parents, in the local worlds NCLB produced.
Continue reading Sorting out how the Powers-that-Be yield their power by watching local wardens →

comprehensive education, on assessment, on schooling policy

Where do (psycho/socio)- metricians fit?

Leave a comment

Recently, March 28 2012, I spent the afternoon at the plenary session of an “International Conference” on “Educational Assessment, Accountability, and Equity: Conversations on Validity around the World.”  The plenary speaker was Michael T. Kane, “The Samuel J. Messick Chair in Test Validity” at the Educational Testing Service.  He talked about validity as measurement scientists deliberate about it, and about some of their soul-searching when they consider the impact of their measurements.  Or, as I would put it, wearing my “anthropologist of Nacirema” hat, he talked about the misgivings of an obscure priesthood specializing in an abstruse numerology few understand outside their rarified convents.  Kane, as a master in this polity of conjurers of numbers, gave us, the uninitiated or very peripheral, a glimpse of his doubts and those of other masters as they discover that they are now at the very center of political storms where their more abstruse spells are thrown at opponents for all sorts of reasons having little to do with numerology.
NYC value added model for teachers

To the extent that I understand it (and I am very far at the periphery of numerology, or rather, I am at the periphery of the gravity well that might have made me, at some point in my career, a legitimate peripheral participant), it all has to do with the “interpretation” of the test that leads to its being used in a particular case.  But Kane and his peers are not quite where Geertz and his peers have been.  For one, Kane is deeply concerned with specifying and justifying the interpretive steps.  For another, he and his peers have, precisely been thrust into the center, while symbolic anthropologists are pushed even further away from it.

Continue reading Where do (psycho/socio)- metricians fit? →

learning/teaching, on assessment, on schooling policy

What’s a teacher to do?

Leave a comment

New York City found out on February 28 that an elementary school teacher I know well rates a “34 (7-73) 32 (5-84)” in Reading and a “63 (41-82) 77 (42-91)” in Math.

A few months ago, teachers had received from their school summary documents that looked like this:
Math result for a NYC teacher
What is an individual teacher to do about any of this?  What, on a day to day basis should a teacher do to “improve” on a 34 and maintain a 77?

These numbers are somewhat related to the wonderful awful formula:

NYC value added model for teachers

What are the values of these variables for any particular teacher? Which of these variables are under an individual’s control?  On what day of the year?

I venture that neither common sense, habituation into any cultural world, guesswork, or any other process proceeding from the individual teacher as teacher or person, is likely to help in answering these questions.  I suspect that a whole new class of professional consultants is now being inducted into fuller and fuller participation in new polities in all sorts of institutions.  They will be sold as the interpreters of the ratings.  They will also be people with children and mortgages who will have ever more interest in keeping the formula opaque.  They will be joined by the psycho/socio-metricians tinkering with the formula to “improve” it so that they can report to the New York Post that “the complaints of the teachers have been addressed,” various software engineers, etc.  And the web keeping everybody in place will get tighter and more difficult to escape.

The question we need to raise is, of course, whether teachers should have to ask questions about manipulating variables on a formula.  The formula may be wonderful as a research tool, but it is awful as a method for hiding political decisions and making it appear that these decisions are removed from precisely political activity at all levels of schooling.  As a political tool it may be intended to take the place of a terminating Skynet where evaluation, like the response to some foreign threat.  Evaluation, it appears, is taken out of the political realm of principals meeting teachers in a school, and into the realm of automatized mechanisms noone quite understand but are un-impeachable, as well as altogether unaccountable.  That people will be hurt people is their problem will the newly powerful say: “good” teachers (the top 50%? 75%? 25%?) “have nothing to fear” and “bad” teachers should fear dismissal (unless the whole exercise is pointless).

Whether any of this will do anything to improve education in any of its senses in the question may be a question one asks at one’s peril.

on assessment, on schooling policy

On Political Deep Play – a coda on experimentation

Leave a comment

My entry from March 2 played, very seriously, with the kind of deep play policy makers in the world of schooling engaged in when they released invalid scores purported to tell how well individual teachers taught.  On March 9th, James B. Stewart of the New York Times, asked “Would Americans be better off if General Motors and Chrysler had simply gone bankrupt, without benefit of taxpayer assistance?” and he raised the question of the kind of evidence one could use to answer such a question.  What picked my curiosity is the following comments:

Unlike a science experiment, in which variables can be changed and the experiment repeated, we can’t turn back the clock, let the auto companies go bankrupt and compare the results with what we have today, which is an American auto industry that is, by nearly all measures, healthier than it’s been in many years. G.M. and Chrysler, not to mention Ford, which didn’t get taxpayer money but benefited indirectly, are profitable, hiring more workers, competing more effectively, gaining market share and building better cars and trucks.

He then proceeded to make comparisons with other companies that were, or not, helped by the government when they face bankruptcy.  Essentially, he was using history rather than “evidence-based” empirical research to argue in favor of a political decision.

Now, of course, history, like anthropology, is precisely not an experimental science and yet it may more useful to “politic” makers, that is politicians, as actors, rather than “policy” makers as advisors to the actor.  The very small group (Obama, Geithner, ??) who decided to bail out General Motors could not rely on “evidence.”  They had to rely, in the best sense of all these words, their ideology, their common sense, and the conversations they must have had.

In other words, they placed a major bet.  It looks like they won.  But this was about the deepest of deep plays.  The only deeper I can imagine is Roosevelt or Wilson getting America into World Wars.

Back in New York, it is probably the case that Bloomberg made a similar bet when he had the test scores released.  He could not wait for the “evidence” that this release would lead to better teaching.  By the time this evidence was in, then the political problem would probably have been moot.  We can disagree with his decisions.  We can note the irony that people who have prided themselves on being “data-driven” made a major decision in the absence of data.  But we see the decision for what it is, a political decision, not a policy decision.  And as one approaches political decisions, history, and anthropology, may be more useful than “experimental” social sciences.

How can we convince policy/politic makers that evidence-based research is not the way to a better democracy?

learning/teaching, on assessment, on schooling policy

MOOC: Education, degrees, careers?

Leave a comment

I ended a recent paper for the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment with comments about the possible disassociation of schooling from assessment.  My argument was that the association between the two has been 1) good for schooling in that it has massively increased its reach and claim on resources, and also 2) terrible as it makes it less and less relevant to education.  The recent, and ongoing, controversy about publicizing teachers’ scores on invalid measures is a case in point: teacher-ing, with ever more symbolic violence (a.k.a “accountability”), is made into a skill for putting measurable bits into students’ head.  That teacher-ing might be about participating in shaping a mind is left aside as not a concern for the State.  But why, may we ask, should the State be concerned with education?  Well, of course, because

the tests
…..that lead to the degrees
……….that accredited  schools grant
……………that employers use to open or close doors to careers

are essential for the representation that a political system is indeed “democratic” and that state rewards are indeed distributed on merit rather than birth privilege (in its racial, ethnic, class, gender, etc. forms).

In many ways, as the people of the School have been saying, focusing on tests leading to degrees is a radical narrowing of what was the mission of schooling.  Arguable, the battle has been lost as much (most?) of what was included in this mission has now been distributed out to the family, the media, religious institutions, etc.  But schooling, as an institution, appeared to remain central because it has kept its monopoly on the granting of degrees.

What if this changed?  What if a successful challenge was mounted to legitimize other doors to adult careers than those controlled by the current schools, colleges and universities (and their teachers or faculty)?

In the past week, the New York Times published evidence that this challenge has started.  One is an opinion piece by Charles Murray asking an “energetic public interest law firm” to challenge “the constitutionality of the [bachelor’s degree] as a job requirement” (March 8, 2012).  The Supreme Court, I did not know, has made it unconstitutional to make test scores the key to employment unless there is a tight link between the test and the job.  Demonstrating the link between almost any college degree and almost any job might be difficult.

The other report may be a more immediate and less ideological challenge, and possibly much more difficult for school people to block (particularly since some of them are profiting from this challenge).  I am talking here about “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs).  Stanford offered a classes for 160,000 students in 190 countries!  Another class, on Machine Learning, was given for 104,000 students with 13,000 completing the course.

The figures are astounding.  They are about something that is happening now and will have social and political consequences.  Of the 13,000 who complete the course on Machine Learning, most of them must have learned something but none got a State recognized certificate or a degree.  So, at this point, they completed the course “for nothing”–that is just for the education of it.  Some of them may also perform their professional tasks better.  I suspect those will not accept for very long to be passed for promotion by people who have a degree.

If the State finds ways to accredit (“give credit for”) the taking of MOOC (perhaps by asking a company like ETS to give an independent and controlled test), the implications for universities and their faculty are staggering.  The New York Times quote one of the Stanford professors who taught one of the MOOC as saying that he does not want to go back to teaching just twenty students in a small classroom.  When Stanford has found a way to charge people for the course, and reward the faculty member in commensurate fashion, the whole economic basis of colleges is transformed.

We may be seeing the end of schooling as we have known it (and for people of my generation profited from it).  It is going to be quite a ride.