The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has brought the hopes of democratizing education closer to manifesting. The ability of hundreds of thousands of people around the world to have access to often free courses offered by elite universities1 is empowering if not liberating for the masses who heretofore could not afford such. Analyzing this delivery platform via McLuhans’s tetrad approach provides an efficient analysis for end users and decision makers wading through the medium’s hype during opt-in or out considerations. Each quadrant’s content contains factors that will be relevant to particular organizational needs. The data is there for informed decisions and direction. This analysis of MOOCs is done in light of the four effects of McLuhan’s Laws of Media. I’ll elaborate examples of the effects for MOOCs in this posting.
Enhancement: “What does the artifact ENHANCE, intensify, make possible, or accelerate?2
Access to affordable, quality credited courses has been accelerated by the medium. I must note that the quality of the instruction is up for debate. Massive numbers of learners can now access courses from stellar institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke3. Co-founder, Gagen Biyani claims the Udemy site which allows anyone to build or take online courses, has more than 100,000 students enrolled in its courses4. Global impact is evidenced. The University of London’s International Programmes’ initial offering of four MOOCs attracted over 210,000 registrations, over 90,000 active students in their first week, from over 160 countries5.
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Obsolescence: “If some aspect of a situation is enlarged or enhanced, simultaneously the old condition or un-enhanced situation is displaced thereby.” What is pushed aside or OBSOLESCED by the new medium?6”
The modern MOOC we know today is structured similar to traditional online higher education courses with a syllabus, and course content consisting of readings, assignments, and lectures. They have replaced or at least, broken away from the original cMOOC, a term introduced by the first MOOC co-founder, Stephen Downes to distinguish the newer xMOOCs from the Connectivist cMOOCs7. I concede here that obsolescence of the cMOOC is questionable. More admirable in my view, is the original CCK08 model and its concept of a massive community of networked learners constructing knowledge together. The xMOOC has definitely crowded the original out with more widely known platforms such as Coursera and edX
The notion of the ‘ivory tower’: This notion of educational institutions being defined by their physical walls seems antithetical to the true mission of the institution. That notion is no longer viable as the demand for access to affordable quality education continues to grow. Enhancing the reach of the professor, the interaction of communities of learners and the collaboration of scholars worldwide give credence to its obsolescence.
Retrieval: “What recurrence or RETRIEVAL of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?8”
Knowledge and learning models are among the earlier actions or services bought into play in the evolution of MOOCs. Their basic structure draws from traditional online learning and the principles of didactic strategies and technologies. The aforementioned cMOOCs preceded xMOOCs and then there are small private online courses (SPOCS) which universities have been using for decades. There appears to be a “chicken or the egg first” discrepancy as 'new' is often used as a descriptor for SPOCs. Massively open TV courses (MOTVCs) were experimented with as early as the 1950’s as in the case of Chicago’s WTTW who in 1956 became the first station in the country to televise college courses for credit9.
Blended learning utilizing hybrid MOOCs and democratization of higher education are reversals that MOOCs have a strong potential for exacting. I detect a pushing to the limit of its potential in the development of hybrids and blended learning models such as The University of Pennsylvania's ModPo MOOC. It uses a hybrid approach, adopting contemporary MOOC structures and incorporating them into their pedagogical dynamic11. These new forms of MOOCs would appear to be reverting to the initial objectives of leveraging the Internet as a massive, collaborative communications platform and to facilitating the formation of connections between information sources12. Partnering with Coursera, the U.S. State Department's MOOC Camp embraces this hybrid model offering a quality education experience with free courses and support for facilitators. Pushing to the extremes of potentials will hopefully result in MOOCs reversion from the business model it has evolved into, to the platform for educational democratization that societies are looking for. As experts are placing MOOCs on Gartner's Hype Cycle in the Trough of Disillusionment position, I surmise more of the enhancement, retrieval, and reversal needed to avoid obsolescence will come to fore.
