text: On November 29, 1872, after the popular vote was counted, but before the Electoral College cast its votes, Greeley died. As a result, electors previously committed to Greeley voted for four candidates for president and eight candidates for vice president. The election of 1872 also remains the only instance in U.S. history in which a major presidential candidate died during the election process. This election set the record for the longest Republican popular vote win streak in American history, four elections, a record that would be matched in 1908.


title: 1872 United States presidential election

text: At the convention the Republicans nominated President Ulysses S. Grant for re-election, but nominated Senator Henry Wilson from Massachusetts for vice president instead of the incumbent Schuyler Colfax, although both were implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal which erupted two months after the Republican convention. Others, who had grown weary of the corruption of the Grant administration, bolted to form the Liberal Republican Party.


text: In the hope of defeating Grant, the Democratic Party endorsed the nominees of the Liberal Republican Party.


text: An influential group of dissident Republicans split from the party to form the Liberal Republican Party in 1870. At the party's only national convention, held in Cincinnati in 1872, "New York Tribune" editor and former representative Horace Greeley was nominated for president on the sixth ballot, defeating Charles Francis Adams. Missouri Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown was nominated for vice president on the second ballot.


text: The Convention met in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 9–10. Because of its strong desire to defeat Ulysses S. Grant, the Democratic Party also nominated the Liberal Republicans' Greeley/Brown ticket and adopted their platform. Greeley received 686 of the 732 delegate votes cast, while Brown received 713. Accepting the Liberal platform meant the Democrats had accepted the New Departure strategy, which rejected the anti-Reconstruction platform of 1868. They realized that to win the election they had to look forward, and not try to re-fight the Civil War. They also realized that they would only split the anti-Grant vote if they nominated a candidate other than Greeley. However, Greeley's long reputation as the most aggressive antagonist of the Democratic Party, its principles, its leadership, and its activists, cooled Democrats' enthusiasm for the presidential nominee.


text: Some Democrats were worried that backing Greeley would effectively bring the party to extinction, much like how the moribund Whig Party had been doomed by endorsing the Know Nothing candidacy of Millard Fillmore in 1856, though others felt that the Democrats were in a much stronger position on a regional level than the Whigs had been at the time of their demise, and predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that the Liberal Republicans would not be viable in the long-term due to their lack of distinctive positions compared to the main Republican Party. A sizable minority led by James A. Bayard sought to act independently of the Liberal Republican ticket, but the bulk of the party agreed to endorse Greeley's candidacy. The convention, which lasted only six hours stretched over two days, is the shortest major political party convention in history.


text: The Liberal Republican Party fused with the Democratic Party in all states except for Louisiana and Texas. In states where Republicans were stronger, the Liberal Republicans fielded a majority of the joint slate of candidates for lower offices; while in states where Democrats were stronger, the Democrats fielded the most candidates. In many states, such as Ohio, each party nominated half of a joint slate of candidates. Even initially reluctant Democratic leaders like Thomas F. Bayard came to support Greeley.


text: The Labor Reform Party had only been organized in 1870 at the National Labor Union Convention, which organized the Labor Reform Party in anticipation of its participation in the 1872 presidential election. In the lead-up to the 1872 presidential election, state-level affiliates of the party formed and saw limited success. One of its major victories was forming a majority coalition with the Democratic Party in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1871 in which William Gove, one of its members, was elected Speaker of the House.


text: The party's first National Convention meeting was held in Columbus, Ohio, on February 22, 1872. Initially, there was a fair amount of discussion as to whether the party should actually nominate anyone for the presidency at that time, or if they should wait at least for the Liberal Republicans to nominate their own ticket first. Every motion to that effect lost, and a number of ballots were taken that resulted in the nomination of David Davis for president, who was the frontrunner for the Liberal Republican presidential nomination at that time. Joel Parker, the Governor of New Jersey, was nominated for vice president.


text: While Davis did not decline the presidential nomination of the Labor Reform party, he decided to hinge his campaign in large part on the success of attaining the Liberal Republican presidential nomination, so that he might at least have their resources behind him. After their convention, in which he failed to attain their presidential nomination, Davis telegraphed the Labor Reform party and informed them of his intention to withdraw from the presidential contest entirely. Joel Parker soon followed suit.


text: A second convention was called on August 22 in Philadelphia, where it was decided, rather than making the same mistake again, that the party would cooperate with the new Straight-Out Democratic Party that had recently formed. After the election, the various state affiliates grew less and less active, and by the following year, the party ceased to exist. Labor Reform party activity continued to 1878, when the Greenback and Labor Reform parties, with other organizations, formed a National Party.


text: Unwilling to support the Democratic party ticket (Greeley/Brown), a group of mostly Southern Democrats held what they called a Straight-Out Democratic Party convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on August 11, 1872. They nominated as presidential candidate Charles O'Conor, who declined their nomination by telegram; for vice president they nominated John Quincy Adams II. Without time to choose a substitute, the party ran the two candidates anyway. They received 0.36% of the popular votes, and no Electoral College votes.


text: Victoria Woodhull is recognized as the first woman to run for president. She was nominated for president by the small Equal Rights Party. Frederick Douglass was nominated for vice president, although he did not attend the convention, acknowledge his nomination, or take an active role in the campaign.


text: Grant's administration and his Radical Republican supporters had been widely accused of corruption, and the Liberal Republicans demanded civil service reform and an end to the Reconstruction process, including withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Both Liberal Republicans and Democrats were disappointed in their candidate Greeley. As wits asked, "Why turn out a knave just to replace him with a fool?" A poor campaigner with little political experience, Greeley's career as a newspaper editor gave his opponents a long history of eccentric public positions to attack. With memories of his victories in the Civil War to run on, Grant was unassailable. Grant also had a large campaign budget to work with. One historian was quoted saying, "Never before was a candidate placed under such great obligation to men of wealth as was Grant." A large portion of Grant's campaign funds came from entrepreneurs, including Jay Cooke, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Alexander Turney Stewart, Henry Hilton, and John Astor.


text: This was the first election after the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. As a result, protests for women's suffrage became more prevalent. The National Woman's Suffrage Association held its annual convention in New York City on May 9, 1872. Some of the delegates supported Victoria Woodhull, who had spent the year since the previous NWSA annual meeting touring the New York City environs and giving speeches on why women should be allowed to vote. The delegates selected Victoria Woodhull to run for president, and named Frederick Douglass for vice- president. He did not attend the convention and never acknowledged the nomination, though he would serve as a presidential elector in the United States Electoral College for the State of New York. Woodhull gave a series of speeches around New York City during the campaign. Her finances were very thin, and when she borrowed money from supporters, she often was unable to repay them. On the day before the election, Woodhull was arrested for "publishing an obscene newspaper" and so was unable to cast a vote for herself. Woodhull was ineligible to be president on Inauguration Day, not because she was a woman (the Constitution and the law were silent on the issue), but because she would not reach the constitutionally prescribed minimum age of 35 until September 23, 1873; historians have debated whether to consider her activities a true election campaign. Woodhull and Douglass are not listed in "Election results" below, as the ticket received a negligible percentage of the popular vote and no electoral votes. In addition, several suffragists would attempt to vote in the election. Susan B. Anthony was arrested when she tried to vote and was fined $100 in a widely publicized trial.


text: Grant also won the electoral college with 286 electoral votes; while Greeley won 66 electoral votes, he died on November 29, 1872, twenty-four days after the election and before any of his pledged electors (from Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Maryland) could cast their votes. Subsequently, 63 of Greeley's electors cast their votes for other Democrats: 18 of them cast their presidential votes for Greeley's running mate, Benjamin Gratz Brown, and 45 cast their presidential votes for three non-candidates.


text: Of the 2,171 counties making returns, Grant won in 1,335 while Greeley carried 833. Three counties were split evenly between Grant and Greeley.


text: During the joint session of Congress for the counting of the electoral vote on February 12, 1873, five states had objections that were raised regarding their results. However, unlike the objections which would be made in 1877, these did not affect the outcome of the election.


text: This election was the last in which Arkansas voted for a Republican until 1972, and the last in which it voted against the Democrats until 1968. Alabama and Mississippi would not be carried by a Republican again until 1964, and they would not vote against the Democrats until 1948. North Carolina and Virginia would not vote Republican again until 1928. West Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey would not vote Republican again until 1896.


text: Source (popular vote): Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections Retrieved on November 3, 2022


text: Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, "Presidential ballots, 1836–1892" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.


text: Red font color denotes states won by Republican Ulysses S. Grant; pink denotes those won by Democrat/Liberal Republican Horace Greeley.


text: "The used sources had insufficient data to determine the pairings of 4 electoral votes in Missouri; therefore, the possible tickets are listed with the minimum and maximum possible number of electoral votes each."


text: Though the national party organization disappeared after 1872, several Liberal Republican members continued to serve in Congress after the 1872 elections. Most Liberal Republican Congressmen eventually joined the Democratic Party. Outside of the South, some Liberal Republicans sought the creation of a new party opposed to Republicans, but Democrats were unwilling to abandon their old party affiliation and even relatively successful efforts like Wisconsin's Reform Party collapsed. Even the strong Missouri Liberal Republican Party collapsed as the Democrats re-established themselves as the major opposition party to the Republicans. In the following years, former Liberal Republicans became members in good standing of both major parties.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh is the eighth-most populated country in the world with almost 2.2% of the world's population. As per the 2022 Census of Bangladesh, the country's population is 165,158,616.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh (previously East Pakistan between 1947 and 1971 and East Bengal before 1947) is largely ethnically homogeneous, and its name derives from the Bengali ethno-linguistic group which comprises 98% of the population. The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Sylhet, Mymensingh, Barisal and North Bengal regions are home to diverse tribal peoples. There are many dialects of Bengali spoken throughout the region. The dialect spoken by those in Chittagong and Sylhet are particularly distinctive. About (91.04%) of Bangladeshis are Muslims, followed by Hindus (largest-minority) at (7.95%), Buddhists (0.61%) and Christians (0.30%) and others (0.12%) as per 2022 census.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh has one of the highest population densities in the world. The total fertility rate (TFR) has been reduced by more than two thirds since Independence. The current TFR in Bangladesh is 2.0, globally considered to be a benchmark for replacement level fertility.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: At this TFR, and without migration, Bangladesh's population is expected to soon reach a stage where it neither grows nor shrinks, once the top of its age pyramid fills in.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: The 2020 total population was 168,827,626 which makes Bangladesh the eighth-most populous country in the world.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: According to the OECD/World Bank population in Bangladesh increased from 1990 to 2008 with 44 million and 38% growth in population compared to 34% growth in India and 54% growth in Pakistan. The annual population growth 2007–2008 was 1.4% compared to India 1.35%, Pakistan 2.2%, Dem. Rep. of Congo 2.9%, Tanzania 2.9%, Syria 3.5% or Yemen 4.0%. According to the OECD/World Bank population statistics between 1990 and 2008 the world population growth was 27% and 1,423 million persons.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh had high rates of population growth in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then however it has seen significant reduction in its total fertility rate. Over a period of three decades it dropped from almost 7 to 0.74 in 2005–2018.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: The sprawling mega-city of Dhaka has a huge population, but the majority of the people nonetheless still live in villages in rural areas.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Based on United Nations Data 2020 figures for population (164,689,383) and land area (130,170 km), Bangladesh has the highest population density among large countries, 1265 persons per square kilometer, and 10th overall, when small countries and city-states are included.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: The Population Department of the United Nations prepared the following estimates. Population estimates account for under numeration in population censuses.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: The vast majority (about 98%) of Bangladeshis are of the Bengali ethno-linguistic group. This group also spans the neighboring Indian province of West Bengal. Minority ethnic groups include Meitei, Tripuri, Marma, Tanchangya, Barua, Khasi, Santhals, Chakma, Rakhine people, Garo, Biharis, Oraons, Mundas, Monipuri.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Biharis are Urdu-speaking, non-Bengalis who emigrated from the state of Bihar and other parts of northern India during the 1947 partition. They are concentrated in the Dhaka and Rangpur areas and number some 300,000. In the 1971 independence war many of them sided with Pakistan, as they stood to lose their positions in the upper levels of society. Hundreds of thousands went to Pakistan and those that remained were interned in refugee camps. Their population declined from about 1 million in 1971 to 600,000 in the late 1980s. Refugees International has called them a "neglected and stateless" people as they are denied citizenship by the governments of Bangladesh and Pakistan. As nearly 40 years has passed, two generations of Biharis have been born in these camps. Biharis were granted Bangladeshi citizenship and voting rights in 2008.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh's tribal population was enumerated at 897,828 in the 1981 census. These tribes are concentrated in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and around Mymensingh, Sylhet, and Rajshahi. They are of Sino-Tibetan descent and differ markedly in their social customs, religion, language and level of development. They speak Tibeto-Burman languages and most are Buddhist or Hindu. The four largest tribes are Chakmas, Marmas, Tipperas, Tanchangya, and Mros. Smaller groups include the Santals in Rajshahi and Dinajpur, and Khasis, Garos, and Khajons in Mymensingh and Sylhet regions.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: There are small communities of Meitei people in the Sylhet district, which is close to the Meitei homeland across the border in Manipur, India.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: There is a large population of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar near the border in the southeast. There are 28,000 living in two UN refugee camps in Cox's Bazar as well as some 200,000 "unregistered people of concern" living outside of the camps. The refugee crisis originated in the early 1990s when the first wave numbering some 250,000 of the predominantly Muslim ethnic group fled persecution from their home in Rakhaine—Myanmar's westernmost state. Bangladesh seeks to repatriate the refugees back to Myanmar. Since 2017, there are approximately 1.1 million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh has the world's highest frequency of the M form of mitochondrial DNA. This genetic variant spans many continents, and is the single most common mtDNA haplogroup in Asia. In Bangladesh it represents about 83% of maternal lineages.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: Bangladesh has a literacy rate of 74.70 percent as of 2019. 76.67 percent for males and 71.95 percent for females.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: According to the United Nations, there were 1,500,921 international migrants in Bangladesh in 2017. Estimation shows that over 1 million Rohingya Muslim refugees live in Bangladesh have arrived during the ongoing Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. On 28 September 2018, at the 73rd United Nations General Assembly, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said there are 1.1-1.3 million Rohingya refugees now in Bangladesh.


title: Demographics of Bangladesh

text: The United Nations has estimated the Bangladesh diaspora as 4,499,919 people with the greatest migration to the following countries:


title: Massive open online course

text: A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive courses with user forums or social media discussions to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs), as well as immediate feedback to quick quizzes and assignments. MOOCs are a widely researched development in distance education, first introduced in 2008, that emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012, a year called the "Year of the MOOC".


title: Massive open online course

text: Early MOOCs (cMOOCs: Connectivist MOOCs) often emphasized open-access features, such as open licensing of content, structure and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources. Some later MOOCs (xMOOCs: extended MOOCs) use closed licenses for their course materials while maintaining free access for students.


title: Massive open online course

text: Before the Digital Age, distance learning appeared in the form of correspondence courses in the 1890s–1920s and later radio and television broadcast of courses and early forms of e-learning. Typically fewer than five percent of the students would complete a course. For example the Stanford Honors Cooperative Program, established in 1954, eventually offered video classes on-site at companies, at night, leading to a fully accredited Master's degree. This program was controversial because the companies paid double the normal tuition paid by full-time students. The 2000s saw changes in online, or e-learning and distance education, with increasing online presence, open learning opportunities, and the development of MOOCs. By 2010 audiences for the most popular college courses such as "Justice" with Michael J. Sandel and "Human Anatomy" with Marian Diamond were reaching millions.


title: Massive open online course

text: The first MOOCs emerged from the open educational resources (OER) movement, which was sparked by MIT OpenCourseWare project. The OER movement was motivated from work by researchers who pointed out that class size and learning outcomes had no established connection. Here, Daniel Barwick's work is the most often-cited example.


title: Massive open online course

text: Within the OER movement, the Wikiversity was founded in 2006 and the first open course on the platform was organised in 2007. Ten-week course with more than 70 students was used to test the idea of making Wikiversity an open and free platform for education in the tradition of Scandinavian free adult education, Folk High School and the free school movement. The term "MOOC" was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island in response to a course called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" (also known as "CCK08"). CCK08, which was led by George Siemens of Athabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council, consisted of 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba, as well as over 2200 online students from the general public who paid nothing. All course content was available through RSS feeds, and online students could participate through collaborative tools, including blog posts, threaded discussions in Moodle, and Second Life meetings. Stephen Downes considers these so-called cMOOCs to be more "creative and dynamic" than the current xMOOCs, which he believes "resemble television shows or digital textbooks".


title: Massive open online course

text: Other cMOOCs were then developed; for example, Jim Groom from The University of Mary Washington and Michael Branson Smith of York College, City University of New York hosted MOOCs through several universities starting with 2011's 'Digital Storytelling' (ds106) MOOC. MOOCs from private, non-profit institutions emphasized prominent faculty members and expanded existing distance learning offerings (e.g., podcasts) into free and open online courses.


title: Massive open online course

text: Alongside the development of these open courses, other E-learning platforms emerged – such as Khan Academy, Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU), Udemy, and Alison – which are viewed as similar to MOOCs and work outside the university system or emphasize individual self-paced lessons.


title: Massive open online course

text: As MOOCs developed with time, multiple conceptions of the platform seem to have emerged. Mostly two different types can be differentiated: those that emphasize a connectivist philosophy, and those that resemble more traditional courses. To distinguish the two, several early adopters of the platform proposed the terms "cMOOC" and "xMOOC".


title: Massive open online course

text: cMOOCs are based on principles from connectivist pedagogy indicating that material should be "aggregated" (rather than pre-selected), "remixable", "re-purposable", and "feeding forward" (i.e. evolving materials should be targeted at future learning). cMOOC instructional design approaches attempt to connect learners to each other to answer questions or collaborate on joint projects. This may include emphasizing collaborative development of the MOOC. Andrew Ravenscroft of the London Metropolitan University claimed that connectivist MOOCs better support collaborative dialogue and knowledge building.


title: Massive open online course

text: xMOOCs have a much more traditional course structure. They are characterized by a specified aim of completing the course obtaining certain knowledge certification of the subject matter. They are presented typically with a clearly specified syllabus of recorded lectures and self-test problems. However, some providers require paid subscriptions for acquiring graded materials and certificates. They employ elements of the original MOOC, but are, in some effect, branded IT platforms that offer content distribution partnerships to institutions. The instructor is the expert provider of knowledge, and student interactions are usually limited to asking for assistance and advising each other on difficult points.


title: Massive open online course

text: According to "The New York Times", 2012 became "the year of the MOOC" as several well-financed providers, associated with top universities, emerged, including Coursera, Udacity, and edX.


title: Massive open online course

text: During a presentation at SXSWedu in early 2013, Instructure CEO Josh Coates suggested that MOOCs are in the midst of a hype cycle, with expectations undergoing wild swings. Dennis Yang, President of MOOC provider Udemy, later made the point in an article for "The Huffington Post".


title: Massive open online course

text: Many universities scrambled to join in the "next big thing", as did more established online education service providers such as Blackboard Inc, in what has been called a "stampede". Dozens of universities in Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia have announced partnerships with the large American MOOC providers. By early 2013, questions emerged about whether academia was "MOOC'd out". This trend was later confirmed in continuing analysis.


title: Massive open online course

text: The industry has an unusual structure, consisting of linked groups including MOOC providers, the larger non-profit sector, universities, related companies and venture capitalists. "The Chronicle of Higher Education" lists the major providers as the non-profits Khan Academy and edX, and the for-profits Udacity and Coursera.


title: Massive open online course

text: The larger non-profit organizations include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council on Education. University pioneers include Stanford, Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Jose State University. Related companies investing in MOOCs include Google and educational publisher Pearson PLC. Venture capitalists include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates and Andreessen Horowitz.


title: Massive open online course

text: In the fall of 2011, Stanford University launched three courses. The first of those courses was "Introduction Into AI", launched by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Enrollment quickly reached 160,000 students. The announcement was followed within weeks by the launch of two more MOOCs, by Andrew Ng and Jennifer Widom. Following the publicity and high enrollment numbers of these courses, Thrun started a company he named Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera.


title: Massive open online course

text: In January 2013, Udacity launched its first MOOCs-for-credit, in collaboration with San Jose State University. In May 2013, the company announced the first entirely MOOC-based master's degree, a collaboration between Udacity, AT&T and the Georgia Institute of Technology, costing $7,000, a fraction of its normal tuition.


title: Massive open online course

text: Concerned about the commercialization of online education, in 2012 MIT created the not-for-profit MITx. The inaugural course, 6.002x, launched in March 2012. Harvard joined the group, renamed edX, that spring, and University of California, Berkeley joined in the summer. The initiative then added the University of Texas System, Wellesley College and Georgetown University.


title: Massive open online course

text: In September 2013, edX announced a partnership with Google to develop MOOC.org, a site for non-xConsortium groups to build and host courses. Google will work on the core platform development with edX partners. In addition, Google and edX will collaborate on research into how students learn and how technology can transform learning and teaching. MOOC.org will adopt Google's infrastructure. The Chinese Tsinghua University MOOC platform XuetangX.com (launched Oct. 2013) uses the Open edX platform.


title: Massive open online course

text: Before 2013, each MOOC tended to develop its own delivery platform. EdX in April 2013 joined with Stanford University, which previously had its own platform called Class2Go, to work on XBlock SDK, a joint open-source platform. It is available to the public under the Affero GPL open source license, which requires that all improvements to the platform be publicly posted and made available under the same license. Stanford Vice Provost John Mitchell said that the goal was to provide the "Linux of online learning". This is unlike companies such as Coursera that have developed their own platform.


title: Massive open online course

text: By November 2013, edX offered 94 courses from 29 institutions around the world. During its first 13 months of operation (ending March 2013), Coursera offered about 325 courses, with 30% in the sciences, 28% in arts and humanities, 23% in information technology, 13% in business and 6% in mathematics. Udacity offered 26 courses. The number of courses offered has since increased dramatically: As of January 2016, edx offers 820 courses, Coursera offers 1580 courses and Udacity offers more than 120 courses. According to FutureLearn, the British Council's Understanding IELTS: Techniques for English Language Tests has an enrollment of over 440,000 students.


title: Massive open online course

text: Early cMOOCs such as CCK08 and ds106 used innovative pedagogy (Connectivism), with distributed learning materials rather than a video-lecture format, and a focus on education and learning, and digital storytelling respectively


title: Massive open online course

text: Following the 2011 launch of three Stanford xMOOCs, including "Introduction Into AI", launched by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig a number of other innovative courses have emerged. As of May 2014, more than 900 MOOCs are offered by US universities and colleges. As of February 2013, dozens of universities had affiliated with MOOCs, including many international institutions. In addition, some organisations operate their own MOOCs – including Google's Power Search.


title: Massive open online course

text: A range of courses have emerged; "There was a real question of whether this would work for humanities and social science", said Ng. However, psychology and philosophy courses are among Coursera's most popular. Student feedback and completion rates suggest that they are as successful as math and science courses even though the corresponding completion rates are lower.


title: Massive open online course

text: In January 2012, University of Helsinki launched a Finnish MOOC in programming. The MOOC is used as a way to offer high-schools the opportunity to provide programming courses for their students, even if no local premises or faculty that can organize such courses exist. The course has been offered recurringly, and the top-performing students are admitted to a BSc and MSc program in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. At a meeting on E-Learning and MOOCs, Jaakko Kurhila, Head of studies for University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, claimed that to date, there have been over 8000 participants in their MOOCs altogether.


title: Massive open online course

text: On 18 June 2012, Ali Lemus from Galileo University launched the first Latin American MOOC titled "Desarrollando Aplicaciones para iPhone y iPad" This MOOC is a Spanish remix of Stanford University's popular "CS 193P iPhone Application Development" and had 5,380 students enrolled. The technology used to host the MOOC was the Galileo Educational System platform (GES) which is based on the .LRN project.


title: Massive open online course

text: "Gender Through Comic Books" was a course taught by Ball State University's Christina Blanch on Instructure's Canvas Network, a MOOC platform launched in November 2012. The course used examples from comic books to teach academic concepts about gender and perceptions.


title: Massive open online course

text: In November 2012, the University of Miami launched its first high school MOOC as part of Global Academy, its online high school. The course became available for high school students preparing for the SAT Subject Test in biology.


title: Massive open online course

text: During the Spring 2013 semester, Cathy Davidson and Dan Ariely taught the "Surprise Endings: Social Science and Literature" a SPOC course taught in-person at Duke University and also as a MOOC, with students from Duke running the online discussions.


title: Massive open online course

text: In the UK of summer 2013, Physiopedia ran their first MOOC regarding Professional Ethics in collaboration with University of the Western Cape in South Africa. This was followed by a second course in 2014, Physiotherapy Management of Spinal Cord Injuries, which was accredited by the World Confederation of Physical Therapy and attracted approximately 4000 participants with a 40% completion rate. Physiopedia is the first provider of physiotherapy/physical therapy MOOCs, accessible to participants worldwide.


title: Massive open online course

text: In March 2013, Coursolve piloted a crowdsourced business strategy course for 100 organizations with the University of Virginia. A data science MOOC began in May 2013.


title: Massive open online course

text: In May 2013, Coursera announced free e-books for some courses in partnership with Chegg, an online textbook-rental company. Students would use Chegg's e-reader, which limits copying and printing and could use the book only while enrolled in the class.


title: Massive open online course

text: In June 2013, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill launched Skynet University, which offers MOOCs on introductory astronomy. Participants gain access to the university's global network of robotic telescopes, including those in the Chilean Andes and Australia.


title: Massive open online course

text: In July 2013 the University of Tasmania launched "Understanding Dementia". The course had a completion rate of (39%), the course was recognized in the journal Nature.


title: Massive open online course

text: Startup Veduca launched the first MOOCs in Brazil, in partnership with the University of São Paulo in June 2013. The first two courses were Basic Physics, taught by Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato, and Probability and Statistics, taught by Melvin Cymbalista and André Leme Fleury. In the first two weeks following the launch at Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, more than 10,000 students enrolled.


title: Massive open online course

text: Startup Wedubox (finalist at MassChallenge 2013) launched the first MOOC in finance and third MOOC in Latam, the MOOC was created by Jorge Borrero (MBA Universidad de la Sabana) with the title "WACC and the cost of capital" it reached 2.500 students in Dec 2013 only 2 months after the launch.


title: Massive open online course

text: In January 2014, Georgia Institute of Technology partnered with Udacity and AT&T to launch their Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS). Priced at $7,000, OMSCS was the first "MOOD" (massive online open degree) (Master's degree) in computer science.


title: Massive open online course

text: In September 2014, the high street retailer, Marks & Spencer partnered up with University of Leeds to construct an MOOC business course "which will use case studies from the Company Archive alongside research from the University to show how innovation and people are key to business success. The course will be offered by the UK based MOOC platform, FutureLearn.


title: Massive open online course

text: On 16 March 2015, the University of Cape Town launched its first MOOC, "Medicine and the Arts" on the UK-led platform, Futurelearn.


title: Massive open online course

text: In July 2015, OpenClassrooms, jointly with IESA Multimedia, launched the first MOOC-based bachelor's degree in multimedia project management recognized by a French state.


title: Massive open online course

text: In January 2018, Brown University opened its first "game-ified" course on EdX. Titled "Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans: Exploring Humanity Through Literature" by Professor James Egan. It featured a storyline and plot to help Leila, a lost humanoid wandering different worlds, in which a learner had to play mini games to advance through the course.


title: Massive open online course

text: The Pacific Open Learning Health Net, set up by the WHO in 2003, developed an online learning platform in 2004–05 for continuing development of health professionals. Courses were originally delivered by Moodle, but were looking more like other MOOCs by 2012.


title: Massive open online course

text: By June 2012, more than 1.5 million people had registered for classes through Coursera, Udacity or edX. As of 2013, the range of students registered appears to be broad, diverse and non-traditional, but concentrated among English-speakers in rich countries. By March 2013, Coursera alone had registered about 2.8 million learners. By October 2013, Coursera enrollment continued to surge, surpassing 5 million, while edX had independently reached 1.3 million.


title: Massive open online course

text: A course billed as "Asia's first MOOC" given by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology through Coursera starting in April 2013 registered 17,000 students. About 60% were from "rich countries" with many of the rest from middle-income countries in Asia, South Africa, Brazil or Mexico. Fewer students enrolled from areas with more limited access to the internet, and students from the People's Republic of China may have been discouraged by Chinese government policies.


title: Massive open online course

text: Koller stated in May 2013 that a majority of the people taking Coursera courses had already earned college degrees.


title: Massive open online course

text: According to a Stanford University study of a more general group of students "active learners" – anybody who participated beyond just registering – found that 64% of high school active learners were male and 88% were male for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses.


title: Massive open online course

text: A study from Stanford University's Learning Analytics group identified four types of students: auditors, who watched video throughout the course, but took few quizzes or exams; completers, who viewed most lectures and took part in most assessments; disengaged learners, who quickly dropped the course; and sampling learners, who might only occasionally watch lectures. They identified the following percentages in each group:


title: Massive open online course

text: Jonathan Haber focused on questions of what students are learning and student demographics. About half the students taking US courses are from other countries and do not speak English as their first language. He found some courses to be meaningful, especially about reading comprehension. Video lectures followed by multiple choice questions can be challenging since they are often the "right questions". Smaller discussion boards paradoxically offer the best conversations. Larger discussions can be "really, really thoughtful and really, really misguided", with long discussions becoming rehashes or "the same old stale left/right debate".


title: Massive open online course

text: MIT and Stanford University offered initial MOOCs in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Since engineering courses need prerequisites so at the outset upper-level engineering courses were nearly absent from the MOOC list. By 2015, several universities were presenting undergraduate and advanced-level engineering courses.


title: Massive open online course

text: In 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed 103 professors who had taught MOOCs. "Typically a professor spent over 100 hours on his MOOC before it even started, by recording online lecture videos and doing other preparation", though some instructors' pre-class preparation was "a few dozen hours". The professors then spent 8–10 hours per week on the course, including participation in discussion forums.


title: Massive open online course

text: The medians were: 33,000 students enrollees; 2,600 passing; and 1 teaching assistant helping with the class. 74% of the classes used automated grading, and 34% used peer grading. 97% of the instructors used original videos, 75% used open educational resources and 27% used other resources. 9% of the classes required a physical textbook and 5% required an e-book.


title: Massive open online course

text: Unlike traditional courses, MOOCs require additional skills, provided by videographers, instructional designers, IT specialists and platform specialists. Georgia Tech professor Karen Head reports that 19 people work on their MOOCs and that more are needed. The platforms have availability requirements similar to media/content sharing websites, due to the large number of enrollees. MOOCs typically use cloud computing and are often created with authoring systems. Authoring tools for the creation of MOOCs are specialized packages of educational software like Elicitus, IMC Content Studio and Lectora that are easy-to-use and support e-learning standards like SCORM and AICC.


title: Massive open online course

text: Despite their potential to support learning and education, MOOCs have a major concern related to attrition rates and course drop out. Even though the number of learners who enroll in the courses tends to be in the thousands range, only a very small portion of the enrolled learners complete the course. According to the visualizations and analysis conducted by Katy Jordan (2015), the investigated MOOCs have a typical enrollment of 25,000, even though enrollment has reached a value up to ~230,000. Jordan reports that the average completion rate for such MOOCs is approximately 15%. Early data from Coursera suggest a completion rate of 7–9%. Coffrin et al. (2012) report the completion rates are even lower (between 3 and 5%), while they say there is a consistent and noticeable decline in the number of students who participate in the course every week. Others have also shown attrition rates similar to Coffrin. One example is the course "Bioelectricity, in the Fall of 2012" at Duke University, where 12,725 students enrolled, but only 7,761 ever watched a video, 3,658 attempted a quiz, 345 attempted the final exam, and 313 passed, earning a certificate. Students paying $50 for a feature (designed to prevent cheating on exams) have completion rates of about 70%. Yang et al. (2013) suggest that even though there is a large proportion of students who drop out early on due to a variety of reasons, there is a significant proportion of the students who remain in the course and drop out later, thus causing attrition to happen over time.


title: Massive open online course

text: Before analyzing some factors which is related to attrition rates and course drop out, one important thing one should keep in mind is that average completion rate for MOOCs is not a good indicator. Completion rate does not reflect the overall view of every student because different students have diverse purposes. For example, Khe Foon Hew (2016) indicates that some students take part in the MOOCs just for interest or finding extrinsic value of course. They drop the course if the course does not satisfy their purpose. However, completion rate is objective enough to reflect engagement of students.


title: Massive open online course

text: Much research has investigated why students drop out of MOOC courses or what factors could contribute to them dropping out. For example, Carolyn Rosé et al. (2014) investigate how three social factors make predictions on student attrition, for students who participated in the course discussion forum. The authors found that students who serve as authorities in the community seem to be more committed to the community and thus less inclined to drop out the course. In addition, students who actively participated in the course since the first week were 35% less likely to drop out of the course, compared with the average population. Lastly, the analysis of the patterns of attrition in a sub community showed that attrition was related to the engagement of the particular students with one another. One interpretation of this finding according to Rosé et al. (2014) is that while participating in MOOCs, students create virtual cohorts who progress and engage with the material in similar ways. Thus, if students start dropping out, then that might cause other students to drop out as they might perceive the environment as less supportive or engaging without their peers.


title: Massive open online course

text: Other studies focus on exploring how motivation and self-regulated learning could be related to MOOC dropout and attrition. Carson (2002) investigated characteristics of self-directed learning in students of grades 8–12 who took online courses through a statewide online program. Two of the hypothesis that the study explored were whether there exist underlying distinct classes (categories) of self-regulated learners and if the membership in these classes was associated with measures such significantly different online course completion, online final grade, or GPA. The results show that there exist different latent classes of self-regulated learning within the population of online students, designated as high, moderate, and low self-directed learning. In addition, the results support the hypothesis that there is an association between the self-directed learning class the student belongs to with the significantly different course completion rate or course achievement (course achievement was measured by the completion of the online courses, the final online course grade and the cumulative GPA). In other words, course completion and self-directed learning in students were found to be significantly related.


title: Massive open online course

text: One online survey published a "top ten" list of reasons for dropping out of a MOOC. The list involved reasons such as the course required too much time, or was too difficult or too basic. Reasons related to poor course design included "lecture fatigue" from courses that were just lecture videos, lack of a proper introduction to course technology and format, clunky technology and abuse on discussion boards. Hidden costs were cited, including required readings from expensive textbooks written by the instructor that also significantly limited students' access to learning material. Other non-completers were "just shopping around" when they registered, or were participating for knowledge rather than a credential. Other reasons for the poor completion rates include the workload, length and difficulty of a course. In addition, some participants participate peripherally ("lurk"). For example, one of the first MOOCs in 2008 had 2200 registered members, of whom 150 actively interacted at various times.


title: Massive open online course

text: Besides those factors cause the low completion rate in MOOCs, the inequality on receiving knowledge affected by different characters of individuals also has a huge influence on the consequence of completion rate. Actually, MOOC is not as fair as we expected. Russian researchers Semenova, T.V. and Rudakova, L.M (2016), indicate that MOOC is designed to decrease the unequal access to getting knowledge, but that does not mean every individual can enjoy the same equality in course completion rate. From their research, there are three main factors that cause inequality, which are degree of education, experience of MOOCs and gender. The survey shows that 18% of high-education students complete the course while only 3% low-education students complete. To be more visualized, 84–88% of students who have completed the course are high-educational. What's more, among students who have completed the course, 65–80% of students have at least one experience of using online learning platform comparing to 6–31% of students who have no experience. Gender also influences the completion rate. In general, 6–7% more men than women complete the course because women are supposed to do household in many countries, which distracts women's attention in learning.


title: Massive open online course

text: The effectiveness of MOOCs is an open question as completion rates are substantially less than traditional online education courses. Alraimi et al. (2015) explained in their research model a substantial percentage of the variance for the intention to continue using MOOCs, which is significantly influenced by perceived reputation, perceived openness, perceived usefulness, and perceived user satisfaction. Perceived reputation and perceived openness were the strongest predictors and have not previously been examined in the context of MOOCs


title: Massive open online course

text: However, research indicates that completion rates is not the right metric to measure success of MOOCs. Alternate metrics are proposed to measure effectiveness of MOOCs and online learning.


title: Massive open online course

text: Many MOOCs use video lectures, employing the old form of teaching (lecturing) using a new technology. Thrun testified before the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that MOOC "courses are 'designed to be challenges,' not lectures, and the amount of data generated from these assessments can be evaluated 'massively using machine learning' at work behind the scenes. This approach, he said, dispels 'the medieval set of myths' guiding teacher efficacy and student outcomes, and replaces it with evidence-based, 'modern, data-driven' educational methodologies that may be the instruments responsible for a 'fundamental transformation of education' itself".


title: Massive open online course

text: Some view the videos and other material produced by the MOOC as the next form of the textbook. "MOOC is the new textbook", according to David Finegold of Rutgers University. A study of edX student habits found that certificate-earning students generally stop watching videos longer than 6 to 9 minutes. They viewed the first 4.4 minutes (median) of 12- to 15-minute videos. Some traditional schools blend online and offline learning, sometimes called flipped classrooms. Students watch lectures online at home and work on projects and interact with faculty while in class. Such hybrids can even improve student performance in traditional in-person classes. One fall 2012 test by San Jose State and edX found that incorporating content from an online course into a for-credit campus-based course increased pass rates to 91% from as low as 55% without the online component. "We do not recommend selecting an online-only experience over a blended learning experience", says Coursera's Andrew Ng.


title: Massive open online course

text: Because of massive enrollments, MOOCs require instructional design that facilitates large-scale feedback and interaction. The two basic approaches are:


title: Massive open online course

text: So-called connectivist MOOCs rely on the former approach; broadcast MOOCs rely more on the latter. This marks a key distinction between cMOOCs where the 'C' stands for 'connectivist', and xMOOCs where the x stands for extended (as in TEDx, edX) and represents that the MOOC is designed to be in addition to something else (university courses for example).


title: Massive open online course

text: Assessment can be the most difficult activity to conduct online, and online assessments can be quite different from the brick-and-mortar version. Special attention has been devoted to proctoring and cheating.


title: Massive open online course

text: Peer review is often based upon sample answers or rubrics, which guide the grader on how many points to award different answers. These rubrics cannot be as complex for peer grading as for teaching assistants. Students are expected to learn via grading others and become more engaged with the course. Exams may be proctored at regional testing centers. Other methods, including "eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A.", allow testing at home or office, by using webcams, or monitoring mouse clicks and typing styles. Special techniques such as adaptive testing may be used, where the test tailors itself given the student's previous answers, giving harder or easier questions accordingly.


title: Massive open online course

text: "The most important thing that helps students succeed in an online course is interpersonal interaction and support", says Shanna Smith Jaggars, assistant director of Columbia University's Community College Research Center. Her research compared online-only and face-to-face learning in studies of community-college students and faculty in Virginia and Washington state. Among her findings: In Virginia, 32% of students failed or withdrew from for-credit online courses, compared with 19% for equivalent in-person courses.


title: Massive open online course

text: Assigning mentors to students is another interaction-enhancing technique. In 2013 Harvard offered a popular class, "The Ancient Greek Hero", instructed by Gregory Nagy and taken by thousands of Harvard students over prior decades. It appealed to alumni to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers. About 10 former teaching fellows also volunteered. The task of the volunteers, which required 3–5 hours per week, was to focus on online class discussion. The edX course registered 27,000 students.


title: Massive open online course

text: Research by Kop and Fournier highlighted as major challenges the lack of social presence and the high level of autonomy required. Techniques for maintaining connection with students include adding audio comments on assignments instead of writing them, participating with students in the discussion forums, asking brief questions in the middle of the lecture, updating weekly videos about the course and sending congratulatory emails on prior accomplishments to students who are slightly behind. Grading by peer review has had mixed results. In one example, three fellow students grade one assignment for each assignment that they submit. The grading key or rubric tends to focus the grading, but discourages more creative writing.


title: Massive open online course

text: A. J. Jacobs in an op-ed in "The New York Times" graded his experience in 11 MOOC classes overall as a "B". He rated his professors as '"B+", despite "a couple of clunkers", even comparing them to pop stars and "A-list celebrity professors". Nevertheless, he rated teacher-to-student interaction as a "D" since he had almost no contact with the professors. The highest-rated ("A") aspect of Jacobs' experience was the ability to watch videos at any time. Student-to-student interaction and assignments both received "B−". Study groups that did not meet, trolls on message boards and the relative slowness of online vs. personal conversations lowered that rating. Assignments included multiple-choice quizzes and exams as well as essays and projects. He found the multiple-choice tests stressful and peer-graded essays painful. He completed only 2 of the 11 classes.


title: Massive open online course

text: When searching for the desired course, the courses are usually organized by "most popular" or a "topical scheme". Courses planned for synchronous learning are structured as an exact organizational scheme called a chronological scheme, Courses planned for asynchronous learning are also presented as a chronological scheme, but the order the information is learned as a hybrid scheme. In this way it can be harder to understand the course content and complete, because they are not based on an existing mental model.


title: Massive open online course

text: MOOCs are widely seen as a major part of a larger disruptive innovation taking place in higher education. In particular, the many services offered under traditional university business models are predicted to become unbundled and sold to students individually or in newly formed bundles. These services include research, curriculum design, content generation (such as textbooks), teaching, assessment and certification (such as granting degrees) and student placement. MOOCs threaten existing business models by potentially selling teaching, assessment, or placement separately from the current package of services.


title: Massive open online course

text: President Barack Obama has cited recent developments, including the online learning innovations at Carnegie Mellon University, Arizona State University and Georgia Institute of Technology, as having potential to reduce the rising costs of higher education.


title: Massive open online course

text: James Mazoue, Director of Online Programs at Wayne State University describes one possible innovation:


title: Massive open online course

text: Principles of openness inform the creation, structure and operation of MOOCs. The extent to which practices of Open Design in educational technology are applied vary.


title: Massive open online course

text: In the freemium business model, the basic product – the course content – is given away free. "Charging for content would be a tragedy", said Andrew Ng. But "premium" services such as certification or placement would be charged a fee – however financial aids are given in some cases.


title: Massive open online course

text: Course developers could charge licensing fees for educational institutions that use its materials. Introductory or "gateway" courses and some remedial courses may earn the most fees. Free introductory courses may attract new students to follow-on fee-charging classes. Blended courses supplement MOOC material with face-to-face instruction. Providers can charge employers for recruiting its students. Students may be able to pay to take a proctored exam to earn transfer credit at a degree-granting university, or for certificates of completion. Udemy allows teachers to sell online courses, with the course creators keeping 70–85% of the proceeds and intellectual property rights.


title: Massive open online course

text: Coursera found that students who paid $30 to $90 were substantially more likely to finish the course. The fee was ostensibly for the company's identity-verification program, which confirms that they took and passed a course.


title: Massive open online course

text: In February 2013, the American Council on Education (ACE) recommended that its members provide transfer credit from a few MOOC courses, though even the universities who deliver the courses had said that they would not. The University of Wisconsin offered multiple, competency-based bachelor's and master's degrees starting Fall 2013, the first public university to do so on a system-wide basis. The university encouraged students to take online-courses such as MOOCs and complete assessment tests at the university to receive credit. As of 2013 few students had applied for college credit for MOOC classes. Colorado State University-Global Campus received no applications in the year after they offered the option.


title: Massive open online course

text: Academic Partnerships is a company that helps public universities move their courses online. According to its chairman, Randy Best, "We started it, frankly, as a campaign to grow enrollment. But 72 to 84 percent of those who did the first course came back and paid to take the second course."


title: Massive open online course

text: While Coursera takes a larger cut of any revenue generated – but requires no minimum payment – the not-for-profit edX has a minimum required payment from course providers, but takes a smaller cut of any revenues, tied to the amount of support required for each course.


title: Massive open online course

text: MOOCs are regarded by many as an important tool to widen access to higher education (HE) for millions of people, including those in the developing world, and ultimately enhance their quality of life. MOOCs may be regarded as contributing to the democratisation of HE, not only locally or regionally but globally as well. MOOCs can help democratise content and make knowledge reachable for everyone. Students are able to access complete courses offered by universities all over the world, something previously unattainable. With the availability of affordable technologies, MOOCs increase access to an extraordinary number of courses offered by world-renowned institutions and teachers.


title: Massive open online course

text: The costs of tertiary education continue to increase because institutions tend to bundle too many services. With MOOCs, some of these services can be transferred to other suitable players in the public or private sector. MOOCs are for large numbers of participants, can be accessed by anyone anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection, are open to everyone without entry qualifications and offer a full/complete course experience online for free.


title: Massive open online course

text: MOOCs can be seen as a form of open education offered for free through online platforms. The (initial) philosophy of MOOCs is to open up quality higher education to a wider audience. As such, MOOCs are an important tool to achieve goal 4 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.


title: Massive open online course

text: Certain lectures, videos, and tests through MOOCs can be accessed at any time compared to scheduled class times. By allowing learners to complete their coursework in their own time, this provides flexibility to learners based on their own personal schedules.


title: Massive open online course

text: The learning environments of MOOCs make it easier for learners across the globe to work together on common goals. Instead of having to physically meet one another, online collaboration creates partnerships among learners. While time zones may have an effect on the hours that learners communicate, projects, assignments, and more can be completed to incorporate the skills and resources that different learners offer no matter where they are located. Distance and collaboration can benefit learners who may have struggled with traditionally more individual learning goals, including learning how to write.


title: Massive open online course

text: These general challenges in effective MOOC development are accompanied by criticism by journalists and academics.


title: Massive open online course

text: Robert Zemsky (2014) argues that they have passed their peak: "They came; they conquered very little; and now they face substantially diminished prospects." Others have pointed to a backlash arising from the tiny completion rates.


title: Massive open online course

text: Some dispute that the "territorial" dimensions of MOOCs have received insufficient discussion or data-backed analysis, namely: 1. the true geographical diversity of enrolls in/completes courses; 2. the implications of courses scaling across country borders, and potential difficulties with relevance and knowledge transfer; and 3. the need for territory-specific study of locally relevant issues and needs.


title: Massive open online course

text: Other features associated with early MOOCs, such as open licensing of content, open structure and learning goals, and community-centeredness, may not be present in all MOOC projects.


title: Massive open online course

text: Effects on the structure of higher education were lamented, for example, by Moshe Y. Vardi, who finds an "absence of serious pedagogy in MOOCs", and indeed in all of higher education. He criticized the format of "short, unsophisticated video chunks, interleaved with online quizzes, and accompanied by social networking." An underlying reason is simple cost-cutting pressures, which could hamstring the higher education industry.


title: Massive open online course

text: The changes predicted from MOOCs generated objections in some quarters. The San Jose State University philosophy faculty wrote in an open letter to Harvard University professor and MOOC teacher Michael Sandel:


title: Massive open online course

text: Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors claimed that MOOCs are not a reliable means of supplying credentials, stating that "It’s fine to put lectures online, but this plan only degrades degree programs if it plans to substitute for them." Sandra Schroeder, chair of the Higher Education Program and Policy Council for the American Federation of Teachers expressed concern that "These students are not likely to succeed without the structure of a strong and sequenced academic program."


title: Massive open online course

text: With a 60% majority, the Amherst College faculty rejected the opportunity to work with edX based on a perceived incompatibility with their seminar-style classes and personalized feedback. Some were concerned about issues such as the "information dispensing" teaching model of lectures followed by exams, the use of multiple-choice exams and peer-grading. The Duke University faculty took a similar stance in the spring of 2013. The effect of MOOCs on second- and third-tier institutions and of creating a professorial "star system" were among other concerns.


title: Massive open online course

text: At least one alternative to MOOCs has advocates: Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCC) challenge the roles of the instructor, hierarchy, money and massiveness. DOCC recognizes that the pursuit of knowledge may be achieved better by not using a centralized singular syllabus, that expertise is distributed throughout all the participants and does not just reside with one or two individuals.


title: Massive open online course

text: Another alternative to MOOCs is the self-paced online course (SPOC) which provides a high degree of flexibility. Students can decide on their own pace and with which session they would like to begin their studies. According to a report by Class Central founder Dhawal Shah, more than 800 self-paced courses have been available in 2015.


title: Massive open online course

text: Although the purpose of MOOCs is ultimately to educate more people, recent criticisms include accessibility and a Westernized curriculum that lead to a failure to reach the same audiences marginalised by traditional methods.


title: Massive open online course

text: MOOCs have been criticized for a perceived lack of academic rigor as well as the monetization strategies adopted by providers. In "MOOCs: A University Qualification in 24 Hours?" Michael Shea writes "By offering courses that are near-impossible to fail and charging upfront fees for worthless certificates, Coursera is simply running a high-tech version of the kind of scams that have been run by correspondence colleges for decades."


title: Massive open online course

text: Language of instruction is one of the major barriers that ELLs face in MOOCs. In recent estimates, almost 75% of MOOC courses are presented in the English language, however, native English speakers are a minority among the world's population. This issue is mitigated by the increasing popularity of English as a global language, and therefore has more second language speakers than any other language in the world. This barrier has encouraged content developers and other MOOC stakeholders to develop content in other popular languages to increase MOOC access. However, research studies show that some ELLs prefer to take MOOCs in English, despite the language challenges, as it promotes their goals of economic, social, and geographic mobility. This emphasizes the need to not only provide MOOC content in other languages, but also to develop English language interventions for ELLs who participate in English MOOCs.


title: Massive open online course

text: Areas that ELLs particularly struggle with in English MOOCs include MOOC content without corresponding visual supporting materials (e.g., an instructor narrating instruction without text support in the background), or their hesitation to participate in MOOC discussion forums. Active participation in MOOC discussion forums has been found to improve students grades, their engagement, and leads to lower dropout rates, however, ELLs are more likely to be spectators than active contributors in discussion forums.


title: Massive open online course

text: Researching studies show a “complex mix of affective, socio-cultural, and educational factors” that are inhibitors to their active participation in discussion forums. As expected, English as the language of communication poses both linguistic and cultural challenges for ELLs, and they may not be confident in their English language communication abilities. Discussion forums may also be an uncomfortable means of communication especially for ELLs from Confucian cultures, where disagreement and arguing one’s points are often viewed as confrontational, and harmony is promoted. Therefore, while ELLs may be perceived as being uninterested in participating, research studies show that they do not show the same hesitation in face to face discourse. Finally, ELLs may come from high power distance cultures, where teachers are regarded as authority figures, and the culture of back and forth conversations between teachers and students is not a cultural norm. As a result, discussion forums with active participation from the instructors may cause discomfort and prevent participation of students from such cultures.


title: Massive open online course

text: "Open Culture", not affiliated with Stanford University, founded in 2006, by Dan Coleman, the Director and Associate Dean of Stanford University's Continuing Education Program, aggregates and curates free MOOCs, as well as free cultural & educational media. C. Berman, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found the website difficult to navigate, with links "hidden" in articles, and the right side lists, clunky and long.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Leo Strauss (, ; September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss established his fame with path-breaking books on Spinoza and Hobbes, then with articles on Maimonides and Al-Farabi. In the late 1930s his research focused on the rediscovery of esoteric writing, thereby a new illumination of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss was born on September 20, 1899, in the small town of Kirchhain in Hesse-Nassau, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia (part of the German Empire), to Hugo Strauss and Jennie Strauss, née David. According to Allan Bloom's 1974 obituary in "Political Theory", Strauss "was raised as an Orthodox Jew", but the family does not appear to have completely embraced Orthodox practice. Strauss himself noted that he came from a "conservative, even orthodox Jewish home", but one which knew little about Judaism except strict adherence to ceremonial laws. His father and uncle operated a farm supply and livestock business that they inherited from their father, Meyer (1835–1919), a leading member of the local Jewish community.


title: Leo Strauss

text: After attending the Kirchhain Volksschule and the Protestant Rektoratsschule, Leo Strauss was enrolled at the Gymnasium Philippinum (affiliated with the University of Marburg) in nearby Marburg (from which Johannes Althusius and Carl J. Friedrich also graduated) in 1912, graduating in 1917. He boarded with the Marburg cantor Strauss (no relation), whose residence served as a meeting place for followers of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Strauss served in the German army from World War I from July 5, 1917, to December 1918.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss subsequently enrolled in the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate in 1921; his thesis, "On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi" ("Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis"), was supervised by Ernst Cassirer. He also attended courses at the Universities of Freiburg and Marburg, including some taught by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Strauss joined a Jewish fraternity and worked for the German Zionist movement, which introduced him to various German Jewish intellectuals, such as Norbert Elias, Leo Löwenthal, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was and remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss's closest friend was Jacob Klein but he also was intellectually engaged with Gerhard Krüger—and also Karl Löwith, Julius Guttman, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Franz Rosenzweig (to whom Strauss dedicated his first book), as well as Gershom Scholem, Alexander Altmann, and the Arabist Paul Kraus, who married Strauss's sister Bettina (Strauss and his wife later adopted Paul and Bettina Kraus's child when both parents died in the Middle East). With several of these friends, Strauss carried on vigorous epistolary exchanges later in life, many of which are published in the "Gesammelte Schriften" ("Collected Writings"), some in translation from the German. Strauss had also been engaged in a discourse with Carl Schmitt. However, after Strauss left Germany, he broke off the discourse when Schmitt failed to respond to his letters.


title: Leo Strauss

text: After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss left his position at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin for Paris. He returned to Germany only once, for a few short days twenty years later. In Paris, he married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn, a widow with a young child, whom he had known previously in Germany. He adopted his wife's son, Thomas, and later his sister's child, Jenny Strauss Clay, later a professor of classics at the University of Virginia; he and Miriam had no biological children of their own. At his death, he was survived by Thomas, daughter Jenny Strauss Clay, and three grandchildren. Strauss became a lifelong friend of Alexandre Kojève and was on friendly terms with Raymond Aron and Étienne Gilson. Because of the Nazis' rise to power, he chose not to return to his native country. Strauss found shelter, after some vicissitudes, in England, where, in 1935 he gained temporary employment at University of Cambridge, with the help of his in-law, David Daube, who was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While in England, he became a close friend of R. H. Tawney, and was on less friendly terms with Isaiah Berlin.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Unable to find permanent employment in England, Strauss moved in 1937 to the United States, under the patronage of Harold Laski, who made introductions and helped him obtain a brief lectureship. After a short stint as Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, Strauss secured a position at The New School, where, between 1938 and 1948, he worked the political science faculty and also took on adjunct jobs. In 1939, he served for a short term as a visiting professor at Hamilton College. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, and in 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, holding the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship until he left in 1969.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In 1953, Strauss coined the phrase "reductio ad Hitlerum", a play on "reductio ad absurdum", suggesting that comparing an argument to one of Hitler's, or "playing the Nazi card", is often a fallacy of irrelevance.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In 1954 he met Löwith and Gadamer in Heidelberg and delivered a public speech on Socrates. He had received a call for a temporary lectureship in Hamburg in 1965 (which he declined for health reasons) and received and accepted an honorary doctorate from Hamburg University and the "Bundesverdienstkreuz" (German Order of Merit) via the German representative in Chicago. In 1969 Strauss moved to Claremont McKenna College (formerly Claremont Men's College) in California for a year, and then to St. John's College, Annapolis in 1970, where he was the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death from pneumonia in 1973. He was buried in Annapolis Hebrew Cemetery, with his wife Miriam Bernsohn Strauss, who died in 1985. Psalm 114 was read in the funeral service at the request of family and friends.


title: Leo Strauss

text: For Strauss, politics and philosophy were necessarily intertwined. He regarded the trial and death of Socrates as the moment when political philosophy came into existence. Strauss considered one of the most important moments in the history of philosophy Socrates' argument that philosophers could not study nature without considering their own human nature, which, in the words of Aristotle, is that of "a political animal". However, he also held that the ends of politics and philosophy were inherently irreconcilable and irreducible to one another.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss distinguished "scholars" from "great thinkers", identifying himself as a scholar. He wrote that most self-described philosophers are in actuality scholars, cautious and methodical. Great thinkers, in contrast, boldly and creatively address big problems. Scholars deal with these problems only indirectly by reasoning about the great thinkers' differences.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In "Natural Right and History" Strauss begins with a critique of Max Weber's epistemology, briefly engages the relativism of Martin Heidegger (who goes unnamed), and continues with a discussion of the evolution of natural rights via an analysis of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. He concludes by critiquing Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. At the heart of the book are excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Much of his philosophy is a reaction to the works of Heidegger. Indeed, Strauss wrote that Heidegger's thinking must be understood and confronted before any complete formulation of modern political theory is possible, and this means that political thought has to engage with issues of ontology and the history of metaphysics.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss wrote that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first philosopher to properly understand historicism, an idea grounded in a general acceptance of Hegelian philosophy of history. Heidegger, in Strauss's view, sanitized and politicized Nietzsche, whereas Nietzsche believed "our own principles, including the belief in progress, will become as unconvincing and alien as all earlier principles (essences) had shown themselves to be" and "the only way out seems to be ... that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth". Heidegger believed that the tragic nihilism of Nietzsche was itself a "myth" guided by a defective Western conception of Being that Heidegger traced to Plato. In his published correspondence with Alexandre Kojève, Strauss wrote that Hegel was correct when he postulated that an end of history implies an end to philosophy as understood by classical political philosophy.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In the late 1930s, Strauss called for the first time for a reconsideration of the "distinction between exoteric (or public) and esoteric (or secret) teaching". In 1952 he published "Persecution and the Art of Writing", arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction. Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning. Taking his bearings from his study of Maimonides and Al-Farabi, and pointing further back to Plato's discussion of writing as contained in the "Phaedrus", Strauss proposed that the classical and medieval art of "esoteric" writing is the proper medium for philosophic learning: rather than displaying philosophers' thoughts superficially, classical and medieval philosophical texts guide their readers in thinking and learning independently of imparted knowledge. Thus, Strauss agrees with the Socrates of the "Phaedrus", where the Greek indicates that, insofar as writing does not respond when questioned, good writing provokes questions in the reader—questions that orient the reader towards an understanding of problems the author thought about with utmost seriousness. Strauss thus, in "Persecution and the Art of Writing", presents Maimonides "as a closet nonbeliever obfuscating his message for political reasons".


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss's hermeneutical argument—rearticulated throughout his subsequent writings (most notably in "The City and Man" [1964])—is that, before the 19th century, Western scholars commonly understood that philosophical writing is not at home in any polity, no matter how liberal. Insofar as it questions conventional wisdom at its roots, philosophy must guard itself especially against those readers who believe themselves authoritative, wise, and liberal defenders of the status quo. In questioning established opinions, or in investigating the principles of morality, philosophers of old found it necessary to convey their messages in an oblique manner. Their "art of writing" was the art of esoteric communication. This was especially apparent in medieval times when heterodox political thinkers wrote under the threat of the Inquisition or comparably obtuse tribunals.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss's argument is not that the medieval writers he studies reserved one exoteric meaning for the many (hoi polloi) and an esoteric, hidden one for the few (hoi aristoi), but that, through rhetorical stratagems including self-contradiction and hyperboles, these writers succeeded in conveying their proper meaning at the tacit heart of their writings—a heart or message irreducible to "the letter" or historical dimension of texts.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Explicitly following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's lead, Strauss indicates that medieval political philosophers, no less than their ancient counterparts, carefully adapted their wording to the dominant moral views of their time, lest their writings be condemned as heretical or unjust, not by "the many" (who did not read), but by those "few" whom the many regarded as the most righteous guardians of morality. It was precisely these righteous personalities who would be most inclined to persecute/ostracize anyone who was in the business of exposing the noble or great lie upon which the authority of the few over the many stands or falls.


title: Leo Strauss

text: According to his critics, especially Shadia Drury, Strauss wrongly assumes a distinction between an "exoteric" or salutary and an "esoteric" or "true" aspect of the philosophy of pre-modern political philosophers. Furthermore, Strauss is often accused of having himself written esoterically. The accusation would seem to rest upon the belief that in modern-era liberal societies and, especially in the United States, philosophers are not free to voice their philosophical views in public without being accused of impropriety.


title: Leo Strauss

text: According to Strauss, modern social science is flawed because it assumes the fact–value distinction, a concept which Strauss found dubious. He traced its roots in Enlightenment philosophy to Max Weber, a thinker whom Strauss described as a "serious and noble mind". Weber wanted to separate values from science but, according to Strauss, was really a derivative thinker, deeply influenced by Nietzsche's relativism. Strauss treated politics as something that could not be studied from afar. A political scientist examining politics with a value-free scientific eye, for Strauss, was self-deluded. Positivism, the heir to both Auguste Comte and Max Weber in the quest to make purportedly value-free judgments, failed to justify its own existence, which would require a value judgment.


title: Leo Strauss

text: While modern-era liberalism had stressed the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, Strauss felt that there should be a greater interest in the problem of human excellence and political virtue. Through his writings, Strauss constantly raised the question of how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist. Strauss refused to make do with any simplistic or one-sided resolutions of the Socratic question: "What is the good for the city and man?"


title: Leo Strauss

text: Two significant political-philosophical dialogues Strauss had with living thinkers were those he held with Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève. Schmitt, who would later become, for a short time, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany, was one of the first important German academics to review Strauss's early work positively. Schmitt's positive reference for, and approval of, Strauss's work on Hobbes was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss's critique and clarifications of "The Concept of the Political" led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt in 1932, Strauss summarised Schmitt's political theology that "because man is by nature evil, he, therefore, needs " dominion". But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men ... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state."


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss, however, directly opposed Schmitt's position. For Strauss, Schmitt and his return to Thomas Hobbes helpfully clarified the nature of our political existence and our modern self-understanding. Schmitt's position was therefore symptomatic of the modern-era liberal self-understanding. Strauss believed that such an analysis, as in Hobbes's time, served as a useful "preparatory action", revealing our contemporary orientation towards the eternal problems of politics (social existence). However, Strauss believed that Schmitt's reification of our modern self-understanding of the problem of politics into a political theology was not an adequate solution. Strauss instead advocated a return to a broader classical understanding of human nature and a tentative return to political philosophy, in the tradition of the ancient philosophers.


title: Leo Strauss

text: With Kojève, Strauss had a close and lifelong philosophical friendship. They had first met as students in Berlin. The two thinkers shared boundless philosophical respect for each other. Kojève would later write that, without befriending Strauss, "I never would have known ... what philosophy is". The political-philosophical dispute between Kojève and Strauss centered on the role that philosophy should and can be allowed to play in politics.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Kojève, a senior civil servant in the French government, was instrumental in the creation of the European Economic Community. He argued that philosophers should have an active role in shaping political events. Strauss, on the contrary, believed that philosophers should play a role in politics only to the extent that they can ensure that philosophy, which he saw as mankind's highest activity, can be free from political intervention.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss argued that liberalism in its modern form (which is oriented toward universal freedom as opposed to "ancient liberalism" which is oriented toward human excellence), contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism:


title: Leo Strauss

text: The first was a "brutal" nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Bolshevik regimes. In "On Tyranny", he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The second type—the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies—was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In the belief that 20th-century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.


title: Leo Strauss

text: According to Strauss, "The Republic" by Plato is not "a blueprint for regime reform" (a play on words from Karl Popper's "Open Society and Its Enemies", which attacks "The Republic" for being just that). Strauss quotes Cicero: ""The Republic" does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things—the nature of the city."


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss argued that the city-in-speech was unnatural, precisely because "it is rendered possible by the abstraction from "eros"". Though skeptical of "progress", Strauss was equally skeptical about political agendas of "return"—that is, going backward instead of forward.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In fact, he was consistently suspicious of anything claiming to be a solution to an old political or philosophical problem. He spoke of the danger in trying finally to resolve the debate between rationalism and traditionalism in politics. In particular, along with many in the pre-World War II German Right, he feared people trying to force a world state to come into being in the future, thinking that it would inevitably become a tyranny. Hence he kept his distance from the two totalitarianisms that he denounced in his century, both fascists and communists.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss actively rejected Karl Popper's views as illogical. He agreed with a letter of response to his request of Eric Voegelin to look into the issue. In the response, Voegelin wrote that studying Popper's views was a waste of precious time, and "an annoyance". Specifically about "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and Popper's understanding of Plato's "The Republic", after giving some examples, Voegelin wrote:


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss proceeded to show this letter to Kurt Riezler, who used his influence in order to oppose Popper's appointment at the University of Chicago.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss constantly stressed the importance of two dichotomies in political philosophy, namely Athens and Jerusalem (reason and revelation) and Ancient versus Modern. The "Ancients" were the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs; the "Moderns" start with Niccolò Machiavelli. The contrast between Ancients and Moderns was understood to be related to the unresolvable tension between Reason and Revelation. The Socratics, reacting to the first Greek philosophers, brought philosophy back to earth, and hence back to the marketplace, making it more political.


title: Leo Strauss

text: The Moderns reacted to the dominance of revelation in medieval society by promoting the possibilities of Reason. They objected to Aquinas's merger of natural right and natural theology, for it made natural right vulnerable to sideshow theological disputes. Thomas Hobbes, under the influence of Francis Bacon, re-oriented political thought to what was most solid but also most low in man—his physical hopes and fears—setting a precedent for John Locke and the later economic approach to political thought, as in David Hume and Adam Smith.


title: Leo Strauss

text: As a youth, Strauss belonged to the German Zionist youth group, along with his friends Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Both were admirers of Strauss and would continue to be throughout their lives. When he was 17, as he said, he was "converted" to political Zionism as a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He wrote several essays about its controversies but left these activities behind by his early twenties.


title: Leo Strauss

text: While Strauss maintained a sympathetic interest in Zionism, he later came to refer to Zionism as "problematic" and became disillusioned with some of its aims.


title: Leo Strauss

text: He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1954–55 academic year. In his letter to a "National Review" editor, Strauss asked why Israel had been called a racist state by one of their writers. He argued that the author did not provide enough proof for his argument. He ended his essay with the following statement:


title: Leo Strauss

text: Although Strauss accepted the utility of religious belief, there is some question about his religious views. He was openly disdainful of atheism and disapproved of contemporary dogmatic disbelief, which he considered intemperate and irrational. However, like Thomas Aquinas, he felt that revelation must be subject to examination by reason. At the end of "The City and Man", Strauss invites us to "be open to ... the question "quid sit deus" ["What is God?"]" (p. 241), and Edward Feser writes that:


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss was not himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself one of the "permanent" questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally as defensible as unbelief.


title: Leo Strauss

text: In "Natural Right and History" Strauss distinguishes a Socratic (Platonic, Ciceronian, Aristotelian) from a conventionalist (materialistic, Epicurean) reading of divinity, and argues that "the question of religion" (what is religion?) is inseparable from the question of the nature of civil society and civil authority. Throughout the volume he argues for the Socratic reading of civil authority and rejects the conventionalist reading (of which atheism is an essential component). This is incompatible with interpretations by Shadia Drury and other scholars who argue that Strauss viewed religion purely instrumentally.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Strauss's works were read and admired by thinkers as diverse as the philosophers Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Alexandre Kojève, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Benjamin had become acquainted with Strauss as a student in Berlin, and expressed admiration for Strauss throughout his life. Gadamer stated that he 'largely agreed' with Strauss's interpretations.


title: Leo Strauss

text: Some critics of Strauss have accused him of being elitist, illiberalist and anti-democratic. Shadia Drury, in "Leo Strauss and the American Right" (1999), claimed that Strauss inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders linked to imperialist militarism, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury argues that Strauss teaches that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them". Nicholas Xenos similarly argues that Strauss was "an anti-democrat in a fundamental sense, a true reactionary". Xenos says: "Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism."