A MOOC Primer by SEK

Once upon a time I did one of these that proved so popular Insider Higher Ed promised to pay me $125 to reprint it at their place. And they did reprint it yes they did. But I digress: last night I was avoiding things I couldn't change, but lacked the courage required to change the things I could, so instead I decided to write a primer summarizing my feelings about the MOOC phenomenon I've been reading so much about lately. It goes something like this:

A is for affordable, you too can attend!

B, the boredom of the automated emails that they send.

C is for the crowd-sourced marks you never can protest,

D, the comments you receive from Dr. Dispossessed.

E is for efficiency, you'll learn much more and faster;

F, the mark you'll earn from your anonymous headmaster.

G is for goals you'll meet, should fleeting time permit;

H, the honey badger, who doesn't give a shit.

I's for innovation, as the Internet is used;

J's the campus jobs "human appliances" will lose.

K is for "the kids," for whom all this is done;

L, the learning process, endless lectures on re-run.

M is for the money that will soon begin to rain,

O for the obscenity of pipe dreams, most profane.

O's also for objectives and assessments by machines,

C, "collaboration," 'cross seas of dim-lit screens.

Q is for the questions never answered in a MOOC,

R for "really thoughtful answers" copied from a book.

S, the rare impoverished souls, who care enough to try,

T, the time spent wasted, "learning" from a turned blind eye.

U's for universities, who seek to monetize,

V, the vastness of the campus they've lobotomized.

W's for the wallet, slit wide and fit to pad,

X is the amount slipped in, the bills that feed the fad.

Y is for the questions time and space do not permit,

Z, the honey badger, who doesn't give a shit.

NOTE: Editorial advice is always welcome, as deaf scansion tends to emphasize rhythm at the expense of everything else.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

Maybe capitalize the corresponding word in each line, for a visual cue?

B: too, many, commas.

The embedded MOOC is very cute.

[SEK]

"B" was to add a boring element to the sentence, but it's too choppy. As for capitalizing the corresponding word, let me see what that looks like and get back to you.

[SEK]

Actually, I don't think the bit at the end, where I don't use the letters, works as well if I capitalize them throughout. Stupid aesthetics!

[waxbanks]

i wish i had any idea, any at all, what all the MOOC fuss is about. surely 'the same product with all the good parts replaced by cheap shit' has been shown time and again to be a bad idea? does folks also think internet sex is better than actual sex just because it's *cleaner*?

hope all's well.

[SEK]

folks also think internet sex is better than actual sex just because it's *cleaner*?

Pretty much it. Except they also provide it for free, in the hopes of one day letting all the sex-workers loose to roam the country and find their dreams ... or something along those lines. I'm not sure I like where this analogy's going.

[mxyzptlk]

Until recently, I thought these were mooks:

The only thing I'd adjust is

"Z the honey badger, who still doesn't give a shit"