MOOCs, Heidegger and Difficulty

In a recent piece in the Harvard Crimson a student was bemoaning the issue of difficulty. The author states:

This past summer, Harvard announced that it would remove difficulty scores from the Q-Guide. ...said that “these changes reflect the decisions of the Faculty Council that were intended to make the Q a more accurate, sophisticated, and helpful mechanism for learning about and choosing courses.” Much of students' outrage centers upon the idea that we have the right to know this information and to choose classes as we please. I have a question ...: How do we, as Harvard students and faculty members, define difficulty? This question may seem overly simplistic, but in my mind, it is actually quite nuanced. When the Q asks us whether or not a class is difficult, is it asking us how hard it is to get an A? Or how easy it is to get a B? Is it how difficult the day-to-day work is, or how hard the final assignments are? I am sure that when many students answer on the Q, they have one or all of these definitions in mind. Difficulty could mean something more thought provoking though. It could be how much a class forces us to think about our own values and preconceived ideas and either change them or inspire us to believe them more deeply. Similarly, it could be how challenging the test material is, instead of how harshly the professor grades those tests. Or, maybe, something being difficult means that it forces us think about the big questions of life that frequently make us uncomfortable.

 I have never been a fan of student reports of this type, they all too often reflect the weakness of the students rather than the quality of the course. But that is only part of the issue.

But how does one get Heidegger into this fray? In the NY Review of Books is a review of Heidegger's Black Books. His notes during his Nazi involvement. It is an excellent review and does bring to bear the Nazi past of Heidegger, the oft praised philosopher whose observations led to the Existential movement, based somewhat on the question of; what is life if there is no God? Thus we have Sartre and de Beauvoir and the post WWII "thinkers" in and around Paris.

As the reviewer so well states:

In his early masterpiece, Being and Time, first published in 1927, Heidegger set forth a bold challenge to the conventional picture of the human being that, in his view, had held sway in philosophy at least since Descartes if not long before. According to this picture, the human being confronts the external world as a disengaged thinker or res cogitans. Knowledge of the world is therefore a matter of correct representation, and truth is essentially a correspondence between an external state of affairs and one’s representation of that state of affairs within the confines of one’s own consciousness. Heidegger objected to this picture not only because he felt it was bad epistemology but, more importantly, because he felt it was bad metaphysics. It splits reality in two, placing the mind on one side and the world on the other, and then makes representation do the work of bridging the divide. Heidegger proposed instead that philosophy should take as its cue our everyday commerce with worldly things. When I wield a hammer, my knowledge of that hammer is not primarily a matter of how it is represented or conceived; it is an implicit know-how that animates my action and embraces its elements all at once: the weight of the tool, the heft of the wood, my care in the work, and so forth. This everyday kind of purposeful involvement motivates a general picture of the human being as already immersed in its world. To emphasize the this-worldly character of such immersion Heidegger uses the term Dasein (which is simply the German word for existence). Dasein is not consciousness but rather “being-in-the-world.” It is an ongoing event that is thrown into time and can only come upon itself as it presses forward into its own possibilities.

Thus for Heidegger it is the Dasein, the "being in the world", the throwness, the breakdown, etc that is the core of his epistemology. Namely we learn by  doing, we learn by our mistakes, and we learn by being in the process of learning. The classic statement that "if one wants to get on the bus and go somewhere, then one must be at the bus stop to start" is all too true. Sometimes it may be the wrong bus but we should then learn from that mistake.

How does this relate to MOOCs? Simply, as the Harvard student recognizes, the Quality of a course or its complexity is really the result of the interaction between the student and the instructor. Lander and Biology is an almost religious experience. Many others are painful reminders of childhood rote education. But is an exciting professor the useful source of wisdom? Or is the professor just an entertainment akin to a weekend at Las Vegas. Did we learn something that has value and which is extensible and enriches our lives and others? Tough question. Yet it should be examined. Lander and his class wins on all fronts.

Yet many other MOOC instructors are treating this like some Freshman High School Algebra course, they give the rules, and then they demand a recitation of examples.

Perhaps the Dasein of Heidegger and the Q issue at Harvard could be a melding of issues to assist MOOC instructors to seek out what education could and should be.