The Maturing of the MOOC

The Maturing of the MOOC
Cuban of Stanford University distinguishes two opposing views of MOOCs, position in the
ODL heritage:
MOOCs are “traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction”
MOOCs represent student-centred learning.
Cuban argues from his personal experience and research work that MOOCs will continue
to conform to the teacher-centred model because:
1. lower cost of delivering professor-centred instruction in MOOCs (as opposed to
face-to-face instruction) where procedural knowledge and skills are expected to be
learned
2. tenure and promotion tracks in universities incentivise research rather than
teaching. Professors are less likely to invest in communities of learning or to
develop student-centred or even hybrid MOOCs, leaving it a heavily teachercentred
model.
Wenger (Institute for Research on Learning) for Lancaster University, analyses learning
not in terms of generations of technology or method of transmission, but rather in terms of
social models. Wenger identifies the learning challenge for the 21 st century as one of
harnessing “communities of practice” and transforming learning into a “self-governed
partnership among people”. Knowledge in this view implies social bodies within
communities of practice, and these entail nuanced interactions of professional bodies,
teachers, research disciplines and service recipients within workplaces and professions.
Competing views of practice within workplaces and professions further complexify the
model, and lead Wenger to propose “geographies of competence”, which are underlying
structures of meaning, locality and power that shape the social nature of knowledge. In
Wenger’s analysis, MOOCs would represent a “complexifying landscape of practice”, in
which new entrants such as NGOs, informal communities real and online, and technology
now interact with traditional practitioners. The future of learning, he argues, is based on
becoming a “learning citizen”, supported by institutions promoting knowledgeability, and to
this extent MOOCs, in Wenger’s perspective, do represent an evolution of learning.
Anderson and Dron of Athabasca University, Canada, analyse three generations of
distance education pedagogy in the International Review of Research in Open and
Distance Learning, 2011. They consider, and then reject typologies based on the
technologies used in distance education (postal education, mass media education,
interactive education). They focus instead on pedagogies that defines the learning
experience as evidenced in programme design. They set out a three-category typology of
pedagogies in distance education:
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