blue trane's Journal: Problems with Production Possibility Frontier models

In Coursera's The Power of Markets, Week 1, slides 8-10, Mark Zupan presents the Production Possibility Frontier model.

http://subbot.org/coursera/powerofmarkets/ppf2.png depicts a constant-slope production possibility frontier.

The assumption is that research is an opportunity cost of teaching, and vice versa. So if you, as the president of a university, add more research units, necessarily teaching units will decrease.

http://subbot.org/coursera/powerofmarkets/ppf3.png shows the typical case. The professor states that this case is based on empirical evidence, but he cites no sources. He also fails to define what "research unit" and "teaching unit" are.

His point is that, necessarily, if you have more research at your university, teaching will suffer. And vice versa.

But what about MOOCs? The professor himself has recorded his lectures, and they can be reached by thousands of students. How many "teaching units" does that translate into? Many more than for a purely physical classroom, which has size limits.

So the professor can record his lectures, have them reach orders of magnitude more students than can fit in his physical classrooms, and go on to do his research. The very technology he's using to present the "production possibility frontier" blows away the assumptions behind the model. When you take the class online, the scarcity of classroom space is eliminated.