Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 9

Enter the Anti-MOOCs: The Reinvention of Online Learning as a Form of Social Commentary
source and free — with the door left open
for a fee if a participant taking the course
wanted university credit to be transcripted
for the work.
Except for a few notable exceptions,
such as the compelling DS106 from
the University of Mary Washington, this
constructivist model has not found much
traction among MOOC designers. Early
MOOCs leveraged a multitude of established
and emerging pedagogies and tools,
including blended learning, open educational
resources, and crowd-sourced interaction.
The technologies that enable the
workflow of early MOOCs varied, but the
common thread has been that these sorts of
tools were readily available and easy to use.
The first MOOCs drew upon cloud-based
services such as WikiSpaces, YouTube, and
Google Hangouts, among many others, to
foster discussions, create and share videos,
and engage in all the other activities that
have over the last five years or so have become
essential to teaching and learning in a
modern online learning environment.
While the influence of these early
MOOCs on online pedagogy has been significant,
it is important to remember that
online learning is not new. The category
encompasses any learning that takes place
through web-based platforms, whether formal
or informal, and online learning providers
have been toiling in these fields for
more than 20 years. What has made the
topic new is the recent and unprecedented
focus on providing learning via the Internet
that has been stimulated by the tremendous
interest in massive open online courses.
MOOCs received their fair share of
hype as they exploded onto the education
landscape in 2012. Big name providers including
Coursera, edX, and Udacity count
hundreds of thousands of enrolled students,
totals that when added together illustrate
their popularity. One of the most appealing
promises of MOOCs is that they offer the
possibility for continued, advanced learning
at zero cost, allowing students, life-long
learners, and professionals to acquire new
skills and improve their knowledge and
employability all of the time. MOOCs have
enjoyed one of the fastest uptakes ever seen
in higher education. Yet critics loudly warn
that there is a need to examine these new
approaches through a critical lens to ensure
they are effective and evolve past the traditional
lecture style pedagogies.
MOOCs as Big Business
In 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York reported that Americans owe
over $900 billion in student loans. At
the same time, 40% of university students
across the nation do not complete a degree
within six years. There is a growing number
of students concerned about what they are
actually getting in exchange for the tremendous
costs of their education. As inexorably
as Moore’s Law has governed the shrinking
size of transistors and chips, higher education
budgets seem to be following a sort of
inverse of the law, in which costs rise year
upon year, with tuition rates rising even
faster as public support dwindles.
This is the environment in which
MOOCs have prospered. More than any
idea that has come along in years, university
presidents and boards of trustees see a new
business model in these large-scale courses,
and as such, have invested a great deal of
efforts in exploring their potential. In October
2012, Stanford University President
John Hennessy referred to the incredible
pace of development in MOOCs as a tsunami.
“I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to
break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not to
just stand there,” he said in a panel discussion
on the changing economics of education.
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