On topic: Spooked by MOOCs

As midlife career changes go, Jeb Stuart Magruder's was pretty remarkable.

True, he wasn't the first person in history to claim a jail cell conversion. But Magruder, who died on May 11, had been one of the Watergate conspirators, and had testified - before an entranced nationwide television-viewing audience - against his former Nixon White House colleagues.

So when he declared he'd found God while behind bars, the announcement made headlines. More than a few political observers and late-night TV comics scoffed.

But after serving his time for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and attempts to defraud the government - only seven months, in exchange for his testimony - he worked with a ministry for high school students. Then he earned a master of divinity degree and became an ordained minister.

When I met Magruder, several years later, he was executive minister at First Community Church in Columbus. His well-delivered Sunday sermons always tied his message to current events, and you couldn't fault his former-insider-in-the-halls-of-power perspective.

I can't claim to have known the man well, nor could I judge his sincerity for his career course correction. We never exchanged more than a handshake and the usual pleasantries of my complimenting his sermon and his replying, hey, thanks, nice day today if it doesn't rain.

Just by coincidence, I saw the news about Magruder's death as I was doing research for this column on second careers. More specifically, I was reading about MOOCs.

Massive open online courses promise to bring down the cost of education and significantly broaden access for workers to diversify their skill sets, as well as help first-time job seekers.

But some higher education experts brood that MOOCs pose a sobering threat to bricks-and-mortar schools. Why expend years of your life in a classroom and vast sums of money to pay for that experience, taking on outrageous debt, after all, when you can learn while sitting at home, on your own time, in front of your computer screen and wearing your pajamas?

Online classes aren't restricted to job seekers. A few years ago I interviewed a principal in a Midwestern rural county whose school offered distance learning for its elementary students, for whom travel time would consume too much daylight.

A pair of educators in a May 12 Wall Street Journal interview played down the possibility of MOOCs supplanting actual classrooms. MOOCs, instead, will cater to those seeking retraining and new credentials, noted one of the interviewees, Ray Schroeder of the University of Illinois Springfield.

But what if the notion takes hold well enough to curtail growth for those physical sites? Won't that affect the need for the number of teachers? And if there are fewer buildings in service, that also would cut down on jobs in construction, textbook publishing (the lessons already are right there online), administrators, janitors, and even cafeteria workers … .

You get the idea. As with most innovations, the promise of MOOCs also could carry unintended consequences.

Which means choices for second careers - and even first careers - continue to shift across many fields.

Consider the changes being brought about to jobs through the growing use of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. GE and Airbus report building lighter, stronger airplane parts using 3D printing, and in late April BBC News reported that a Chinese company had constructed 10 full-sized, single-story houses using only four 3D printers - in one day.

Closer to home, employers as disparate as Rockwell Collins, M.C. Ginsberg Objects of Art in Iowa City, the University of Iowa, Kirkwood Community College and West Branch's Scattergood Friends School, among others, take advantage of additive manufacturing.

The Flash Gordon technology certainly will mean a decline for some manufacturing jobs - ironically at a time when American companies have been bringing back work from overseas, mostly due to quality-control issues. (See last Sunday's Business 380 page 1D.)

Who can say what the safe career choices of the near future might be, beyond the usual suspects of money counters and health care.

It seems as if we'll need to trust in the notion that as technology taketh away, technology will giveth, too. And keep burnishing our own occupational skills.

We're not all of us cut out to be ministers, let alone aides to the president of the United States, after all.

Michael Chevy Castranova is Sunday editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@sourcemedia.net