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1. In the last year, MOOCs have gotten a tremendous amount of publicity. Last November, the New York Times decided that 2012 was “the Year of the MOOC,” and columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have proclaimed ad nausea that the MOOC “revolution” is a “tsunami” that will soon transform higher education. As a Time cover article on MOOCs put it — in a rhetorical flourish that has become a truly dead cliché — “College is Dead. Long Live College!”
2 . Where is the hype coming from? On the one hand, higher education is ripe for “disruption” — to use Clayton Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation” — because there is a real, systemic crisis in higher education, one that offers no apparent or immanent solution. It’s hard to imagine how the status quo can survive if you extend current trends forward into the future: how does higher education as we know it continue if tuition fees and student debt continue to skyrocket while state funding continues to plunge? At what point does the system simply break down? Something has to give.
3. At the same time, the speed at which an obscure form of non-credit-based online pedagogy has gone so massively mainstream demonstrates the level of investment that a variety of powerful people and institutions have made in it. The MOOC revolution, if it comes, will not be the result of a groundswell of dissatisfaction felicitously finding a technology that naturally solves problems, nor some version of the market’s invisible hand. It’s a tsunami powered by the interested speculation of interested parties in a particular industry. MOOCs are, and will be, big business, and the way that their makers see profitability at the end of the tunnel is what gives them their particular shape.
4 . After all, when the term itself was coined in 2008 — MOOC, for Massively Open Online Course — it described a rather different kind of project. Dave Cormier suggested the name for an experiment in open courseware that George Siemens and Stephen Downes were putting together at the University of Manitoba, a class of 25 students that was opened up to over 1,500 online participants. The tsunami that made land in 2012 bears almost no resemblance to that relatively small — and very differently organized — effort at a blended classroom.
For Cormier, Siemens, and Downes, the first MOOC was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education, the idea that we learn best when we learn collaboratively, in networks, because the process of learning is less about acquiring new knowledge “content” than about building the social and neural connections that will allow that knowledge to circulate, be used, and to grow.
1. 去年，“大规模在线开放课程”得到了广泛的宣传。《纽约时报》去年11月份时曾把2012年称为“大规模在线开放课程之年”。撰稿人大卫·布鲁克斯和托马斯·弗莱德曼反反复复直至令人作呕地称道大规模在线开放课程引发的“教育革命”是一场“海啸”，将在短时间内在高等教育中引起变革。正如《时代周刊》里的一篇封面文章所指出的——在这个修辞学蓬勃发展的时代，“大学已死，大学万岁！”已经真正地成为了一个毫无生命力的陈词滥调。 2. 炒作从何而来？一方面，高等教育运用克莱顿·克里斯坦森的“颠覆性创新”理论“中断”的时机已经成熟。由于高等教育存在一个真正的系统性危机，没有人能为此提出显而易见或内在的解决方案。很难想象如果你把当前的趋势向前延伸至未来，这一现状能否存在下去，即如果学费持续上涨，学生债务日渐加重，而国家用于教育的资金继续下调，那我们所知道的高等教育将如何继续？该体系将会在什么时候完全崩溃掉？不得不做点什么。 3 与此同时，一种没有良好信用做基础的网络教育学形式发展的如此迅猛而成为主流，揭露了种种享有权力的人与机构在此方面投资程度之高。大规模在线开放课程革命如果到来的话，将既不会是心怀不满的公众寻解决问题的技术的结果，也不会是市场某种无形之手在起作用。这是一个特定产业中利益集团的投机行为引发的海啸。大规模在线开放课程现在是，将来也会成为大产业，它的创造者看到了它背后的巨大利润，而也正是如此也赋予这个课程具体的形式。
4 毕竟,在2008引物年，当MOOCses这一术语问世时，大规模在线开放课程描述了一个截然不同的项目。戴夫·科米尔指的一种当时加拿大曼尼托巴大学的乔治•西门子和斯蒂芬·唐斯正在制作一种开放式课件的实验，一个针对25个学生的班级的课件却面向超过1500个在线的参与者开放。于2012年登陆的如海啸一样的大规模在线课程与相对小型，组织结构不同的混合课堂几乎没有相像之处。 对于科米尔,西门子和唐斯来说，首次大规模在线开放课程是在教育中“联结者原则”中的一部分。这个观念就是我们说的网络合作，因为学习的过程与其说是获取新知识的“内容”，不如说是构建社会和神经脉络，从而使知识能传播，运用以及扩展。
上海家具展2013This first MOOC was anchored by what Dave Cormier has called “eventedness” — the fact that it was a project shared among participants, within a definable space and time — but its outcomes were to be fluid and open-ended by design. The goal was to create an educational process that would be as exploratory and creative as its participants chose to make it. More importantly, it was about building a sense of community investment in a particular project, a fundamentally socially-driven enterprise.
5. The MOOCs that emerged in 2012 look very different, starting with their central narratives of “disruption” and “un-bundling.” Instead of building networks, the neoliberal MOOC is driven by a desire to liberate and empower the individual, breaking apart actually-existing academic communities and refocusing on the individual’s acquisition of knowledge. The MOOCs being praised by utopian technologists in the New York Times appear to be the diametric opposite of what Siemens, Downes, and Cormier said they were trying to create, even if they deploy some of the same idealistic rhetoric.
Traditional courses seek to transfer content from expert to student in a lecture or seminar
setting. The original MOOCs stemmed from a connectivist desire to decentralize and de-institutionalize the traditional model, creating fundamentally open and open-ended networks of circulation and collaboration.In contrast, the MOOCs which are now being developed by Silicon Valley startups Udacity and Coursera, as well as by non-profit initiatives like edX, aim to do exactly the same thing that traditional courses have always done — transfer course content from expert to student — only to do so massively more cheaply and on a much larger scale.
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