Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Commentary

A Catholic Case Against MOOCs

By Jonathan Malesic September 16, 2013
A Catholic Case Against MOOCs 1
Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle

An odd fact of MOOC mania is that it has barely touched one prominent sector of higher education: the nearly 250 Roman Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. So far, only Georgetown University has forged a partnership with one of the three major companies offering platforms for massive open online courses—Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

An odd fact of MOOC mania is that it has barely touched one prominent sector of higher education: the nearly 250 Roman Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. So far, only Georgetown University has forged a partnership with one of the three major companies offering platforms for massive open online courses—Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

I don’t know why there aren’t more Catholic MOOCs. Many Catholic universities are just as prestigious as other colleges offering the online courses. Moreover, Catholic universities presumably want the same things that their secular counterparts hope that MOOCs can provide: greater brand recognition, a showcase for innovative faculty, and the chance to recruit from a bigger pool of students.

But I do know that by banding together in a principled stand against producing MOOCs or offering students credit for completing them, Catholic universities can be true leaders in higher education. Instead of following the hype, they can reassert the belief that education is a moral enterprise that develops human dignity and promotes social justice.

MOOCs not only fail to accomplish those goals; they undermine them. And if large Catholic universities pursued strategic aims through MOOCs, they could end up pushing smaller Catholic colleges, including ones sponsored by the same religious orders, out of business, weakening Catholic higher education as a whole.

There is one way in which MOOCs seem to line up with a major historical goal of Catholic universities: They offer access to college-level instruction for people who have been excluded because of poverty, remoteness, or others’ prejudice. But the altruistic promise of MOOCs has been empty so far.

Most people taking MOOCs already have degrees; they are not in desperate need of education. And while many of the students do come from developing countries, there is evidence that they are not being well served by MOOCs. For example, more than half of those who completed a recent course in computational investing, offered by Georgia Tech through Coursera, came from first-world countries.

Catholic organizations have known for a long time that to educate the poor, you have to go to them. In fact, to educate anyone fully—addressing their moral and spiritual development as well as their intellect—teachers and students must be present to each other.

The question of what makes education personal is where we see the biggest gap between MOOCs and Catholic educational principles. Coursera’s co-founder, Daphne Koller, promotes the “personalized” learning that a MOOC can offer. Coursera can track how each learner uses the course material and how his or her quiz performance correlates with given in-course behaviors. With that information, Coursera can guide students toward the activities that will best help them to learn: additional video lectures or a specific discussion-forum thread. I cannot customize each student’s education as precisely as Coursera claims it can. But I can personalize it, in the sense that I can help students connect what they learn in my class to who they are as people—their biographies, aspirations, shortcomings.

MOOC creators assume that learners’ intellects are detachable from their broader life circumstances. You take the MOOC, but you’re on your own in figuring out how your learning fits into the rest of your life—or how it might require changing your life. That’s fine if you just need to know about analog circuits to work on a specific project. But people come to universities at all ages, with unsettled identities and life plans, or with plans that education itself will unsettle. Moral education, which Catholic institutions promise (and secular ones, too, should offer), relies on dialogue and physical proximity. Students therefore need accessible mentors on the faculty as well as counselors, advisers, and chaplains.

By forswearing the production and consumption of MOOCs, Catholic colleges would also show that social justice entails not replacing human labor (here, faculty) with cheaper, less effective machine labor. When members of the philosophy department at San Jose State University wrote an open letter to the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel stating why they would not give students credit for taking the MOOC he teaches, they appealed to principles of social justice—principles that, ironically, Sandel teaches in his edX course, “JusticeX.” MOOCs, the department argued, exacerbated racial and class divisions in higher education, offering inferior goods to poor and minority students.

ADVERTISEMENT

The grounds for a social-justice case against MOOCs are even stronger within the Catholic tradition. In his 1981 encyclical on work, Laborem Exercens, Pope John Paul II acknowledged that technology can aid our work, but he also warned that it can become an “enemy” by displacing workers and robbing work of its rightful meaning. The threat is that technology will depersonalize both the work and the worker, who is, the pope argued, “the primary basis of the value of work.”

MOOCs undercut that value for academic workers. As the historian Jonathan Rees has argued convincingly on his blog, the endgame for MOOCs is the supplanting of local, in-person labor by technologically mediated remote labor. The human educator, who is the source of education’s greatest value but also its greatest expense, is meant to become dispensable. As colleges encounter trouble balancing their books (as many small Catholic colleges are), they will be tempted to grant academic credit for completing MOOCs. If that happens, MOOC providers will profit at the cost of faculty jobs. The dignity of faculty as workers will be damaged.

Finally, in collectively standing against MOOCs, Catholic colleges can show that education is a mission shared across different institutional types. Catholic institutions compete with one another for students, faculty, and athletics championships, but education itself, which is governed not by scarcity but by abundance, must not become a competitive endeavor. MOOCs hold out the dangerous prospect of larger Catholic universities’ crowding out smaller ones in the name of competitive advantage.

If MOOCs enable elite universities to cut into their smaller peers’ student base, then the largest and richest will be the only ones left. In fact, that is exactly what the Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun predicts will happen within 50 years.

ADVERTISEMENT

If, in a few decades, the number of Catholic colleges in the United States amounts to only a handful of mega-universities, with most students taking classes online, in physical isolation from their professors and peers, then the project of Catholic higher education will have failed. Not only will it have abandoned personal and local education, but it will have elevated the market principles of competition and consolidation above the Catholic social-justice principles of solidarity (making decisions that benefit the common good) and subsidiarity (making decisions at the lowest and most local possible level).

Once Catholic colleges distinguish themselves from the MOOC-addled crowd by making this appeal to their tradition’s moral principles (and once they persuade Georgetown to give up its MOOCs), they need to put those principles into action. They need to make sure that they really do educate the whole person—with faculty who embody what it means to be an educated person. They must also treat their employees, especially their highly vulnerable contingent faculty, like the sources of value they really are.

Finally, Catholic institutions must demonstrate that they are collaborators more than competitors. Catholic colleges share a common, noble mission. The emergence of MOOCs may be their best opportunity to prove it.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Jonathan Malesic
Jonathan Malesic is a writer and an adjunct instructor of first-year writing at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of The End of Burnout (University of California Press, 2022). Read his previous columns here. His website is Jonmalesic.com and his Substack is here
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists
ManganGMU-0708 B.jpg
Leadership
The Trump Administration Appears to Have Another College President in Its Crosshairs
Joan Wong for The Chronicle
Productivity Measures
A 4/4 Teaching Load Becomes Law at Most of Wisconsin’s Public Universities
Illustration showing a letter from the South Carolina Secretary of State over a photo of the Bob Jones University campus.
Missing Files
Apparent Paperwork Error Threatened Bob Jones U.'s Legal Standing in South Carolina

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin