There&#x27;s no reason why MOOCs can&#x27;t be effective in the humanities. I think the problem is that there&#x27;s much less overlap between those who are skilled at teaching, say, history and those who are skilled at creating good online courses.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed this same lack of overlap in the field of journalism. I know quite a few people who are really good (and successful) in their field, but despite being in their late twenties or early thirties, they&#x27;re shockingly inept at operating computers.<p>This is a problem, in my opinion, because much of what (specialist) journalist do is find the story in high volumes of data. And computers are great for that: RSS readers, DEVONthink (or other personal databases), good google searches, collaboration through, at the very least google docs, etc.<p>And yet they settle for ordering books, reading huge stacks of newspapers, cuting out the good articles and writing in their paper notebooks, and composing word documents that they send around via email with -2 added to the filename.<p>But I digress. My point is that there&#x27;s significant low-hanging fruit in combining technology with the &#x27;stuffy&#x27; areas of academia or fields like journalism, but relatively few people from either side collaborate in this area.<p>In part, I think this is because of a fundamentally different personality&#x2F;temperament and social surroundings, and in part I suppose it&#x27;s because this &#x27;low-hanging fruit&#x27; is not low-hanging when it comes to profit. That saddens me.<p>But the fact remains that if I as a data&#x2F;tech&#x2F;web geek were to &#x27;fuse&#x27; with one of my journalist friends, great things could happen. While such a &#x27;fusion&#x27; is unlikely, I&#x27;m still trying to find a good starting point for collaboration.