Wednesday 3 April 2013

Are MOOCs progressive or regressive?


At the ELESIG's recent symposium on students' experience of MOOCs, one of the interesting questions posed by George Roberts of Oxford Brookes University was whether Open Online Courses (massive or not) would address the digital literacy deficit.

Since we had already agreed amongst ourselves that MOOCs weren't really suited to learners without significant pre-existing digital skills, as well as considerable self-confidence and the ability to drive and organise their own learning, I mischievously proposed that MOOCs would actually widen the digital divide rather than narrowing it: those who had good education already would be able to get more from MOOCs, but those unfortunate enough to have been poorly taught and given no models for self-directed learning would be left even further behind.

It's a feature of open and free systems - such as free markets - that they favour those with the power and resources - the capital - to dominate them. This connection between digital liberalism and political liberalism (that's to say, conservatism) was also made interestingly last week by a commentator on The Guardian's website, following a review of Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything , Click Here. "RO42" wrote:

This sounds a very valuable book, and one that need to be more widely read.

The thing I'm increasingly coming to notice is that technophiles are very, very conservative politically but think they're liberal. They believe in deregulation and hands-off governance because it is "freer", market self-regulation rather than legal frameworks for business operation because it "promotes entrepreneurism" (shades, of course, of "wealth creators") and a strange kind of philanthropic Big Society obsession where everything is "democratically" chosen and the enthusiastic amateur rather than expertise listened to.

There is a massive fear of expertise and knowledge in this new technological culture; anyone who claims to know things is lumped in with the charlatans, or even worse deemed elitist and irrelevant. There is a place for crowd-sourcing and co-operation but it should not come with the devaluing of education.

If free and open education is not just to favour the already-privileged, there need to be educational structures to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged - which is why I hope there will always be a place for institutions such as my own, The Open University, which have a mission to do precisely that, and why even as we ourselves move into MOOCs I think ours will be rather different from those envisaged by techno-utopians.

Reference

The sessions led by Alison Littlejohn and George Roberts at the ELESIG symposium "Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" can be seen at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).

Seen and heard: March 2013


"Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" - symposium at ELESIG (Evaluation of Learners' Experiences of e-learning Special Interest Group), with talks from Alison Littlejohn, Glasgow Caledonian ('Charting open territory: learners' experiences in Massive Open Online Courses') and George Roberts, Oxford Brookes ('First Steps into Learning and Teaching (M)OOC') - videos at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).

Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. 2011 collection of her talks and essays on science fiction. Interesting, but her own fiction is more powerful.

The Vatican's announcement Habemus Papam - "Brothers and sisters, good evening!" Good start, Francis.

The Challenger - BBC/OU co-produced drama on Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman's uncovering of the flaws - technical, human and administrative - which resulted in the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Great performance by William Hurt, vivid re-creation of the period and the events, and a very nice tie-in learning activity on the ethics of being on an investigative committee, about which I have already blogged here.

Wall-E, Pixar 2008 film - watched on DVD for the benefit of our 5-year-old grand-daughter, who enjoyed it very much, though she really prefers Wallace and Gromit, and the references to 2001: A Space Odyssey went over her head. Like many Pixar films, I liked it much more on second viewing, when you're no longer watching to find out what happens - a sign of a good film. And I still have the Peter Gabriel end-titles song going round in my head.

Foyle's War - most welcome return of Michael Kitchen as world-weary detective Christopher Foyle in ITV's drama series, the "war" now being the Cold War. He reminds me of the line from The Russia House: "nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being" (see script transcription).