Curricular Commons

The Year of the MOOC: Old News Already?

The year 2012 in the Chinese calendar was the "Year of the Dragon.” Wired called 2012 "the Year of the Drone in Afghanistan.” On NPR it was "the Year of the Woman,” at least within the context of the Olympic Games held in London, England. Meanwhile a New York Times article declared 2012 "the Year of the mooc” based upon the newspaper’s reportorial recognition of the satiated coverage of the explosive massive open online course (mooc) phenomenon.

As with many novel technologies, early optimistic excitement and predictions were generated around the educational and democratizing possibilities of the new online platforms. moocs were hailed as a tool that could bring free educational opportunities provided by elite higher education institutions, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, to large groups of users around the globe.

By December 2013, however, the New York Times was questioning the effectiveness of moocs as it reported the disappointing results of a study released by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. On average, only 4 percent of students who began a mooc completed the course. And 80 percent of those enrolled for the course were individuals who already had earned a college degree. Administrators, educators, and politicians who were quick to embrace moocs in order to address concerns over the limited availability of seating in classrooms, increasing tuition rates, and decreasing state support for schools were challenged by disturbing trends of poor completions rates, questionable levels of instructional quality, and issues of accessibility and sustainability (Young, 2013; Yuan & Powell, 2013).

Rhoads, Berdan, and Toven-Lindsey (2013) argue that there are three predominant problems regarding open courseware movements such as moocs: a problem of epistemology, a problem of pedagogy, and a problem of hegemony. Let us begin with epistemology—what we mean by knowledge. In the context of moocs, it appears that knowledge is narrowly defined "in relatively concrete ways” and is explicated in a manner that makes it "quite close to the notion of information . . . as sets of facts, pieces of data, or concrete bits of a larger process” (Rhoads et al., 2013, p. 92). mooc instruction in the hard sciences, where a positivist approach is the norm, has often set the mooc design standard. Knowledge is objective and achievable. But while this may (or may not) work well for the sciences, this positivist approach to instructional design is not necessarily a useful formula for the arts and humanities.

In point of fact, the offerings of humanities moocs are limited, at least in part because as more complex definitions of "truth” emerge, the evaluation of performance becomes difficult and less suitable to the design standards and protocols that drive the majority of mooc courseware. Rhoads et al. (2013) ask, "What are the implications of an Internet-based knowledge system in which certain disciplines and fields of inquiry become further marginalized by their lack of visibility?” (p. 92). Is the mooc preference for the positivist simplicity of rote or reductionist course design preventing sophisticated mooc development in the humanities?

Next, let us look at pedagogy—the scholarship of teaching and learning. Here, some critics are questioning the unidirectional approach of teaching that ignores how students learn—that is, ignores the fact that students learn through active, "deep engagement with others” (Rhoads et al., 2013, p. 92).

Here, pedagogy becomes intertwined with epistemology when courses are structured such that knowledge is viewed dualistically. The result can be an environment in which students are perceived as sponges soaking up knowledge provided through videotaped class lectures and working through tutorials from which they are expected to demonstrate understanding through a series of objective quizzes. A unidirectional approach coupled with the massive student audiences fails to encourage interactivity, recognize a student’s role in the construction of knowledge, or provide the faculty members with the opportunity to engage each student in a course’s substantive and sometimes emotional content. Delbanco (2013) illustrates the importance of such engagement when considering the effectiveness of technology, rather than of an instructor, as the medium for disseminating information, stating:

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote...