Summertime, and everyone’s all a-Twitter over Eau de Me, You the City, Corps Será, and other MOOC platforms (MOOC = massively-open online courses, though they aren’t). ((For employees of these enterprises upset with my making fun of your names, please remember that your own choices gave me the straight line. And the folks at Digital Campus agree with the silliness of these names.)) That pounding has become even louder now that UVa joined Core Será (okay, Coursera) just a few weeks after the UVa Board of Visitors tried to push Teresa Sullivan out because … they weren’t happy with how fast UVa was moving in the High-Profile Branding online space.
I like Siva Vaidhyanathan’s column on the UVa choice for a down-to-earth explanation of what involvement with Coursera means. He speaks the truth even though he’s a kid from Buffalo who acquired a Texas accent. And I think we need an easy way to identify silly arguments about what a policy or practice can do, both to puncture overinflated egos and bring discussion back to reality: Yet Another Silver-Bullet Approach, or YASBA.
When someone says MOOCs will bring the end of universities “as we know it,” they’re using YASBA.
When someone says TFA will revolutionize teaching, they’re using YASBA.
When someone tries to sell a particular textbook series as bringing everyone to “100% proficiency” (whatever that means), they’re using YASBA. Same with assertions that a textbook is somehow “college- and career-ready” or “Common Core ready.” All YASBA.
As Vaidhyanathan observes, MOOCs (even misnamed) are interesting and justifiable without having to claim they’ll solve the world’s problems. I think TFA is justifiable in some cities to address specific teacher shortages, but this week’s The Onion prod is on the money on its limits. And some textbooks are clearly better than others. But to reinterpret small, partial solutions as YASBA is to damage both the idea you’re boosting and the way we discuss education policy.