Thinking about your random sample, I wonder if there’s some sample bias in there. I get the impression that most universities partnering with Coursera aren’t letting their junior faculty teach MOOCS. It’s too risky of a move for those without tenure. That leaves only the more experienced faculty in the pool of MOOC instructors. Since you don’t want a dud MOOC, you want to have a rather accomplished faculty member in there teaching, preferably on something they know very, very well. So the faculty most likely to teach MOOCs are senior, experienced, and well-versed in their topics… exactly the kind of faculty most likely to have written books.

The questions you raise about profiting off of MOOCs are still relevant, of course. I’m just not sure how many of the MOOC faculty out there are primarily motivated by book sales.

Robert McGuire
Editor, MOOC News and Reviews

This is a great website! I couldn’t agree more about the lack of women studying history. It’s worse than some STEM fields. I tried to get a job teaching history in HS but couldn’t coach football so here I am in a Learning Science doctoral program.

Also, I’m very inspired by your pedagogy of disruption and the creation of historical hoaxes to teach how to detect dangerous and untrustworthy information online and develop expert historians. Given recent events (e.g. Syrian Electronic Army hacking into the AP Twitter account and the Onion), we need to teach how to read like a historian as a form of counter terrorism so that citizens are not susceptible to these types of cyber-attacks.

This historical hoax curriculum has sparked many ideas!

Thanks for the inspiration!
Kim

As Jason points out, the branding is also nice, and though we never brought it up in the meetings, that was part of my rationale for taking part when I already had to be dealing with finishing my phd. That said, I also believe that the more people have access to knowledge and training opportunities, the better. When I talk to other MOOC instructors, especially those with tenure, they seem to feel the same way; I really don’t think anyone’s making loads of money off book sales.

It sounds like you put altruism at the lowest rung of the latter, but from my (admittedly limited) experience, it seems the cynical solution might not be the most accurate.

Couldn’t you ask the same question as to why any faculty member would blog? It’s time-consuming & gets you no “official” accomplishments to put on your CV – but many of us still carve out time to do it, for a combination of altruism, self-promotion, and the pleasure of community & conversation. That being said, my blog doesn’t undercut the publication opportunities of other faculty, while arguably teaching a MOOC does threaten teaching opportunities for others.