Editor’s Note: Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs, have emerged as a great hope for education reform in the eyes of many, perhaps especially among conservatives, traditionalists, and classical liberals fed up with the state of the academy and the intransigence of the faculty after years of cogent and conscientious opposition to the decline in standards. Academic Questionshas already presented an extensive argument against online learning by Donald Phillip Verene in our Fall 2013 issue (“Does Online Education Rest on a Mistake?”), but we know that the jury is still out—and regardless of the verdict a certain measure of online learning is here to stay. One finds conscientious thinkers on both sides of the issue, and we present a few of them here. According to Mohammed Gad-el-Hak, “Humans are social beings and learning is a social process. Both require
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