Rhetoric Check

Career College Central summary:

The faculty leaders behind the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education continued their barrage against massive open online courses on Tuesday, challenging the providers to come clean on “overblown, misleading or simply false” rhetoric. In letters blasted off last week to the founders of Coursera, edX and Udacity, the organization expresses its concern that the MOOC providers are motivated not by the “needs of our students, but the needs of [their] investors.”
“Higher education institutions, policy makers, families and taxpayers deserve the facts about MOOCs and similar forms of online education,” the letters read. “They should not be misled by wondrous promises of cheap and easy solutions.”
The organization has long been a critical voice against MOOCs. Its members cheered the signs of MOOC fatigue seen in 2013, but even as the hype has leveled off, the organization has kept up its offensive. Last October, the group released a series of working papers criticizing online learning and the influence of for-profit entities in higher education, arguing the debate ignored questions of quality in favor of “[focusing] squarely and exclusively on what will make money for particular companies.”
The organization stresses in the letters that it is opposed neither to technology in education nor to companies making a profit, only to the rhetoric some of those companies use about their products.

Click through for full article content.