MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES

WHEREAS, education is fundamentally a process by which human beings share and impart knowledge, technique, wisdom and experience with each other; and

WHEREAS, within this human exchange, teachers make use of a wide variety of tools in support of the educational process; and

WHEREAS, in recent years electronic, computer-based technologies, and more specifically Internet-based technologies, have come into broad and pervasive use throughout our society; and

WHEREAS, the impact of new technologies on education, in terms of both positive and negative outcomes, are only beginning to be reviewed and understood; and

WHEREAS,  educational researchers have demonstrated that to be as effective as an in-person, brick-and-mortar education, online education requires even smaller class sizes than in-person; and

WHEREAS, educational institutions are being aggressively pushed to adopt new educational technologies, with a limited understanding of its effective uses and with little regard for the students, teachers, and staff who will be affected by its introduction, by both corporations and elected representatives; and

WHEREAS, such tactics are not driven by a desire to provide the highest possible quality of education, but by a political agenda that seeks to deprofessionalize educators, dismantle our institutions of public learning, and profit off of people seeking an education; and

WHEREAS, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has embraced the potential of massive online open courses (MOOCs) to transform education, even while practitioners and researchers have noted that MOOCs have only been shown to be effective with highly-developed learners in non-credit, non-graded circumstances; and

WHEREAS, all of this is done on the premise that there is a scarcity of educational opportunities and a scarcity of dedicated, qualified educators; and

WHEREAS, proposals for massive use of online education demonstrate an agenda on the part of those pushing online education the hardest, to wit:

• Shifting education from an investment in the future of society and fulfillment of the abilities of its members, to opportunities for corporate investment and profit;
• Diverting students, for whom there will never be jobs in corporate America, out of public education and into corporate, for-profit institutions where they can become ensnared in lifelong student debt;
• Making education conform precisely to the labor market needs of global corporations; and

WHEREAS, intense grassroots public pressure will be necessary to protect high-quality public education from those who seek to dismantle, privatize, and profit from it:

RESOLVED, that the American Federation of Teachers reaffirm that access to the highest-quality education is a right enjoyed by all and that education is primarily a process of face-to-face interaction, with appropriate, educator-reviewed pedagogic technologies playing a supporting role; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT advocate for federal policies and priorities that protect and expands the public’s right to the highest-quality education, including those utilizing all forms of technology; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT advocate for the use of appropriate educational technologies as a means to enhancing the face-to-face work of education, not replace it; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT and its affiliates work with institutions and school districts to see that appropriate educational technologies, including computer hardware and software, are provided at a reasonable cost, and that extra efforts be made to ensure that institutions which serve high-need students have access to appropriate technologies; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT and its affiliates use its political influence to ensure that policy-makers enact educational policies which protect and expand the public’s right to the highest-quality education delivered by the most effective means.