MOOCs

as a Canary: A Critical Look at the Rise of EdTech

Rolin Moe, EdD
Assistant Professor
Director of Educational Technology & Media
Seattle Pacific University

Abstract: Within popular media, the massive open online course (MOOC) is
presented as a novel idea created by maverick professors and developed with a goal
to further democratize education on bases of quality and cost. The perception of this
sequence of events as modular history has perpetuated a difficulty in developing
MOOC-related research and critique within the fields of distance and online
education. At the center of this struggle is the MOOC acronym: its initial
development was in 2008, and its use today happens in opposition to the theoretical
and pedagogical elements of the 2008 MOOC. The MOOC as a harbinger of EdTech
shows the field as much more critical than pragmatic.

The din of the MOOC world continues unabated, vacillating between the
MOOC continuing its march toward Valhalla and the MOOC as a dying revolution in
need of last rites. The multiple personality disorder of MOOC coverage is most
evident in last weeks tech-business articles about MOOC company Udaicty. Upstart
Business Journal last week wondered aloud if the MOOC was dying, asking the
question whether Sebastian Thrun could save the MOOC. Here, we learn that Thrun
recently left Google to focus full-time on Udacity (similar to the FastCompany report
from 11/13 on him leaving Stanford to focus full-time on Udacity), as potentially a
last-ditch effort to save the MOOC.
This is echoed in a TechCrunch blog from earlier in September entitled The
MOOC Revolution that Wasnt. Yet on the same day Upstart ran their open question,
both EdSurge and Venture Beat heralded a recent $35M investment in Udacity from
venture capital firms such as tech-based Drive Capital. The tenor of these articles, it
should be said, lacks the same globalize and democratize education ballyhoo from
articles in 2012 and 2013. That said, none of these articles have given up on the
MOOC as an instrument of educational change.
What about other MOOC providers? edXs Anant Agarwal was profiled in
Wired Magazine the same week as the Udacity news:
The way [Agarwal] sees it, effective uses of the MOOC model are only beginning to take
shape. Enrollment in edX courses has doubled over last year, and he believes were on
the verge of an era he calls MOOC 2.0. Weve been growing as others are throwing in
the towel, he says of edX.
There is lot to take issue with in this quote, and the article in whole. What
MOOC providers are throwing in the towel? Certainly not Udacity, Coursera, edX or
Canvas. Also, Agarwals use of MOOC 2.0 is symptomatic of the ahistorical nature of
most EdTech Mavericks; it marks at least the sixth time someone has used MOOC 2.0

to talk about the future, and fails to note that Cathy Sandeen of the American Council
on Education invoked MOOC 3.015 months ago.
What Agarwal has is research showing that, in at least one instance, MOOC
students learned as much in a course as traditional, face-to-face students. In the
physics course studied, students showed gains in knowledge of the
subject regardless of their prior background in the subject or a more general
scholastic background. The study is of one course, and there is still a question of
intrinsic motivation. Most interesting to me was evidence of a spate of recent
research on the model, a focus indicative of a model with staying power rather than
a flash-in-the-pan.
Jonathan Rees writings and media discussions of MOOC matters have been
vital recordings and perspective on the phenomenon; I have enjoyed reading his
work, getting to know him through social media and feeling out our disagreements
(we largely agree on the subject, so dissension is always interesting). Today Rees
noted on his blog that the MOOC revolution is indeed over, citing MOOC provider
Udacitys shift away from solving undergraduate education malaise and towards
professional development and corporate training. Rees sees a need for all MOOCs to
move this way in order to monetize and feed the venture capital frenzy. Here, Rees
calls me out in the most gracious manner possible, seeing a point of disagreement in
our beliefs from his perspective, he sees the MOOC as nothing like a revolution
but rather a reaction to the socioeconomic climate of the day whereas I am stuck on
the word over. Rees puts me in good company here, bolstering his argument by
including recent writings from education journalist Jeff Selingo.
My disagreement with Rees (as well as Selingo) has nothing to do with
whether a revolution is over or not, or whether this was in fact a revolution. The
MOOC fails in many ways to be a revolution because the so-called revolt came from
the established power players in the field. The house of cards upon which Clayton
Christensen rests his theory of disruptive innovation crumbles in the face of
education, as even the most generous of disruption defendants cannot say the
University of Phoenix model is the model gaining progress in Coursera, edX or
Udacity. I harkened to Baudrillards simulacrum last year in a similar MOOC
discussion when David Wiley made an argument such as Jonathan Rees in calling
MOOCs Massively Obfuscated Opportunities for Cash; in this instance I would have to
go with a slightly different Baudrillard notion: The MOOC revolution did not take
place*.
*Baudrillard wrote three essays in 1991 which were collected into a book entitled The
Gulf War did not take place. A very brief but accurate summary is at Wikipedia; in
short, Baudrillard questions the concept of the transgressions in the Persian Gulf as
war rather than a totalitarian focus on actions and events, and the title harkens to a
French play called The Trojan War did not take place.
MOOC does not symbolize a revolution but rather signifies a phenomenon, a
phenomenon that continues today. I have been working with George Veletsianos on
a paper that shifts the lens of MOOC discussion from instrument to sociocultural
happening
3 Oct 14


Jeff Selingo @jselingo
A good piece by @jhrees. We actually agree more than he gives credit
for....The MOOC revolution is indeed over.
http://moreorlessbunk.net/technology/moocs/the-mooc-revolution-is-
indeed-over/
The idea that MOOCs would consolidate Higher Education into 10 schools
was preposterous, as was the idea that the MOOC was a masterful new learning
model (see: AllLearn, Fathom). The initial attention Sebastian Thruns 2011
catalytic MOOC CS 271 received from distance education scholars was reserved but
positive, a tone which quickly changed as the course was shown to be a massive
dump of content upon students (but in short videos). Media interest in the sheer
volume of enrollees created a maelstrom of attention, which led to the eventual
media free-for-all we still enjoy today. In the end, though, as a learning model Rees
is right: the MOOC as we know it may have benefit for corporate training and
professional development, with some spaces still exploring a wider benefit, their
research based on a 1972 theory of learning-as-memory-recall.
Selingos piece MOOC U: The Revolution Isnt Over, unfortunately makes
many of the same claims and platitudes inherent to most MOOC journalism: it is still
early, it is changing how students learn, it is affecting how professors teach, etc.,
saccharin points that take away from the more powerful parts of his piece (namely,
that society should expect more out of MOOCs given the energy and financial
commitment of universities in the name of the MOOC). All of these arguments,
however, still look at the MOOC as a learning model upon which we expect change
will happen.
Change has happened, not because of the efficacy of a video-based LMS run
by elite institutions, but because of the manner in which MOOC discussion has
shaped public policy, public perception, and shone an unflattering light on existing
practices in traditional higher education. When public officials openly see education
as having the potential to operate without human intervention, the manner in which
society views education has changed. When education is seen as a industry ripe to
be disrupted monetized before any other considerations, the manner in which
society views education has changed. When news articles directly link the Big Data
movement in education to a shift in the purpose of education away from happy
citizen and closer to a corporations ideal employee, the manner in which society
views education has changed. When the President of the United States redefines
Middle Class in terms that, were they used two generations ago would have signaled
Working Class, the manner in which society views education has changed.
I am not fixated on whether or not a MOOC revolution is over, because there
was no MOOC revolution to begin with. Any semblance of a MOOC revolution went
underground in 2011 when the term was co-opted, and it continues to be fought

today, though too many scholars and researchers today are reticent to label their
work as MOOC. The MOOC has provided organizations, policy groups and
institutions an opportunity to redefine the purpose of education and offer opinions
on the most efficient manner for that purpose to be reached. Whether Coursera,
Udacity, edX or any other providers meet this purpose is moot; education continues
to slide away from a public good and toward a mechanism for producing
inexpensive yet fully-capable employees at the need of existing corporations. A true
online learning revolution could stem that tide, but as long as we argue over the
finer points of what constitutes revolution we only allow those outside education to
further define our turf.
I have long tracked the absurdity of MOOC developers and pundits assigning
version numbers when discussing the MOOC. The oscillation between MOOC 2.0
and MOOC 3.0 over the last two years was evidence I presented to argue the MOOC
is not a tool or instrument or disruptive innovation but rather the acronym from
which we discuss a larger sociocultural phenomenon regarding educational
technology and solutionism.
Historically, software versioning had meaning for the proprietary sect
(starting at 1.0 and changing with various updates) and the open field (building
from a 0.x beta to the 1.0 indicating a complete and reliable product). This has
vacillated somewhat, but the meaning behind versioning progress has continued to
involve significant changes to a specific product. The use of versioning when
describing the evolution of the MOOC lacks this principled or pragmatic grounding;
MOOC 2.0 meant one thing to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity (for-credit courses) and
an entirely different thing to NPRs Marketplace (leadership strategy), while MOOC
3.0 meant one thing to Cathy Sandeen of the American Council on Education (the
MOOC in a blended or distributed flip) and another to Anant Agarwal & Michael
Crow of the Global Freshman Academy (adaptive learning in a for-credit
environment). Forget that many of these sound the same (the Udacity MOOC 2.0 is
pitched a lot like the Global Freshman Academy MOOC 3.0), and forget that in some
cases MOOC 3.0 came before MOOC 2.0
Actually, dont forget any of that. Remember it, because the inanity is the
point. The only reason we can have MOOC 3.0 before MOOC 2.0 (not to mention
huge announcements from Coursera and edX at the same time as educational media
tell us MOOC hype is over) is because MOOC has little practically defined
meaning. It is immaterial, hype, folderol. I spent the first part of my educational
scholarship life trying to rectify a definition based on both the scholarship of the
educational technology field and the textual offerings of EdTech developers, and the
result was a very diluted and fairly meaningless definition so inclusive its use offers
no pragmatic purpose.
So, then, why does MOOC matter? We say MOOC because it signifies an era in
education and educational technology, a movement, a discussion, what some see as
a battle and others see as progress and others yet see as Same Stuff Different
Day. MOOC in and of itself is a simulacrum; invoking it in conversation allows us to
engage a very divergent phenomenon with some semblance of a foothold, to share
our beliefs/values/ideas in what we hope to be a constructive fashion.
There is nothing constructive about version numbers, however. They harken

to the practical when there is no practical to the MOOC, they assume progress when
there is no defined history or pathway, and they tap into an ethos of contradictory
solutionism by using parlance of companies dedicated to perpetual upgrades and
profit. When edX and ASU harkened to MOOC 3.0 with the Global Freshman
Academy (just six short months after Anant Agarwal said we had finally reached
MOOC 2.0, mind you), I feigned disappointment that hype version numbers were
still somewhat behind the times.
Ask and ye shall receive! A Monday night Huffington Post blog by Otto
Scharmer, MIT instructor and co-founter of the Presencing Institute, presents a self-
described revolution in learning and leadership that he refers to as MOOC 4.0.
I have been running and/or supporting profound change initiatives for the past two
decades. But almost never do changes, even when successful, happen on the scale that
is necessary today. MOOCs 4.0 put us on a new playing field, not only in education, but
also in the business of leading profound innovation and large systems change.
What does this mean? I do not wish to be flippant, but having read the article three
times, I still do not know. The sheer volume of buzzwords and hype mixed with a
striking lack of knowledge regarding educational theory and history results in an
article chock full of unnecessary invention and basics as Eureka. You could question
their methodology for measuring success

Mike Caulfield @holden
@RMoeJo @dkernohan @davecormier The survey that had "eye-opening"
and "life-changing" as two options sounds a completely valid instrument.
10:43 AM - 5 May 2015

patlockley @patlockley @davecormier @dkernohan @RMoeJo shush, you
just invented eduation (noun) : a process in elearning which disruptively
innovatws graduation

Lorna M. Campbell @LornaMCampbell
@patlockley @davecormier @dkernohan @RMoeJo "...empower change
makers to co-sense and co-shape the future." Seriously?
10:11 AM - 5 May 2015

5 May

David Kernohan @dkernohan @RMoeJo it's OK, Dave. We all know who
invented MOOCs...

dave cormier @davecormier @RMoeJo yes. I hate every article that doesn't
include me. that or articles published by MIT staff discovering learning
9:08 AM - 5 May 2015


I stop at what the Institute represents. It would be easy to attack the idea of
the Presencing Institute; the website drowns in what I consider shallow self-help
jargon, and the pictures in the Huffington Post blog involve people standing on
chairs or a large group sitting with their eyes closed, which when mixed with hype
and buzz can convey a very negative view of New Age as mysticism. But presencing
itself is not one of these negotiated terms; the word has a philosophical basis with
Martin Heidegger, and while the institutes co-founders do not advertise this in the
About section of the institute, a cursory search of other materials show a grounding
in daesin philosophy. There is a great effort from the Presencing Institute to link its
validity to the giants of thought in various cultures and eras. Calling it a cult based
on a blog in the Huffington Post feeds the same inauthenticity that frustrates so
many EdTech academics about the corporate influence in the field today.
Schramer presents MOOC 4.0 as the synthesis of the MOOC movement, that how he
sees social constructivist learning is the MOOC apotheosis; it is not just that we are
on the path of progress, but the final stop is MOOC 4.0 and presencing. I have
argued the path of progress is one of the greatest obstacles facing educational
technology today; there is no path to progress, and assuming one exists only feeds
the dominant paradigm.
MOOC 4.0 is in contrast to Jesse Stommels discussion of his experience
teaching a Coursera MOOC (also published this week) which posits the MOOC
journey as one not on a singular path of progress but rather multivariate paths
where the journey is the destination:
I have designed half a dozen cMOOCs. I love them allbut I find myself wanting
to kill all of my darlings. And not just in the name of experimentation. But because
killing our darlings is at the root of pedagogy. Never do the same thing twice, because
the same thing twice is already rotten. We learn from every one of our successes and
mistakes, and we encounter each learner and each learning environment anew.

I am not going to say this is the lens from which everyone should look at MOOCs a
constant evolution not bound by a facsimile path of progress but rather by the
localized and networked needs of the learners as group and individual. But
Stommels piece recognizes there is a dominant interpretation of what a MOOC is, he
negotiates terms, he provides his own resistance grounded in theory and defined by
pillars of what academic educational technology finds important, and he presents in
a way that will have access and resonance for that subculture and beyond. It would
be easy for a MOOC that (among other things) resists the Subject Expert for subject
experts to call itself MOOC 5.0, pretend to have invented this approach,
get ungrounded press and pub in trade periodicals and media mags, and add more
meaninglessness to a topic supposedly meaningful. Rather, by sacrificing pizazz
Stommel has provided an alternative lens, one that does not believe in the sanctity
of EdTech as academic nor as commercial but rather as diffuse and delicate.
MOOC version numbers are one of the many frustrations of the MOOC model
phenomenon. We should highlight the absurdity of versioning a sociocultural
phenomenon and point to what they advertise as new as a lack of history, theory
and politic that actually supports a dominant paradigm history, theory and
politic. When we stop there, however, we have only furthered the dominant version
of the MOOC, cast alternatives as victims, and created a battleground where there is
no battle being fought. MOOC progress as described by version numbers is but a
continuation of a longstanding dominant viewpoint of education, today handled by
EdTech corporations but being ingrained in the fabric of educational sociology since
Marx, Weber and Durkheim engaged the field. It is not about winning or fighting. It
is about producing, experimenting, designing, playing, situating and localizing.
At the heart of the Open Education Resources movement (and the Open movement
in general) is the notion that education is a public good. The progression to such
sentiment may be based in a notion that an educated citizenry betters democracy
and civic life (folks like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson), or that knowledge and
wisdom are non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Econ 101), or that the increase and
diffusion of knowledge stimulates societal and cultural growth (James Smithson,
John Quincy Adams). Regardless of its germination, the crux of such thought is that
the provision of education from an egalitarian lens results in benefit across the
population.
At face value the Massive Open Online Course fits this vision: courses are
free, prerequisites are encouraged but not enforced, and access to the best professors
at the best universities is not bound to geography or economics. And research into
the framework of the MOOC points to the opening of university walls, the building of
intra- and internet communications and an attempt to promote the increase and
diffusion of knowledge for society, whether communal or global. Thats why its
worth noting that one of the primary voices in OER, David Wiley, sees the 2013
incarnation of MOOCs as a money grab:
I propose that, whenever you hear the acronym MOOC, you think: Massively
Obfuscated Opportunities for Cash
How can a MOOC be both a bastion for openness and the epitome of closed content?
It is because the term MOOC means nothing. It is the epitome of a
simulacrum, Baudrillards copy of a copy with no original ever in existence. The

term means one thing in mainstream society, another to the researchers and
scholars who have spent their professional careers in distance education. In that it
has grown into a catch-all neologism where any ed-tech startup can throw it into
promotional social media in hopes to catch a big client. Since its inception just five
years ago it has been something different each year, and recent movements toward
professional development, textbook subscription and both undergraduate and
graduate degrees promise that 2013 will be quite different from 2012. How did four
letters turn into higher educations most recent (and most media-cognizant)
lightning rod?

George Siemens envisioned the digital society as elemental to learning and
knowledge sharing in a digital culture. He coined a term for the theory
(connectivism), and gave the theory a test run in the production of a free collegiate
course (CCK08) both about and borne of the theory. At the same time as Siemens
work, researchers and scholars like David Wiley and Alec Couros were also
experimenting in the realm of open networks, OER and online courses. Tied into
this subculture, two people (Bryan Alexander and Dave Cormier) arrived from
separate departures at calling the movement (most specifically Siemens course) a
MOOC, a happenstance that points to a confluence of signifiers and symbols that
directed the culture to viewing the phenomenon as massive and open (as well as
tying into the digital cultures love of acronyms; see MOO and MUD). Three years
later Sebastian Thrun, the guy who was instrumental in developing the driver-less
car, experimented in what he called distributed learning with a teacher-less course,
and the movement gained some press. Siemens himself saw the potential of Thruns
course as a logical step in the opening of networks and education, and called CS221
a MOOC. When Thruns enrollment reached 100K+, tech and education writers
flocked en masse to see what the big deal was, and (this part I am presuming; if
someone can find the missing link between when Siemens labeled CS221 a MOOC
and when MOOC became the descriptor for this movement, let me know!) in trying
to research the movement these writers found the Siemens blog and ran with the
neologism. Within months, Stanfords courses are no longer labeled distributed
learning (which has a different meaning in CS/AI circles than it does in education)
but MOOCs. Thruns course has little in common with Siemens work, however, and
by 2013 Wikipedia editors are trying to remove people like Wiley, Siemens and
Couros from the MOOC entry because, according to the page editor, their use of the
term was for promotional purposes.
Theres an outcry about this potential removal, but its only from the group
that views MOOCs in the second way listed above, the subculture that was there
back in 2008 or is keen on its growth, not the mainstream. For that mainstream,
this history is inconsequential, as well as to those disrupting the education
establishment, most likely due to hubris. When we talk about MOOCs, they can be
the savior of higher education, the destruction of it, or a ship passing in the night,
and all are true and will continue to be. They can be these separate things because
they are all of them at once. This is MOOC as marketing, as brinksmanship, as sound
byte.
And its not just MOOCs where terminology ambiguity reigns supreme. Its
distributed learning, a phrase with very different meanings in education and in

artificial intelligence. Its blended learning, which can be both a methodology for
strengthening community and a tool for personalizing learning in a sea of
thousands. Last year I came across a well-intentioned blog about pedagogy by
George Mason Universitys Mark Sample that set out to create two competing
notions of educational scaffolding, without any mention or knowledge of the long
history of scaffolding as an educational construct. You can make an argument for
disparity in the use of a phrase like school choice, one that sounds completely benign
but within the circles of K-12 education stands for (depending on your perspective)
the opportunity for free-market entry into the education market or the destruction
of the final public institution heretofore unencumbered by profiteering. When we
are talking about education, we are often using the same words and not talking
about the same things.
Why is this? A few potential thoughts. *Educators, especially those in higher
ed, are subject specialists almost always outside of education, so knowledge of edu
as a discipline is almost always personalized and bereft of the same theoretical and
historical knowledge they hold on their primary subjects. *The merging of
education with a field such as computer science (a la Ed Tech) is incomplete, with
educators unrefined in computer parlance and computer scientists found wonting
on the teacher jargon. *In haste to publish content in the hyperreality of Internet
commerce, we pull terminology from other places and put pieces together that
perhaps make sense in one context but lack the historical knowledge from an
educational perspective. *Marketing is a major part of the continued success of
higher education, both in selling customers and in selling the public. The use of
distilled terminology can sound refined without any heed to the terminologys
etymology.
Part of what makes language a wonderous construct is its multiple
modalities, the opportunity for various meanings and suggestions, double entendre
and subtle subtext. But such rich application of language comes from historical
precedent developed and refined over generations of use. It is deliberate and
considerate. It understands the past yet pushes forward the present. This nuance
does not exist in modern educational discourse. Education terminology, especially
in the ed-tech sector, is a catch-all designed as the salvation point and rallying cry,
the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, or the epicenter of all ills of
society. The result is confusion in the research literature, debating semantics and
attempting to define terms while the playing field continues to shift with policy and
product.