MOOCs in the Global Context

Moocs In The Global Context

This chapter questions the overall premise that the introduction of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) as a solution to America’s broken university system under various rubrics—a paradigm-shifting educational reform of the outdated lecture-based classroom, entrance into an age of revolutionary technologies which would make assumedly costly instructors redundant, usherance of student-centered, machine-driven innovative pedagogies, or as a plain fiscal expediency (Adams, 2012; Archer, 2008; Clegg, 2008; Friedman, 2013; Marginson, 2012; Parry, 2012). While all of the preceding claims require some critical scrutiny from multiple angles, in this chapter, I primarily focus on much-touted benefits of MOOCs for global masses and present a detailed critique of this claim both from an international and U.S. perspective. The venture capitalists sponsoring these MOOCs, as well as the universities providing the academic fronts, have continually propagated the far-reaching scope of MOOCs as “open access” global education system (Darrow, 2012). Not only has this value been inflated to appeal to the American masses’ sense of benevolence, these claims also have been employed to inflate general enrollment figures because a majority of these MOOCs have been heavily subscribed to by students from other parts of the world. While these MOOCs have been promoted as a great benefit to the world outside of the United States (see, for example, Schroeder 2012), their Americentric content, lack of local contexts, and their dismal completion rates tell a different story about their educational benefit for international students (Wilson & Gruzd, 2014).

Since the pedagogical and ideological implications of these massive courses remain under examined (Altbach 2013; Barlow 2014), I pose the following two interconnected questions about the nature, characteristics, and relevance of MOOCs in the international context to develop my critique:

• 1.

  What are the assumptions about literacy and learning that inform MOOC discourse about mass education of U.S. and foreign citizens?

• 2.

  What could be some unstated political, cultural, and economic purposes behind these MOOC ventures?

Before delving into these two international questions, I will first deal with the MOOC lore prevalent in the American press and flesh out the emerging metanarrative of these courses, using two particular examples from the field of writing. My purpose in dwelling on these examples is to draw attention to the vast gap between the futuristic claims advanced about the revolutionary improvement MOOCs will make in higher education and the relatively unimpressive pedagogical record of MOOCs so far. The commentary threaded throughout this section delineates the cracks in the MOOC pedagogy while showing that many of the characteristics attributed to the innovative MOOC technology and pedagogy existed prior to the introduction of MOOCs in the past decade. The upcoming MOOC analyses are also aimed at exemplifying the type of American MOOC pedagogy being proffered to the global learners outside the United States as the best education available on the American ground. Siemens (2012) points out, and my key points made about the nature of current MOOC pedagogies below also show, that massive open online courses gain vastly different connotations in the American and international contexts when the vendors of MOOC speak in the language of us and them, and the industrialized first world and that developing World, whether or not this exact phraseology is applied.