emergentfutures:

“Academic culture is a huge and diverse ecosystem. People who come along with grand plans about how everything is going to be transformed so often don’t have even a very shallow understanding of how that ecosystem works: You have all these Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are going to blow everything up and transform it; what you’re really talking about doing is killing all the green plants in the ecosystem and then expecting the deer to have something to eat; no; the deer are going to die. There’s this basic economic argument for the cheapness of online education that is always about requiring less labor; paying people less, replacing people with technology. And at the end of the day, what you’re going to have is a very stagnant intellectual culture. Who writes the textbooks? Who writes the lectures? You tape the [MOOC] lecture once, but then what happens next year? You just keep recycling the same materials over and over again? It’s like a really bad ecological management system; you think you can remove something that is really crucial to the ecosystem, and nothing else will change?”

Aaron Bady, cited by Maria Bustillos in Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College

(via stoweboyd)