PASTICCIO PARA LA MASAS

  La révolte des masses on line: Ortega y Gasset tournant un MOOC (Madrid 1931)
  

Dans le New York Review of Books du 14 Aout 2014, on trouve un excellent compte rendu (par David Bromwich d'un film sorti aux US, Ivory Tower, sur le "mess high tech de l'enseignement supérieur". On y lit notamment :

" At the utopian edge of the technocratic faith, a rising digital remedy for higher education goes by the acronym MOOCs (massive open online courses). The MOOC movement is represented in Ivory Tower by the Silicon Valley outfit Udacity. “Does it really make sense,” asks a Udacity adept, “to have five hundred professors in five hundred different universities each teach students in a similar way?” What you really want, he thinks, is the academic equivalent of a “rock star” to project knowledge onto the screens and into the brains of students without the impediment of fellow students or a teacher’s intrusive presence in the room. “Maybe,” he adds, “that rock star could do a little bit better job” than the nameless small-time academics whose fame and luster the video lecturer will rightly displace.

That the academic star will do a better job of teaching than the local pedagogue who exactly resembles 499 others of his kind—this, in itself, is an interesting assumption at Udacity and a revealing one. Why suppose that five hundred teachers of, say, the English novel from Defoe to Joyce will all tend to teach the materials in the same way, while the MOOC lecturer will stand out because he teaches the most advanced version of the same way? Here, as in other aspects of the movement, under all the talk of variety there lurks a passion for uniformity.

[....]

A MOOC lecturer may interact with a small cross-section of students, but in the nature of the artifice, where class enrollments may soar upward of 100,000, this will never be more than a specimen group. A conventional delivery system for “the personal touch” in the MOOC format is the so-called “flipped classroom.” Here a teaching assistant circulates in a roomful of students who have watched the assigned video, and helps them to sort out questions about details. The assistant—as Ivory Tower suggests with a single understated caption—will often turn out to be somebody who was once a professor but whom economies facilitated by MOOCs have demoted to the status of section leader. At the heart of the MOOC model is the idea that education is a mediated but unsocial activity. This is as strange as the idea—shared by ecstatic communities of faith—that the discovery of truth is a social but unmediated activity.


Nous sommes quelques uns à avoir dit cela aussi.

Cela peut peut-être inciter à (re)lire un vieux classique oublié, le livre de Georges Gusdorf, Pourquoi des professeurs, Payot, 1963: "Enseigner, disait le vieux Gusdorf, ce n'est pas parler en l'air, c'est parler à quelqu'un , c'est parler pour quelqu'un, ce qui suppose la réciprocité des perspectives". Le MOOC suppose que , comme cette réciprocité ne peut évidemment pas se faire entre l'enseignant ou les enseignants qui apparaissent dans le MOOC et les milliers d'étudiants virtuels qu'il est supposé drainer, elle se fera par un dialogue entre les utilisateurs, qui entreront en communication entre eux. Ils feront par eux mêmes la réciprocité des perspectives...Le modèle c'est celui de l'autodidacte, qui est à lui même son propre professeur. Mais Gusdorf cite ici Leonard de Vinci: "Triste e quel discepolo che non avanza il suo maestro".

      Mais imaginons un instant - qui est peut être déjà arrivé - que l'enseignement passe entièrement sur internet via les MOOCs. De tristes épisodes comme celui-ci ne se produiront plus.  Et tout le monde sera bien tranquille.