Is the hype around Massive Open Online Courses a Trojan horse in the global higher education debate? Image: PR.When I first pitched my blog series, Postcards from the Participatory, I intended it to be a collection of narratives exploring Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from the inside. I was engaged in the almost year-long #change11 MOOC, and I wanted to explore how the experience intersected with – and departed from – my teaching and learning within university walls. I thought the series might share a few stories about the resonances and challenges of participatory education, and explore the implications of distributed learning networks for conventional higher education. Basically, I thought it was time for higher education to start thinking about MOOCs.
Ahem. Apparently bigger fish than me had a similar idea.
Days after my first post was published, MITx was announced. In the months since, I've watched agog as the word MOOC has proliferated and spiralled into the higher education buzzword of the year. Trying to keep on top of it makes me feel vaguely like the sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia, frantically scurrying as the brooms divide and double.
When you have worked in academia for 15 years, you get used to a relatively glacial and circular pace of change. This nouvelle vague of MOOC hoopla, then, has been disorienting. But there's no denying it. In mainstream newsspeak, it appears MOOC now signifies some material manifestation of the 'disruptive innovation' everybody's sure is upon us but can't quite pin down.
Educational enterprises tagged with the letter X are fruitful and multiply. University presidents are dismissed – if later reinstated – for failing to change fast enough, though the terms and targets of change are never explicitly specified. And Udacity and the xEd mega-MOOCs, with their overt emphasis on data collection and vaguely-defined business models, begin to look like trojan horses for mass-scale automation of teaching and marking.
When the cavalry charge is being led by the most prestigious HEIs in the market, it's hard to assume it'll all just blow over. Clearly, higher education is thinking about MOOCs and the tone of that thinking gets a little bit more portentous and apocalyptic all the time. I find myself musing on Yeats, wondering what rough beast the MOOC is morphing into?
Words become buzzwords because they capture a sentiment or zeitgeist burbling under the skin of a culture. They give name to latent hopes and fears, and they capitalize on our secret hubris – rampant in academia – that we are knowers, that we can name the future.
The problem, of course, with buzzwords is that they end up empty. In this case, each new media iteration of the term 'MOOC' seems to tie it more closely to the behemoth of elite power and rapid change that drives the frenzy around disruption in higher education.
Yes, higher education is changing. Its funding and knowledge structures and its place in culture have shifted drastically in the past generation or two, on multiple axes and in often-conflicting directions. It's under intense pressure to function in an increasingly corporate fashion, with increasingly little public funding. Globalization and the push for participatory collaboration all challenge the role of the traditional classroom. Things fall apart, we hear from every corner. The centre cannot hold.
The problem with apocalyptic thinking is that it predisposes us towards simple solutions and salvation narratives, even in complex situations. If we're interested in being part of the conversation around the future of higher ed, we need to stop talking about MOOCs as buzzwords and begin talking about the interests that determine the specific shape of particular MOOCs as they emerge.
MOOCs will not inherently gut faculty positions in higher education. They do not have automation and robot grading built into their conceptual structure. They certainly offer the capacity for these things, if backed by scale and prestige and neoliberal values of efficiency and market niche domination: they offer the potential to look like disruptive innovation while consolidating the market interests of elite brands within higher education. Udacity's partnership with Pearson? Perhaps a case in point
MOOCs grew, initially, as learning networks of emergent knowledge focused around educational technologies – in other words, around complexity and disruptive innovation in higher ed. Oh, the irony! In their first inaugurations, led by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, MOOCs weren't especially aimed at disrupting the university at all. They weren't about the university, but about an alternate environment for learning. As Downes put it, "MOOCs don't change the nature of the game; they're playing a different game entirely."
I've participated in a couple of MOOCs within this tradition. Instead of leaping to grand-scale automation, they've gone the opposite route, attemptiung to build sites for participatory conversation and networking around emergent technologies, practices, and ideas. There will be another, the biggest yet, offered this coming autumn. Its topic? The current and future state of higher education.
My final postcard, then, says forget the buzzwords. The hype around MOOCs only clouds the conversation, consolidating power back in the hands of those who have the most to lose if the universities as business entities do not adapt. But those of us who teach and learn have ties to these entities too – just little to gain from robot grading. It's complex, this future of higher education. Maybe MOOCs can be a different kind of Trojan horse for change.
Bonnie Stewart is a PhD student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. She is a member of the editorial collective at University of Venus, read her blog or follow her on Twitter at @bonstewart
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