Moocs

“The Revolution to Come”
MOOCs and the Politics of the
Postindustrial University
Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato

Structure of presentation
1. Inside the Global Teaching Machine (GTM) – a history of
openness?
2. “The Revolution to Come” – Analyzing the rhetoric
3. Political economy: The current initiatives - Main players and
business models
4. Politics of the postindustrial university: Pedagogy, academic
labour and monetization
5. An Education Research Agenda: The Search for an
Alternative Vision? Radical Openness

Inside the global teaching
machine (GTM) – a history of
openness?
From programmed instruction to MOOCs

Elements of the emerging Global
Teaching Machine (GTM)
 Teaching machines - 1920s (Industrial S-R Psychology)
 EdTech – from developments in films, radio, TV, video, DVD etc
 Personalization
 Global calibrations: measurement, standardization, internationalization
 Where is Open Education Resources (OER) -- Open Education?
 MOOCs
___________________________________________________
Dominant phases of GTM: psychology, computerization, venture capitalism,
algorithmic teaching & learning---- privatisation of education & knowledge
Openness-based alternatives? “Open” functions as a constant for “public”

Inside the teaching machine
 Teaching machines of Sidney Pressey in the
1920s
 The teaching machine and programmed
instruction
 “A relatively simple device supplies the
necessary contingencies. The student taps a
rhythmic pattern in unison with the device.
"Unison" is specified very loosely at first (the
student can be a little early or late at each tap)
but the specifications are slowly sharpened. The
process is repeated for various speeds and
patterns. In another arrangement, the student
echoes rhythmic patterns sounded by the
machine, though not in unison, and again the
specifications for an accurate reproduction are
progressively sharpened. Rhythmic patterns can
also be brought under the control of a printed
score.” (Skinner, 1961, p. 381).

From Correspondence to Open Education
“Towards New Era in Open Education: From the “Classical” to the “Inventive” World of Digital Openness” (2013)

Rebirth of the teaching machine (1)
http://philmcrae.com/2/post/2013/04/rebirth-of-the-teaching-maching-through-the-seduction-of-data-analytics-this-
time-its-personal1.html
 a new generation of technology platforms promise to deliver
“personalized learning” for each and every student.
 This rebirth of the teaching machine centers on digital software
tutors (known as adaptive learning systems) and their grand
claims to individualize learning by controlling the pace, place and
content for each and every student….
 Personal choice, with centralized control, in an increasingly data
driven, standardized and mechanized learning system, has long
been a fantasy for many technocrats desperately wanting to
(re)shape K-12 teaching and learning with technology.


(2)
 Technologies have amplified our desires for choice, flexibility
and individualization …, so it is easy to be seduced by a
vision of computers delivering only what we want, when, and
how we want it customized.
 Many governments have in turn adopted this language in an
eagerness to reduce costs with business-like customization
and streamlined workforce productivity - all with the
expectation that a flexible education system will also be more
efficient and (cost) effective.
 Educational technology companies and publishers are rushing
to colonize the Big Data and personalized learning revolution.
In the United States the trajectory of education reform is one
of increased standardization, centralization and adaptive
learning systems…. Big data and personalized learning is the
next tsunami.

Big Data and Learning
Analytics
 “The emerging research communities in educational
data mining and learning analytics are
developing methods for mining and modeling the
increasing amounts of fine-grained data becoming
available about learners.” Coursera – Ryan Baker
 Prediction; Modeling Behavior Detection; Behavior
Detector Validation; Relationship Mining; Discovery
with Models; Visualization of Educational Data;
Knowledge Inference; Knowledge Structures;
Clustering and Factor Analysis; Educational Databases

Big data and PISA by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's
Secretary-General
http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/big-data-and-pisa.html
 Big data is the foundation on
which education can reinvent
its business model and build
the coalition of governments,
businesses, and social
entrepreneurs that can bring
together the evidence,
innovation and resources to
make lifelong learning a reality
for all. So the next educational
superpower might be the one
that can combine the
hierarchy of institutions with
the power of collaborative
information flows and social
networks.

Where is openness in
algorithmic T&L systems?
Openness as peer governance, peer learning, information transparency

Understanding Education through Big Data
By Lyndsay Grant October 25, 2013 - 10:20am
http://dmlcentral.net/blog/lyndsay-grant/understanding-education-through-big-data
 It is not new that educational
institutions collect and analyse
data for predicting and intervening
in children’s educational
performance…What is new is
digitising, meta-tagging and
aggregating that data with many
other data sets, making possible
new connections, predictions and
diagnoses
 {it indicates} a potentially lucrative
new market tapping into students’
data.
 Who Decides Our Learner
Identities?

The Era of Educational Openness (EO)
Educational Openness as a Research Agenda
 Eds. Michael A. Peters & Rodrigo Britez, 2008
“We all know how neo-liberal globalization has
produced unequal and uneven social and
educational consequences, and how global
integration of economy, facilitated by the new
developments in information and communication,
has occurred in a space characterized by
asymmetrical relations of power. While the notion
of global connectivity has been hailed for its
potential to liberate human relations from the
confinement of artificial national boundaries, it is
equally clear that it has disrupted, even destroyed,
the lives of many people and communities. In
education, while many have been able to take
advantage of global interconnectivity and mobility,
others have been left behind, trapped within the
cycles of poverty and unequal opportunities.
Despite their cosmopolitan promise, new media
technologies, so often noted as the key driver of
globalization, have reproduced patterns of cultural
and linguistic privileges, now at a global level.”
Fazal Rizvi

Preface
“The course taught by Michel Peters demanded from students an
understanding of the role information and communication technologies
play in global reconfigurations. More specifically it required them to think
about the potential of the Open Source movement for opening up new
communication systems, for promoting effective cross-cultural dialogue
and for realizing the democratizing possibilities of education. The three
key terms of the course –open source, open access and open education
–were constantly problematized with respect to the ways in which they
might be related. In this sense, the discussion worked at each of
descriptive, analytical, normative and imaginative levels simultaneously.
It brought together on-campus and on-line students into a productive
dialogue, challenging them to work beyond the binary between physical
and virtual spaces. It encouraged students to explore some of the more
complex issues surrounding new technologies and new media, and how
we might interpret the notions of open source and open access in world
of digital divide. But equally it explored their potential for the development
of open education and open society. The notion of open itself became a
key point of debate.” - Fazal Rizvi

Open Education and Education for Openness
Introduction
 Open education involves a commitment to openness
and is therefore inevitably a political and social
project.
 The concept of openness in regard to education
predates the openness movement that begins with
free software and open source in the mid 1980s with
roots going back to the Enlightenment that are
bound up with the philosophical foundations of
modern education with its commitments to freedom,
citizenship, knowledge for all, social progress and
individual transformation.

(2)
 political, social and technological developments have taken place
in parallel alongside the history of the movement of open
education that have heightened certain political and
epistemological features and technological enabled others that
emphasize questions of access to knowledge, the co-production
and co-design of educational programs and of knowledge, the
sharing, use, reuse and modification of resources while enhancing
the ethics of participation and collaboration.
 Open education as a movement sits within the broader framework
of the history of openness that brings together a number of
disciplines and fields to impact directly upon the value of
knowledge and learning, their geographic distribution and
ownership, and their organization.

The Virtues of Openness
 Michael A. Peters & Peter Roberts, 2012
The movement toward greater openness represents a change
of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated
and complex changes that transform markets altering the
modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era
based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-
to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of
participation. These changes indicate a broader shift from the
underlying industrial mode of production a productionist
metaphysics to a postindustrial mode of consumption as use,
reuse, and modification where new logics of social media
structure different patterns of cultural consumption and
symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily creative
activity. The economics of openness constructs a new
language of presuming and produsage in order to capture the
open participation, collective co-creativity, communal
evaluation, and commons-based production of social and
public goods. Information is the vital element in the new politics
and economy that links space, knowledge, and capital in
networked practices and freedom is the essential ingredient in
this equation if these network practices are to develop or
transform themselves into 'knowledge cultures’

The Virtues of Openness
 The book argues that openness seems also to suggest
political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed,
even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of
inquiry and the dissemination of its results. "The Virtues of
Openness" examines the complex history of the concept of
the open society before beginning a systematic investigation
of openness in relation to the book, the open text and the
written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the
development of new open spaces of scholarship with their
impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open
science, and the open global digital economy.

The Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and
Theory (1999-)
http://eepat.net/doku.php?id=thematic_sections
The Idea of Openness
 Open Education and Education for Openness
 Open Works, Open Cultures and Open Learning Systems
 'Openness' and 'Open Education' in the Global Digital
Economy: An Emerging Paradigm of Social Production
 Creativity, Openness and User-Generated Cultures
 Scientific Communication and the Open Society : The
Emerging Paradigm of ‘Open Knowledge Production’

The Pedagogy of the Open Society
Knowledge and Governance of Higher Education
 Michael A. Peters, Tze-Chang
Liu & David Ondercin, 2012
 Openness is a value and
philosophy that also offers us
a means for transforming our
institutions and our practices.
This book examines the
interface between learning,
pedagogy and economy in
terms of the potential of open
institutions to transform and
revitalize education in the
name of the public good.

Radical Openness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ5zb8gyAr4
“Radical Openness: Creative institutions, creative
labor and the logic of public organizations in
cognitive capitalism”
With the advent of the Internet, web 2.0 technologies
and user-generated cultures new principles of radical
openness have become the basis of innovative
institutional forms that decentralize and democratize
power relationships, promotes access to knowledge
and encourages symmetrical, horizontal peer learning
relationships.

Open Education
 Open Education
 Open Learning (1971 OU-UK;
other OUs)
 Open CourseWare (2001:
MIT)
 Open Educational Resources
(2002: UNESCO)
 Open Education (2008: Cape
Town Declaration)
 Massive Open Online Courses
 Opening up Education (2013:
EU)
 Open Source
 Open access
 Open Archiving
 Open Journal Systems
 Open Publishing
---------------------------------------------
-
 Open Inquiry
 Open Information
 Open Government
 Open Management

“The Revolution to Come”
The ‘Right’ rhetoric
Discourse analysis of four influential reports
1. University of the Future, Ernst & Young, 2012
2. An Avalanche is Coming, Higher education and the revolution ahead, Barber et al, 2012
3. NYT Schools for Tomorrow : Virtual U – The Coming of Age of Online Education, 2013
4. MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education, Yuan & Powell, 2013

University of the Future
Ernst & Young, 2012
“A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change”
http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/University_of_the_future/$FILE/University_of_the_future_2012.
pdf

University of the Future:
Ernst & Young

Current Australian model
 The current Australian
university model — a
broad-based teaching
and research
institution, with a large
base of assets and
back office — will prove
unviable in all but a few
cases.
 Ernst & Young’s view
is that the higher
education sector is
undergoing a
fundamental
transformation in
terms of its role in
society, mode of
operation, and
economic structure
and value.

1. Democratisation of
knowledge and access
“The massive increase in the
availability of ‘knowledge’ online and
the mass expansion of access to
university education in developed and
developing markets means a
fundamental change in the role of
universities as originators and keepers
of knowledge.”

2. Contestability of markets
and funding
“Competition for students, in Australia
and abroad, is reaching new levels of
intensity, at the same time as
governments globally face tight
budgetary environments. Universities
will need to compete for students and
government funds as never before.”

3. Digital technologies
“Digital technologies have transformed
media, retail, entertainment and many
other industries — higher education is
next. Campuses will remain, but digital
technologies will transform the way
education is delivered and accessed, and
the way ‘value’ is created by higher
education providers, public and private
alike.”

4. Global mobility
“Global mobility will grow for students,
academics, and university brands.
This will not only intensify competition,
but also create opportunities for much
deeper global partnerships and
broader access to student and
academic talent.”

5. Integration with industry
“Universities will need to build significantly
deeper relationships with industry in the
decade ahead — to differentiate teaching
and learning programs, support the
funding and application of research, and
reinforce the role of universities as drivers
of innovation and growth.”

An Avalanche is Coming
Higher education and the
revolution ahead
Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly, Saad Rizv
Foreword by Lawrence Summers,
President Emeritus, Harvard University
Institute for Public Policy Research, March 2013
http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2013/04/avalanche-is-coming_Mar2013_10432.pdf

Summers’ Foreword
An Avalanche is Coming sets out vividly the challenges ahead for
higher education, not just in the US or UK but around the world. Just
as we’ve seen the forces of technology and globalisation transform
sectors such as media and communications or banking and finance
over the last two decades, these forces may now transform higher
education. The solid classical buildings of great universities may look
permanent but the storms of change now threaten them.
In An Avalanche, the authors argue that a new phase of competitive
intensity is emerging as the concept of the traditional university itself
comes under pressure and the various functions it serves are
unbundled and increasingly supplied, perhaps better, by providers
that are not universities at all.

An Avalanche is Coming
 The traditional university is being
unbundled.
 Some will need to specialise in
teaching alone – and move away
from the traditional lecture to the
multi-faced teaching possibilities
now available:
 the elite university
 the mass university
 the niche university
 the local university
 the lifelong learning mechanism.

There are three fundamental challenges
facing systems all round the world
1. How can universities and
new providers ensure
education for employability?
2. How can the link between
cost and quality be broken?
3. How does the entire learning
ecosystem need to change
to support alternative
providers and the future of
work?
1. The global economy is
changing
2. The global economy is
suffering
3. The cost of higher education
is increasing faster than
inflation
4. Meanwhile, the value of a
degree is falling
5. Content is ubiquitous
6. The competition is heating
up

The Aftermath
In conclusion, the combination of marketisation – the student
consumer as king with options outside universities for talented
students too – and globalisation will lead to universities being
less and less contained within national systems and more and
more both benchmarked globally and a leading part of the
growth of knowledge economics – collaborating and
competing. In the new world the learner will be in the driver’s
seat, with a keen eye trained on value. For institutions,
deciding to embrace this new world may turn out to be the only
way to avoid the avalanche that is coming.
Just as an avalanche shapes the mountain, so the changes
ahead will fundamentally alter the landscape for universities.

New York City, September 17, 2013
http://www.nytschoolsfortomorrow.com/

Agenda 1
 OPENING PLENARY: IS ONLINE EDUCATION THE
GREAT EQUALIZER?
There is no doubt that we are in the middle of an online
education revolution, which offers huge potential to
broaden access to education and therefore, in theory,
level the playing field for students from lower-income,
lower-privileged backgrounds. But evidence to date
shows that the increasing number of poorly designed
courses could actually have the reverse effect and put
vulnerable students at an even bigger disadvantage.

Agenda 2
 DEBATE: HAS THE UNIVERSITY AS AN INSTITUTION
HAD ITS DAY?
Higher education has always been an array of autonomous
institutions, each with their own courses, their own faculty,
and their own requirements for their own degrees. But online
education is starting to break down those lines, in ways that
are likely to lead to a lot more shared courses, consortia and
credit transfers. In addition, there are a growing number of
companies (not schools) providing higher education courses
outside the traditional higher education institutions. As we
move towards the possibility of a multi-institution, multi-credit
qualification, is the traditional higher education institution in
danger of losing applicants, income and identity?

Agenda 3
 THE DEALBOOK PANEL
WHAT’S THE NEW ERA BUSINESS MODEL FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION?
The traditional idea that education is something the
government provides free, for the public good, is coming
under assault from an increasing assortment of new
ventures offering for-profit schools, for-profit online courses,
tests, curricula, interactive whiteboard, learning
management systems, paid-for verified certificates of
achievement, e-books, e-tutoring, e-study groups and more.
Which areas have the most potential growth — and where is
the smart investment going?

Agenda 4
 GAMECHANGERS: HOW WILL ONLINE EDUCATION
REVOLUTIONALIZE WHAT WE KNOW AND UNDERSTAND
ABOUT LEARNING?
Traditionally, pedagogical research has been done in tiny groups; but
new-generation classes of 60,000 students make it possible to do
large scale testing and provide potentially game-changing research
on how students learn best. Using the big data from online courses,
we have access to new information about what pedagogical
approaches work best. MOOCs, and many more traditional online
classes, can track every keystroke, every homework assignment and
every test answer a student provides. This can produce a huge
amount of data on how long students pay attention to a lecture, where
they get stuck in a problem set, what they do to get unstuck, what
format and pacing of lectures, demonstrations, labs and quizzes lead
to the best outcomes, and so on. How can we use Big Data for the
good of the education profession, and not for “Big Brother”?

MOOCs and Open Education:
Implications for Higher
Education
A white paper
By Li Yuan and Stephen Powell
March, 2013
http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667

MAKING SENSE OF MOOCS
 MOOCs are a relatively recent online learning phenomenon,
having developed from the first early examples five years ago,
they are now generating considerable media attention and
significant interest from higher education institutions and venture
capitalists that see a business opportunity to be exploited.
 They can be seen as an extension of existing online learning
approaches, in terms of open access to courses and scalability,
they also offer an opportunity to think afresh about new business
models that include elements of open education. This includes the
ability to disaggregate teaching from assessment and accreditation
for differential pricing and pursuit of marketing activities.

MOOCs as Disruptive
Innovations
 The theory of disruptive innovation (Bower and Christensen, 1995)
offers an explanation as to why some innovations disrupt existing
markets at the expense of incumbent players. In this case, there is a
significant question for higher education institutions to address: are
online teaching innovations, such as MOOCs, heralding a change in
the business landscape that poses a threat to their existing models of
provision of degree courses?
 This possibility is brought about through the combination of wider
societal adoption of communication and, particularly, Internet
technologies, changing funding models and the development of new
business models that leverage this opportunity. If this is the case, then
the theory of disruptive innovation suggests that there is a strong
argument for establishing an autonomous business unit in order to
make an appropriate response to these potentially disruptive
innovations.

MOOCs and Open Education
Timeline

Political Economy
The current initiatives
Main players and business models

Business Models (1)(Yuan & Powell, 2013 & other sources)
 edX https://www.edX.org/ is a non-profit MOOCs platform founded by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University with $60 million.
20 to 30 courses in 2013
 Coursera https://www.coursera.org/ is a for-profit company, which started with
$22 million total investment from venture capitalists, including New Enterprise
Associates and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers Education. Stanford
University, Princeton University and the Universities of Michigan and
Pennsylvania. 197 courses in 18 subjects
 UDACITY https://www.udacity.com/ is another for-profit start-up founded by
Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky with $21.1 million
investment from venture capitalist firms, including Charles River Ventures and
Andreessen Horowitz. 18 online courses
 Udemy https://www.udemy.com/ founded in 2010, with a total $16 million
investment from Insight Venture Partners, Lightbank, MHS Capital, 500 start-
ups and other investors provides a learning platform, which allows anyone to
teach and participate in online video classes. Udemy currently offers over 5,000
courses, 1,500 of which require payment, with theaverage price for classes
falling between $20 and $200.

Business Models (2)
 P2Pu https://p2pu.org/en/ was launched in 2009 with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the
Shuttleworth Foundation. P2PU offers some of the features of MOOCs. Community centred approach to
provide opportunities for anyone that is willing to teach and learn online. 50 courses
 Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/ another well-known free online learning platform, is a
not-for-profit educational organisation with significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and Google. The Khan Academy, started by Salman Khan in 2008, offers over 3,600 video lectures in
academic subjects with automated exercises and continuous assessment
 Open2Study: an Australian MOOC provider with some differences: short courses (4 weeks), use of
industry professionals (not academic faculty) to teach some courses, digital badges for active
participation in the course discussions and a form of the freemium business model
 OpenupEd: Eleven universities in eleven European countries will offer MOOCs in a variety of subject
areas, each course requiring 20-200 hours of study.
 NovoEd: NovoEd was developed by Stanford and, at startup in April 2013, includes only Stanford-based
courses with a difference -- an emphasis on student interaction and collaboration. The expectation is that
this will make the MOOC more enriching and reduce the notoriously high drop-out rate.
 iTunes U offers a platform for universities to place lectures, tutorials, campus tours, laboratory
demonstration and other digital materials online.

https://www.futurelearn.com/
 We are a private company
wholly owned by the Open
University, with the benefit of
over 40 years of their
experience in distance
learning and online education.
Our partners include over 20
of the best UK and
international universities, as
well as institutions with a huge
archive of cultural and
educational material, including
the British Council, the British
Library, and the British
Museum.
 FutureLearn offers you a
powerful new way to learn
online. Every course has been
designed according to
principles of effective learning,
through storytelling,
discussion, visible learning,
and using community support
to celebrate progress.

Australia and NZ
 Edx – ANU, UQ
 Coursera – Melbourne, UWA, UNSIV
 Open2Study – RMIT, Wollongong, Swinburne, Griffith,
Curtin, Macquarie, UWS, Massey
 FutureLearn – Monash, Auckland
 Independent – UWH (Class2Go), UTAS
(DesiretoLearn), Waikato (Weka, Data Mining)

MOOCs at Melbournehttp://le.unimelb.edu.au/elearning/moocs.html
Melbourne is the first Australian University to join
Coursera, the educational technology company which
partners with over 30 leading universities world-wide to
offer free online access to world-class higher education.
Through Coursera, Melbourne can provide first-class
tertiary courses to a broad and diverse new audience who
otherwise may not have the chance to engage with the
University.

California Senate Bill 520
 According to the legislation, called Senate Bill 520, nearly 90% of California’s
112 community colleges reported waiting lists for courses in autumn 2012,
with an average of 7,000 students on waiting lists per college.
 Meanwhile, only 60% of students at the University of California and a paltry
16% at California State University were able to earn a degree within the
standard four years, largely due to their inability to register for the courses
they need in order to graduate.
 Under the new legislation, a panel of faculty leaders from the three systems
would develop a list of the 50 most oversubscribed introductory courses and
deem which online courses would be eligible to stand in.
 The platform, which would cost around $10 million to create, would allow
students to access either free MOOCs or low-cost online classes. The courses
would only be available to students who were unable to enrol in similar
classes at their institution.

California’s Online Education Bill SB 520
Passes Senate
Posted on June 13, 2013 by Phil Hill
 Section 2 (e) When evaluating a potential faculty or campus grantee to receive an incentive grant
pursuant to this section, the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California
State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges shall consider the extent to
which the developed or deployed course will do each of the following:
 (1) Provide students with instructional support and related services to promote retention and success.
 (2) Provide students with interaction with instructors and other students.
 (3) Contain a proctored student assessment and examination process that ensures academic integrity
and satisfactorily measures student learning.
 (4) Provide a student with an opportunity to assess the extent to which he or she is suited for online
learning before enrolling.
 (5) Use, as the primary course text or as a wholly acceptable alternative, content, where it exists, from
the California Digital Open Source Library established pursuant to Section 66408.
 (6) Include adaptive learning technology systems or comparable technologies that can provide
significant improvement in student learning.
 (7) Be made available to students of another system, regardless of the system at which they are
enrolled.

California's Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock
Waves, but Key Questions Remain Unanswered
(Chronicle HE, March 14, 2013)
 The language of the measure, as currently written, outlines
a platform that would apply to all three state systems: the
University of California, California State University, and the
community colleges. A nine-member faculty council
established last year to oversee open-source digital
textbooks would come up with a list of the 50 lower-level
courses that students most need to fulfill general-education
requirements—courses that are, as Mr. Steinberg put it,
"identified as the most difficult for a student to get a seat."
The council would then review and approve which online
courses would be allowed to fulfill the requirement and count
for credit as conferred by state institutions.

MOOC Bill Dead for Now
(August 1, 2013)
Ry Rivard
 A controversial California bill to pass off untold thousands of state
college students to nontraditional providers of instruction, some of
them for-profit or unaccredited, is dead for now.
 The bill, unveiled in March by a powerful California lawmaker, initially
would have required the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to
grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups,
including for-profits companies, among them the providers of massive
open online courses, or MOOCs. The legislation was the subject of
massive media coverage, with many citing it as evidence that
traditional higher ed models were doomed.
 The immediate death of the bill is yet another setback to a wave
of private companies hoping to play in the public higher
education market.

LMS Market Report
 Learning Management Systems (LMS) Market Worth $7.83 Billion by
2018 Forecasted in MarketsandMarkets Recent Report
 DALLAS, TEXAS--(Marketwired - Oct. 29, 2013) - The report "Learning
Management Systems (LMS) Market [Products (Content Management,
Student Management, Performance Management, Collaboration,
Administration), by Users (K-12, Higher Education, Corporate)]:
Worldwide Market Forecasts and Analysis (2013 - 2018)" by
MarketsandMarkets, defines and segments the LMS market into various sub-
segments with an in-depth analysis and forecasting of revenues.
 Browse 113 market data tables and 56 figures spread through 195 pages
and in-depth TOC on "Learning Management Systems (LMS) Market"
 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/learning-management-
systems-market-1266.html

Opposition to the Billhttp://petitions.moveon.org/sign/uc-faculty-opposition
 UC Faculty Opposition to SB520 -- Automatic MOOC transfer credit
 We, the undersigned faculty of the University of California, write to express
our many, deep concerns about SB 520, as recently amended. We believe
that this bill will lower academic standards (particularly in key skills such as
writing, math, and basic analysis), augment the educational divide along
socio-economic lines, and diminish the ability for underrepresented minorities
to excel in higher education. In other words, we predict that SB 520 would
worsen precisely the situation it claims to resolve.
The research on MOOCs demonstrates that on line courses suffer from high
dropout rates, poor outcomes for students struggling with basic skills, and high
cheating rates (see Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars, “Adaptability to Online
Learning:Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas.”
Community College Research Center, Teachers College Columbia University,
February 2013). This research also indicates that MOOCs produce the worst
outcomes for exactly those students they would most likely serve — students
from less wealthy families. None of these unfortunate realities square with
your hope for high-quality, wide-access education.
 1600 signed

Florida Says Yes to MOOCs
July 1st, 2013
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/07/01/florida-says-yes-to-moocs/
Florida Governor Rick Scott has signed a bill to expand
the use of massively open online courseware in the
state’s primary, secondary, and higher education systems.
The law, which has been described as a slightly watered
down version of an earlier bill, encourages public schools
to use the courses as a teaching tool in certain
designated subjects and allows college students to use
them to obtain transfer credits when switching schools.

Four Scenarios of Future
Higher Education

Politics of the Postindustrial
University
Venture capital partnerships
Forms of parallel privatization

Academic Labour Policy
MOOCs as academic labour
policy raising larger long-term
issues of digital or immaterial
labour: automation, deskilling,
deprofessionalisation, precarity for
adjuncts, grad assistants and
professoriat; ad-hoc "freelancing"
work regime.
Digital Taylorism, [is]where the
knowledge of technicians,
managers, and professionals is
translated into working knowledge
by codifying, capturing, and
digitalizing their work.

Labour issues
 As Inside Higher Ed reports, teachers, professors and
their unions are dead set against the new law:
 Tom Auxter, the president of the 7,000-member United
Faculty of Florida, said “intense and feverish”
opposition from faculty helped scale back the plan. Still,
he warned of a generation of “cheap and dirty” online
courses offered to students before they enroll in
college. “No matter how many times they use ‘quality,’
this is a cheapening of what higher education is all
about,” Auxter warned, referring to supporters of
MOOCs for credit.

What happens to Pedagogy
under Digital Taylorism?

Pedagogy and Cultural
Difference
 The obliteration of cultural difference
 Cultural models of “Globality” – Metropole and Global
periphery
 “Indigeneity” and Southern Theory
 The rise of “global studies” and “global studies in
education”
 Colonization and postcolonization orientations
 Place and mobility

MOOCs enhance assembly production
line of “open learning”

Cognitive Capitalism
Cognitive capitalism - sometimes
referred to as 'third capitalism,' after
mercantilism and industrial capitalism - is
an increasingly significant theory, given
its focus on the socio-economic changes
caused by Internet and Web 2.0
technologies that have transformed the
mode of production and the nature of
labor. The theory of cognitive capitalism
has its origins in French and Italian
thinkers, particularly Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari’s Capitalism and
Schizophrenia , Michel Foucault's work
on the birth of biopower and Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and
Multitude , as well as the Italian
Autonomist Marxist movement that had
its origins in the Italian operaismo
(workerism) of the 1960s.

Why I am attracted to this
theory
 It combines Foucault, Deleuze
& Guattari with Negri and the
Marxist tradition of Italian
workerism to serve as a basis
for theorizing creative labor
 It theorizes the transformation
of capitalism from the
viewpoint of labor rather than
(human) capital
 It provides a useful vehicle for
discussing the role and status
of the university in the tradition
of postindustrialism
In postindustrial society Hardt
and Negri observe, “jobs for the
most part are highly mobile and
involve flexible skills. . . . They
are characterized in general by
the central role played by
knowledge, information, affect
and communication” (2000,
285). In different conditions,
such work might be thought of
as extending our distinctively
human, universal and rational,
creative powers in concert with
machine-power (i.e., artificial
cognition

Cognitive capitalism as a working
hypothesis, P2P Foundation
http://p2pfoundation.net/Cognitive_Capitalism
 The production of wealth is no longer based on a standardised and
homogenous models for the organisation of the labour process
regardless of the types of good produced. Production in cognitive
capitalism takes place through a wide variety of labour-process
models made possible by the development of new technologies of
linguistic communication and transportation, and particularly
characterised by forms of networking.
 Cognitive capitalism means that the production of wealth takes
place increasingly through knowledge, through the use of those
faculties of labour that are defined by cognitive activity (cognitive
labour), in other words principally through immaterial cerebral and
relational activities.

Financialisation of HE
MOOCs and the Future of the Humanities (Part One)
A roundtable at the LA Review of Books
Ian Bogost http://bogo.st/1a9
 MOOCs are speculative financial instruments. The purpose of an educational institution is to educate, but the
purpose of a startup is to convert itself into a financial instrument. The two major MOOC providers, Udacity and
Coursera, are venture capital-funded startups, and therefore they are beholden to high leverage, rapid growth with an
interest in a fast flip to a larger technology company or the financial market.
 MOOCs are a financial policy for higher education. They exemplify what Naomi Klein has called "disaster
capitalism": policy guilefully initiated in the wake of upheaval. The need to teach more students with fewer resources
is a complex situation.
 MOOCs are a type of marketing. They allow academic institutions to signal that they are with-it and progressive, in
tune with the contemporary technological climate. They make an institution's administration appear to be doing novel
work on "the future of higher education," and they offer professors an opportunity to reach a large number of students
who might also spread their ideas, buy their books, or otherwise publicize their professional practice.
 MOOCs are an expression of Silicon Valley values. Today's business practices privilege the accrual of value in the
hands of a small number of network operators. Anything unable to be maximally leveraged isn't worth doing.
 MOOCs are a kind of entertainment media. We are living in an age of para-educationalism: TED Talks, "big idea"
books, and the professional lecture circuit have reconfigured the place of ideas (of a certain kind) in the media
mainstream. Flattery, attention, the appeal of celebrity, the aspiration to become a member of a certain community,
and other triumphs of personality have become the currency of thinking, even as anti-intellectualism remains
ascendant.

MOOCs and Venture Capital
 MOOCs are increasingly the result of venture capital
partnerships and for-profit arrangements among big
publishers, universities, and providers of video content.
 “MOOCs may also be emblematic of a broader shift in attitudes
towards online education that reflects changing patterns of online
activity in wider society. MOOCs and other open and online
learning technologies may reshape the core work of institutions,
from pedagogical models to business models, and the relationship
between institutions, academics, students and technology
providers.”
 MOOCs: Higher Education’s Digital Moment? UK Universities,
May, 2013

An Alternative Vision?
The Philosophy of Radical Openness

Radical Openness?
 Radical openness is a complex code
word that represents a change of
philosophy and ethos, a set of
interrelated and complex changes that
transforms markets, the mode of
production and consumption, and the
underlying logic of our institutions.

Peer Philosophies
 This presentation advocates the significance of peer
governance, review and collaboration as a basis for
open institutions and open management philosophies.
 This form of openness has been theorized in different
ways by Dewey, Pierce and Wittgenstein as a
“community of inquiry” – a set of values and philosophy
committed to the ethic of criticism that offers means for
transforming our institutions and ourselves in what
Antonio Negri and others call the age of cognitive
capitalism.

Creative Labour
Expressive, aesthetic labor (“creative
labor”) demands institutional
structures for developing “knowledge
cultures” as “flat hierarchies” that
permit reciprocal academic and
learning exchanges as a new basis
for public institutions.

Ten Core Open Principles of
Social Media
1. Participation: user-participation encourages mass collaboration and
mobilizes the community to generate collective intelligence; user-
generated content is the basis of social media.
2. Collective intelligence: users ‘collect’, share and modify user-generated
content which is a collective knowledge-building process that invokes that
“community of inquiry”.
3. Transparency: each participant gets to see, use, reuse, augment,
validate, critique and evaluate others’ contributions, leading to collective
self-improvement on the basis of the principle of criticism.
4. Decentralization: from the logic of ‘one to many’ that characterizes
industrial media to the flat structures of ‘many to many’ that characterize
social media – interactive anytime, anyplace collaboration independently
of other contributors.
5. P2P community of inquiry: sociality based on ‘conversations’ that are
relationship and knowledge-seeking.

(2)
 Personalization: personalization refers to the process of tailoring and
customization of digital processes based on the individual’s preferences and
behavior.
 ‘Design is politics’: this feature is an explicit recognition of the dimension of
power in design: how social media sites are designed determines how people
will use them.
 Emergence and self-organisation: emergence refers to self-organizing social
structures, expertise, work processes, content organization and information
taxonomies that are not a product of any one person.
 Criticism and Revisability: social media can be altered, unlike industrial media;
it can be infinitely updated and added to and allows group editing and individual
contestation.
 Public Ownership: social media are accessible and available at little and
decreasing cost, unlike industrial media that are controlled, require large
investments and are easily co-opted into large-scale surveillance and ‘big data’
analytics.

Socializing the University
 The reinvention of the university as a public
institution allows an embrace of a diverse
philosophical heritage based on the notions of
“public’: “the public sphere”, “publics” (in the
plural), “civil society”, and “global public
sphere”—all concepts that hold open the
prospect of recognizing indigeneity, place and
the local and addressing the global.

Retheorizing “the social”
Four interconnected layers:
 Social Media
 Social (co) Production
 Social (creative) Labor
 The Social Mind (The Dewey-Wittgenstein configuration)
_____________________________________________
These different layers can be seen to be in part a development
out of a theory of social and cultural practice.

University as a Public
Knowledge Institution
 The notion of the university as a public knowledge institution
needs to reinvent a language and to initiate a new discourse that
reexamines the notions of “public” and “institution” in a digital
global economy characterized by increasing intercultural and
international interconnectedness.
 This discourse needs to begin by understanding the historical and
material conditions of its own future possibilities including threats
of the monopolization of knowledge and privatization of higher
education together with the prospects and promise of forms of
openness (open source, open access, open education, open
science, open management) that promote the organization of
creative (or expressive) labour and the democratization of access
and knowledge in the age of cognitive capitalism.

Some references
 Bower, J., Christensen, C., (1995). Disruptive technologies: catching the wave. Harvard Business
Review, pp.41–53. https://cbred.uwf.edu/sahls/medicalinformatics/docfiles/Disruptive Technologies.pdf
 Educause, (2012), What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs, http://tinyurl.com/c7gqj65
 Jarrett, J (2012), What Are 'MOOC's and Why Are Education Leaders Interested in
Them?http://www.huffingtonpost.com/impatient-optimists/what-are-moocs-and-why-
ar_b_2123399.html
 Global Industry Analysts, (2010), ELearning: A Global Strategic Business Report
,http://www.strategyr.com/eLEARNING_Market_Report.asp
 Hill, P (2012), Online Educational Delivery Models: A Descriptive View,
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/online-educational-
 Willetts, D., (2011), Speech to the Universities UK Spring Conference, http://goo.gl/PdF8y.
 Li Yuan (CETIS), Stephen Powell (CETIS) (2013) MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for
Higher EducationURI: http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667

Truthout
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18120-massive-open-online-courses-
and-beyond-the-revolution-to-come

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