Twitter #BookChallenge

Some weeks ago, a friend invited me on Twitter to take part in the #BookChallenge. You’ve probably heard about it: people post covers of their favorite books for seven days, one book per day. It runs in various languages and usually includes a statement like “7 days, 7 favorite books, no explanations,” you mention the person who invited you and you might invite or challenge somebody else. A really nice version of a chain letter, I think.

I accepted the challenge by Ruth Mell:

#BookChallenge 7 days, 7 favorite books Challenged by ⁦@KonstanzeMarx 2/7 Ein unterschätztes Buch. Die Charaktere sind einfach großartig! I invite @CerstinMahlow pic.twitter.com/tdT71bgqE0

— Ruth M. Mell (@Ninchen2) 6. November 2018

And I posted 9 books, you can find all of my tweets via Twitter Search.

Wait, why 9? Because I’ve read so many books that are important for me, I didn’t manage to reduce their number to 7 in the end.

I’d like to give some explanations on the books I posted — and on the books I finally didn’t post. I’ll explain them in a different order than I originally posted them, though.

I’ve always loved reading, and as a kid I always had a book with me. When you just start reading, blackletter is quite difficult. So my grandmother read these old children’s books with me: we were both sitting in a really wide armchair, looking at the book, and she was reading aloud. The armchair was placed near the heating and we probably also had some snacks and cocoa or coffee. When we went on vacation, it was a hard fight every time about how many and which books I could take with me — we were traveling by train and somebody had to carry those books in the end. So, of course I wanted to include at least one of the books from these days. I love everything by Benno Pludra (“Bootsmann auf der Scholle,” “Heiner und seine Hähnchen,” etc.), the children’s books by Christoph Hein (e.g., “Das Wildpferd unterm Kachelofen”), Alfred Wellm (e.g., “Das Pferdemädchen”) and Fred Rodrian (e.g., “Das Wolkenschaf,” “Schwalbenchristine”) and so on. Later I read all books about American Indians by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich (all the volumes of “Die Söhne der Großen Bärin” and “Das Blut des Adlers”) — some of them I received as gifts, some of them my grandfathers had bought for themselves — and of course all books by Karl May one could buy (which was a bit of an issue in the GDR: partly because of the dispute about publication rights and partly because of the low number of books printed in the GDR). But finally, I decided to post “Geschichten aus der Murkelei” by Hans Fallada, with illustrations by Conrad ‘Conny’ Neubauer. Printed in 1960, it’s a book my father got when he was a kid.

It’s a collection of short stories Fallada first told his kids and then later wrote down. The stories contain all kinds of nonsense: there are days turned upside down, caps that make you invisible, and my favorite story “Mäuseken Wackelohr.” This is the story of a little mouse with an ear that’s a bit jagged, and who finally succeeds in getting into the house across the street despite the cat, and with the help of ants (who do everything for candies) and doves.

I also love the radio play from 1980 with all the great actors of the time!

An author I really like is Neal Stephenson. I chose “Reamde,” which is not his latest book but the one I read most recently:

The two books published after “Reamde” are still waiting for me on the “To Read” shelf. When I first discovered Stephenson, I read the novels in their German translations. Starting with the Baroque Cycle, I’ve been reading his books in their original English versions. Maybe I should get the first ones in English, too, as I really like his style. I like him as a writer since he writes (or at least used to write) using Emacs, and I admire how he manages to create futuristic or historical places and scenarios that are totally reasonable and plausible. He also wrote about more technical stuff like “In the Beginning was the Command Line” or “Mother Earth Mother Board.”

The ability to write about futuristic sceneries with a scientific touch — there is no magic, it’s all very plausible, and can be explained by scientific reasoning — is even more prominent in the novels and stories by Stanisław Lem. I think I have all of his books that have been translated into German.

The book I chose was “Gast im Weltraum” (“The Magellanic Cloud,” original Polish title: “Obłok Magellana”):

It’s from the 1950s and this copy was one of my grandfather’s books. I don’t remember when I first read it — my grandfather died when I turned 7 — but I inherited it from him, and so he somehow introduced me to science fiction and cybernetics (OK, that’s stretching it a bit, especially since he was a musician). I recently discovered that the version published at the time had been censored and that the original version was only published in the 1990s — unfortunately it seems that there’s no English or German translation of this version.

Lem published essays and stories covering neural networks, nanotechnology, the Internet, artificial intelligence, etc., long before these things existed, and he predicted and explained everything in a way that lets you read his publications from the 1960s and 1970s just like very recent books on contemporary topics. He continued writing even as an old man, and the essays from the volume “Die Megabit-Bombe” (“The Megabit Bomb,” original: “Bomba megabitowa”) from 1999 discuss technical, and even more importantly, ethical issues that are highly relevant today! So I included this book, too, as a sidekick.

When you discuss the effects and impacts of the digital transformation in the humanities, in science, in politics and society, you should read those essays! It seems that they have been only translated into German and Russian, though.

I discovered Bret Easton Ellis when I was 17 or so. I read the German translation of his book “American Psycho.”

At that time, the book was on the index in Germany (which meant that it was not allowed to be advertised and not to be sold to customers younger than 18), but IIRC my father had received a review copy from a newspaper before the book was put on the index. Both of us liked the book very much — both of us didn’t like my German teacher at school. When one could write a somewhat longer essay to substitute for one of the written exams I decided to write about the “image of the American society in the early 1990s as described in contemporary novels.” I used “American Psycho” and “Leviathan” by Paul Auster. And I included extensive samples from “American Psycho,” so my teacher was forced to read it — and I knew she didn’t like splatter movies and horror scenes. It was a bit mean, I guess. However, this book is also the first novel I read in English — I wanted to read the original version. It was impossible to get in Germany, so I asked one of my schoolmates — the son of the pastor — who was about to go to the US for a summer camp whether he could buy the book for me. And he did; he never commented on it, though :)

I liked Genesis and Phil Collins already before I read the book, but based on Ellis’s extensive reviews, I bought specific albums, first on cassette and later on CD. Much, much later I discovered Ellis’s account on Twitter and followed him. And in summer 2013, he posted a recommendation for a book I only bought because of his recommendation, and I didn’t regret it: “Stoner” by John Williams.

I’ve read “Franziska Linkerhand” by Brigitte Reimann in the new unabridged edition from 1998 with an extensive afterword by Withold Bonner. There was a first edition in 1974 (one year after Reimann had died at the age of 39) which had been censored and edited a lot — and as Brigitte Reimann wrote in her diaries, she herself had censored and changed a lot during writing after “helpful and friendly” exchanges with lectors and other writers. This new edition ends with the unfinished pages and sentences by Reimann: there is no end of the novel. Maybe it’s true that, from a literary point of view, Reimann would have had to revise the whole book to find a proper ending anyway; it’s true that the story somehow gets stuck in the end.

Franziska Linkerhand is a young architect trying to find her way in the 60s in the GDR, in the building sites of one of those cities that were thrown up to house mineworkers. I recommend reading the novel together with Reimann’s diaries “Ich bedaure nichts” (1955 to 1963) and “Alles schmeckt nach Abschied” (1964 to 1970), so you can understand why Franziska acts as she does. And there is also a nice edition of letters she exchanged with Hermann Henselmann (“Mit Respekt und Vergnügen”, published 2001), one of the most influential architects of the GDR (he’s the architect of the Stalinallee boulevard in Berlin, for example), you should read to understand the construction-related political scenes. And in the letters with Christa Wolf from 1964 to 1973 (“Sei gegrüßt und lebe”, published 1993), you can follow how Reimann struggled with writing and finding ways for her protagonist. I read the book again this summer while commuting and I always forgot the time and completely immersed in the book and in the time. I didn’t live during the time Reimann describes, but the cities and streets were close to reality even 20 years later. And also the arguments of politicians and superiors were still the same, as was the killer argument: you surely are in favor of peace (or even world peace!), aren’t you?

“Jahrestage” by Uwe Johnson I read during my last school year. It took some time and I showed up with one of those black books wherever I went, I even read when waiting at the traffic lights. I had read other novels by Johnson before, I liked his style and I could understand the Low German and the Russian snippets he used. And of course I liked and I still like the Baltic Sea, Mecklenburg, and those small towns and villages Johnson describes. He writes in a way the people in the North speak and react: very reduced, a bit uncommunicative.

“100 Eier des Kolumbus” by Dr. Gerhard Niese, printed in 1962, is one of my mother’s children’s books.

It contains magic tricks, mathematical, physical, and chemical experiments or problems, nicely illustrated by Heinz-Karl Bogdanski. I actually used it when working on problems in the math club as the explanations were much better than the ones given by my teachers or in the school books.

“Maus” by Art Spiegelman was the first comic I read. I had never been into comics as a kid, no Digedags, no Abrafaxe, let alone Asterix or Spirou. “Maus“ had been on the index in Germany as well — just because there are swastikas all over, but how would you tell/draw the story of the Holocaust without showing Nazi symbols?

Spiegelman tells about talking with his father — a survivor of the Holocaust — about his experiences and he tries to understand what had happened and why his father is now the way he is. It is very impressive and very depressing. Much later I bought the book where Spiegelman documents the making of “Maus,” also as a comic.

And then there are other books and authors I find important and that I considered — but which eventually didn’t make it into the final nine.

When it comes to children’s books, I also always liked “Lustige Geschichten” (original Russian title: “Забавные истории”) by Wladimir Sutejew.

Especially as he was able (or at least that’s what he told his readers) to draw and write at the same time!

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in an old edition, printed in 1954. Originally my mother received it as a gift when she was a kid.

My grandfather used to do fretwork. He did “Rotkäppchen” (“Little Red Riding Hood“) for me and he used the illustration in the book as a master. It used to hang in my bedroom.

The first North American author I discovered was John Irving in the early 1990s, and the first novel I read was “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (in the German translation published as “Owen Meany”). But as this book isn’t mine but my father’s I couldn’t take a picture of the cover for the challenge.

Over the years, I’ve read more of Irving’s novels, and as for Ellis and Stephenson, I regularly check whether he’s published something new and then go and get it. So there are also some novels of his waiting on my “To Read” shelf.

And then all the great books by Walter Moers!

I also regularly check for new books by him. His novels are full of fantastic adventures, crazy twists, and creative names and descriptions. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups. And the books are also nicely done when it comes to typography and layout.

An author I only recently discovered is Stefan Heym. I discovered him by chance while diving into literature on architects and architecture in the GDR, and Hermann Henselmann in particular. Heym wrote “The Architects” in the 1960s, and it discusses many of the same things as the movie “Spur der Steine” and Brigitte Reimann’s novel “Franziska Linkerhand,” which were also censored and/or banned in the GDR, so it does not come as a surprise that the German translation was only published in 2000, shortly before he died (the English original was published in 2005).

This got me interested and I began reading more, Heym’s autobiography “Nachruf” and more of his novels. And I reread “Franziska Linkerhand.”

As I strolled by my bookshelf, I discovered many other books I think I should read again. So, thanks for this challenge that got me thinking about my books!

Supervision families

When you do your PhD, you‘re not completely on your own, you have a supervisor. And then maybe a PhD committee and a second and a third reader and so on. However, during the process of developing your research question, diving into literature and possible approaches, making discoveries, and finding a place for your future academic persona, you primarily interact with your PhD supervisor. He or she should act both as a coach and as a mentor to support you on your academic adventures.

Interestingly, in German speaking academia, your supervisor is still rather called „Doktorvater“ (doctoral father) or „Doktormutter“ (doctoral mother). Which implies a more family-like relationship. And which also is in line with the traditional notion of not studying somewhere at a certain university, but to study with someone, i.e., be the (graduate) student of a specific professor. And thus become a member of a specific „school.“ In the old days, the members of an academic family stood together, supported one another, helped with getting promoted, etc. Which is what you would actually also expect from a mentor. So the role somehow fits.

By the way, how are the PhD students called, I‘m not aware of a label as „Doktorkind“ (doctoral child). You are the „Doktorand“ (male) or „Doktorandin“ (female) (doctoral student) of someone. However, this is derived from the present participle of the verb meaning „to do a PhD.“ Which means, after the defense of the thesis, the label doesn‘t fit any longer. You might be a „former PhD student“ of someone, but this person doesn‘t turn into your „former PhD supervisor“ or your „former Doktormutter.“ He or she keeps the label and thus probably also the role, even after dozens of years.

Surprisingly with this family notion, at least on the side of PhD students expectation grows that these ties will last for longer — you cannot get rid of fatherly or motherly duties — and that mentoring or coaching support also will last for longer. So they tend to get disappointed when mentoring-like support stops, no information on (future) projects or even jobs are passed on, no reference letters are written any longer, and so on. Of course, one could argue that during your PhD you should also find your own way, stand on your own feet, and leave your supervision family to start your own. And of course family relationships aren‘t always positive, there is abusive behavior which is hard to report and will stay within the family. And as long as everything looks great from the outside, nobody will believe that the inside isn‘t as bright as current incidents at the ETH show.

Another aspect seems to be gender, actually. And maybe more on the side of the supervisor. Female supervisors (so the „Doktormütter“) seem to be more protective and more supportive, at least they report such actions on social media and they even use selfdescriptions as „mama bear advisor“ and the like. And from what I see (which is obviously a very small snapshot), more female supervisors state how proud they are when their current or former PhD students report success stories (an award, a talk at a prestigious venue, a good job, another grant, etc.). Male supervisors also show success of their PhD students, but with much less emotion, they rather mention this as a success story of their lab/institute/project. Which fits stereotypes of motherly and fatherly support within families, so the German terms actually are apropriate, don‘t you think?

Back where I started

So, we have 2018 and I'm an e-learning specialist at a university of applied sciences in Switzerland.

Last week I found my old business cards when I was looking for something else in my desk drawers. And I realized that exactly 10 years ago, I also had business cards as e-learning consultant of a university of applied sciences in Switzerland — in 2008, I was at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (HSA FHNW), today I'm with the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), at the Competence Center for Higher Ed Didactics and E-Learning. And the fun thing is: exactly 10 years after, I now have a 50% permanent position as I had then, I do similar things — although I'm not on my own as I was 10 years ago but a member of a wonderful team — , and even my salary is the same (yes, I also found old pay slips when looking for documents needed for the 2017 tax declarations).

So, what did I do in between — and was it worth it when I end up almost where I started? Let's look at the business card circle (the current card is at the top, the starting card is the one right to it and the circle goes clockwise).

The e-learning job at HSA FHNW wasn't my first one, but the first outside the University of Zurich (and I even had an e-learning job there from 2004 to 2008). After that I held various positions and did various things as senior researcher at the University of Basel, as acting professor at the University of Konstanz (I blogged about that experience and most of the posts are still quite relevant, I guess), as postdoc and scientific coordinator at the University of Stuttgart, as scientific coordinator and later as senior researcher at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, as guest professor again at the University of Stuttgart, and as researcher at the University of Bern. All of those activities where related to my other live as computational linguist and writing researcher — I used e-learning activities and tools for my teaching, but I wasn't active in that area during that time.

I had left the e-learning business in 2010 for a chance to pursue my scientific career and to become a professor one day. Turns out, I didn't succeed.

Yes, I published a lot, yes I finished and defended my thesis (so at least I have a different academic title on my current business card), yes I grew an international network, yes I founded two workshop series (both of them have fallen asleep because of decreasing interest), yes I edited various proceedings (oh, and yes I know a lot about publishing and “added values” by publishers now and I do have an expletive explicit opinion about those and their work flows), yes I was what's called “an active member of the scientific community” (I founded and still run a doctoral consortium, I'm co-leader of a SIG, I was a newsletter editor), yes I was active in various scientific areas (computational morphology, writing research, document engineering, corpus linguistics), yes I taught a lot (as acting and as guest professor I did the usual German 9 hours per week (so 3 to 4 courses per term) teaching load and I taught one course per term at the other places), yes I have been acting professor, yes I reviewed for various prestigious conferences and journals — all those activities you find listed as recommended or even necessary on your way towards professorship. But I'm still not a professor.

However, I grew older.

And last year when I got the chance to “go back to e-learning” I decided to no longer actively pursue the scientific career road — my chances will not increase. I will not apply for grants any longer, I will reduce reviewing activities, I might continue publishing but will carefully chose where and how (considering issues of access and submission formats). I hopefully will continue teaching and I hopefully will get chances to do small scale research at the intersection of document engineering, linguistics, and writing research. I will not apply to scientific jobs — my list of rejected or even unanswered applications is long enough now. I'm not sure whether all of this equals “I'm leaving academia”, but time will tell.

So the question remains: was it worth it? I guess so. I got chances to do research, I taught a lot (and I didn't know that I actually enjoy teaching before!), I could present my research at various places I wouldn't have visited otherwise, and last but not least I got to know a lot of people with similar interests, some of whom I call friends today.

COST ELN STSM on multi-word production (3): A first look at the data

For keystroke-logging the writing sessions in our experiment, we use Inputlog. It's developed at the University of Antwerp and free to use for everybody. On the Inputlog website you also find information on how to use it and on how it has been used in other studies.

In the record tab, you enter the information on the participant and the writing session and press "Record". MS Word opens automatically with a fresh new document. The Inputlog window goes to the background and doesn't disturb your writing. When you finish your writing, you bring the Inputlog window back to the front, press the "Stop recording" button and you're done. Inputlog switches to the Analyze tab and lets you select analyzing scripts which you can also modify.

Of course, you could run your own scripts on the recorded file. All keystrokes are stored in an idfx file, which is an XML file containing the participants information as meta data and all information on keys pressed and mouse movements as events. You could load it into an XML Database like BaseX and run XQuery scripts.

So, everything looks as ready for processing. But it's better to look more closely at your data first. The main issue when dealing with non-English language data is always encoding. The snippet shown above actually has Greek letters and it is encoded in UTF-8 (Emacs makes this information explicit at the bottom). Students wrote texts in Greek, all final texts also show Greek letters. So everything should be fine, shouldn't it?

Actually, the information in the idfx file is not taken from MS Word, but directly from the keyboard. So no matter what your setting in MS Word is, the setting for the keyboard in Windows is relevant. And we discovered that for some sessions, this was set to English and not to Greek. Which means that the information in the idfx file are actually ASCII keys pressed -- because of the setting in MS Word, this information is converted into the corresponding Greek characters and the characters in MS Word appear as Greek characters.

The question is: Does this affect the analysis? We could simply replace the English letter with the corresponding Greek letter. There are conversion tables available and even the keyboards are labeled accordingly, so this should be easy. But then, Greek has accented vowels which are not characters of its own, but are constructed similar as you would write them by hand: You put an accent on the vowel. Which means you press the key for the tonos (the key right to P (which would be the "ü" on a German keyboard and the ";" on a US-English keyboard)) and then the vowel. The result is a vowel with tonos, one character only although we pressed two keys. And that's how it is recorded when the keyboard is set to Greek.

However, if the keyboard is still set to English, Inputlog records that two keys have been pressed, the key for the tonos is not treated as a dead key. The following image shows two idfx files

In both cases, we produce the same character, the small letter eta with tonos: ή. In the right file (GR-03_0.idfx), the key for the tonos is pressed (VK_OEM_1) at position 375 as the 491st event. Then the key VK_H for the small eta is pressed as the 492nd event, but we are still at position 375. The tonos key is actually treated as dead key (there is no key value) and after pressing the eta key η, the value is "ή". But if we look at the left file (GR-11_0.idfx), we find the production of ή to be recorded differently: the key for the tonos is pressed as event 38 at position 19 and there actually is a value: ";". Then the key VK_H is pressed as event 39 at position 20 and the value is "h". So the tonos is not treated as a dead key, but as any other key with an actual value. In the idfx file, no accented value is visible, we cannot simply replace ASCII values with the corresponding UTF-8 characters. A more sophisticated recoding would be needed.

Let's see what this means for our analyses in a later post.

COST ELN STSM on multi-word production (2): Data collection

In order to explore how multi-word expressions are produced, we need somebody to write something. We decided to have students come to write short argumentative essays. In those texts, you would expect to find discourse expressions like "in my opinion", or "on the one hand -- on the other hand". This would give us freely produced MWE without explicitly triggering them.

Students come to the lab and first get some information about the experiment on paper. They sign a consensus form and fill in a small questionnaire. The questionnaire asks about their native language and other languages the speak/write, and about their writing (how many fingers do they use, do the look at the screen or at the keyboard, etc.). I also take observational notes and we will later see whether or not their self image is true. They get a topic to write about. First they can plan for 5 minutes and make notes on paper, after that they start writing for 30 to 35 minutes.

Students write a text about one of two topics: "Should students pay tuition for post-graduate studies in Greek Universities?" or " argue in favor or against having the options to be tested in all courses they take at each semester". The target audience are other students, so they write a letter to the editor of an imagined student news paper.

It's a small lab, so we can have four students at a time. However, they drop in from time to time and sometimes there are four, most often there is one writing while we start analyzing the incoming data. I will tell about this in the next post.

All four computers run Windows, but different versions. Ioannis installed Inputlog for keystroke-logging. You start the logging and MS Word is opening. You write as usual, Inputlog does not interfere with MS Word.

According to our plans, we will have around 60 writing sessions with Greek data in the end.

COST ELN STSM on multi-word production (1): The start

At the end of 2014, the COST Action IS1401 Strengthening Europeans' Capabilities by Establishing the European Literacy Network (ELN) started. We will explore how to help people (students, adults, novices and experts, and foreign language learners) to write and read better. You can read about he official statement, goals, and working groups on the COST ELN website.

One instrument in COST actions are STSM (short term scientific missions). Combining my interests in writing processes and multiword expressions (which I follow in the COST action PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions) Towards linguistic precision and computational efficiency in natural language processing, I applied for a research adventure with Ioannis Dimakos from the Department of Primary Education of the University of Patras. He heads the Laboratory of Cognitive Analysis of Learning, Language and Dyslexia. Under Constantin Porpodas this lab participated in the COST action A8 "Learning disorders as a a barrier to human development."

For this STSM we work on a multi-lingual study on multi-word expression (MWE) production. A great part of natural language (either spoken or written) consists of MWE (i.e., sequences of words with special meaning and/or syntactic properties). Those units have to be learned, the use and meaning cannot be deduced from a simple combination of the words involved. MWEs are rather fixed units and they are typically stored as complete units in dictionaries. It has been shown widely that knowledge of such units plays a key role in reading and listening. However, there is very little research on the production of multi-word expressions. In a pilot study, I could show that MWEs of various kinds (idiomatic phrases, terminology, grammatical constructions, etc.) are produced with significantly shorter pauses between the words involved than when producing any other sequence of words. This study was based on texts produced by German university students who wrote short argumentative essays, the writing was recorded using Inputlog. It has been shown in great detail that use, structure, and semantics of MWEs are similar across European languages and European cultures. In this STSM we will investigate whether this holds also for the production of MWEs in German and Greek.

So, in the second week of April 2016, I travelled to Patras, found a really nice hotel by the sea with a great view, and we started our small project.

Professor for one year (week 48): Who does profit from MOOCs?

Actually, this blog post was scheduled for the first week of March. However, the topic is still relevant even a few weeks later. Just pretend it's early March 2014 (i.e., cold and rainy) while reading.

During our visit of US higher ed institutions last year, we met James P. Honan from Harvard's Grad School of Education. We discussed various things and also touched e-learning and MOOCs. Honan told us about his experiences as a teacher and consumer of e-learning courses and contents and then some musing started about the underlying principles of MOOCs. I will briefly follow up here.

From a didactically point of view, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are old wine in new skins. I wrote about this part in an earlier post. E-Learning courses hosted on servers of universities started around 2000, and courses supported by current technology are as old as TV. The only new aspect is the "massiveness". At a university, e-learning courses are offered to the students of a particular subject at a certain point of their studies enrolled at that specific university. So there might be several hundreds of students using the materials of a course.

Going "massive" and "open", those courses skip restrictions -- everybody can take part -- but no change in didactics might be involved. Allowing more than only a few hundred users to access the material may involve changes in server architecture, maybe clustering, but not necessarily in the general technology used for user interaction and the like.

However, someone has to run those servers and someone should be paid for maintenance. The first MOOCs were developed from scratch, not just scaled e-learning courses (there will be another post on this aspect, stay tuned) -- maybe the content providers would need some payment, too. But declaring those courses as "open" doesn't only mean everybody may join, but also means nobody should pay anything for taking part. So where should the money come from to pay development and maintenance?

Honan gave a hint when he told about the fear of teaching staff at universities: Attending a course may have two main reasons. People just are curious about a certain topic (a), or people have to acquire certain knowledge (due to job demands or the like) and that involves getting a certificate (b). For a certificate, attendees would have to do some sort of exam. And this exam would have to be assessed and graded by someone. And guess who is qualified for assessing and grading student work? Right, teaching staff.

So while in the early years of e-learning instructors feared to be replaced by machines, the advent of MOOCs makes instructors fear to be used for grading only. And in the end, to be replaced by cheap grading staff -- why should you need highly qualified academics when you can have people trained to grade certain exams only. MOOCs would not result in replacing humans, but in downgrading educators.

At the one hand, this nightmare might not become true to the extend instructors might expect -- similar to the fear of teachers being replaced be educational TV shows or e-learning courses --, but on the other hand, that's probably part of the business model of companies like Coursera, edX, or Udacity. Participation in MOOCs might be free, but to get a certificate you would have to pay -- part of this money might get down to the graders, but most of it will go to the company owners. Those certificates don't have to cost a fortune. Look at prices for apps -- as long as the audience is big enough, small fees are fine.

Of course, with "certificate" a mean any piece of paper stating that you passed the exam of this course. As soon as participants actively demand official certificates of the hosting institutions, e.g., from Stanford or the MIT, another question arises: How much is such a certificate worth? As an on-campus student, you would have to pay a lot of money -- if you would ever get accepted in the first place. However, nobody would pay several thousand dollars for an on-line course offered or developed by Stanford or MIT staff.

So maybe several hundred dollars? But wouldn't that be a hard competition for those Ivy League Universities? If I could get a prestigious certificate without moving to Stanford and without enormous debts, why should I even send an application to Stanford? But here we're already touching another topic.