LECTURE halls can seat only so many students, but it's easy enough to broadcast lectures online to tens of thousands. Ventures such as EdX, a non-profit consortium involving a dozen universities, and Coursera, a for-profit business, are now focused on making courses taught by outstanding instructors available to millions of students. Some universities are using these so-called MOOCs, short for "massively open online courses", to supplement their standard curriculum, and the possibility that these offerings may in time replace flesh and blood university professors has become a source of distress among academics.
The philosophy faculty of San Jose State University (SJSU) recently broke with university administrators by refusing to offer a "blended" course, which would combine outsourced online lectures with classroom discussion, based on Michael Sandel's famous Harvard lecture series on justice. In an open letter to Mr Sandel, the philosophers of SJSU worry about the effectiveness of prepackaged, one-size-fits-all courses, the hazards of a homogenised curriculum dominated by a handful of superstar professors, and air a number of other sensible concerns. When they get right down to it, though, they admit they're