A MOOC By Any Other Name

Hello ENGL613 classmates! Alex asked me, as a makeup assignment, to write a blog post reflection on last week's class. Here it is!

So I thought we had some really interesting discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, as many of us in class learned for the first time😛), and their advantages and disadvantages. It seemed we thought Aaron Bady's "The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform" was a little bit tech-panicky, but overall agreed that, ideally, these courses would not replace in-person education. We see them as a useful supplement to in-person education or even a way to do a flipped classroom. We also agreed that as a solution to economic inequality/unequal access to education, MOOCs cannot be dismissed as an option, and ultimately do seem to be beneficial.

I find myself stuck on Bady's assertion, "If I have one overarching takeaway point in this article, it's that there is almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes." He goes onto to frame the MOOC as being just a step in "the longer story of online education." I know that Bady's larger point is about the capitalization of education, which we also talked about in class, but, as with most tech-panic arguments we've read this semester, I find myself wondering: How different is this, really, than many types of traditional education? Why are we holding technology-minded pedagogy up to a standard we don't always achieve in IRL classrooms?

Are the same teachers, I'm wondering, who argue against online or hybrid classes, making their IRL classrooms critical pedagogy spaces? Are their classrooms group-work and discussion oriented, or are they lecturing at their students for a couple of hours, which doesn't actually sound that different than a MOOC to me? Perhaps an in-person lecture pumps up the ego of an instructor more, and makes it so teachers don't have to learn a whole new skill set of online tools and education, but how different is it, pedagogically, from the more one-way communication (that's argued) of a MOOC? Is it possible that this way actually is more student-oriented, in that it saves students time and money and provides perhaps similar information/experiences to a traditional IRL lecture?

And, because I relate literally everything back to Shakespeare, I found myself wondering about what we define as a class/educational experience. When we go see a Shakespeare play, that's a director showing us their and the actors' and designers' interpretations of this work of literature. Except for reviews, this is mostly a massive, one-way communication experience. The audience will talk before, and after, maybe whisper during and at intermission maybe, but when the actual play is taking place, it could be considered a kind of lecture. And then is a Shakespeare performance a kind of mini MOOC? Shakespeare's Globe and the National Theatre recently started broadcasting their productions to wider audiences around the world. Could these broadcasts be considered mini MOOCs? What do you think?

Photo of Shakespeare' Globe from: londontheatredirect.com