Jeremy Knox

Digital Culture Clash: "Massive" Education in the "E-Learning and Digital Cultures" MOOC.

While education has been both open and online, the sizeable enrolment numbers associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are somewhat unprecedented. In order to gauge the significance of education at scale, this article analyses specific examples of massive participation derived from E-learning and Digital Cultures, a MOOC from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera. Student-created content, user statistics, and survey data are illustrated to examine the experiences and repercussions of engaging with educational activity where participants number in the tens of thousands. This activity is shown to mirror established instructionist or constructivist approaches to pedagogy. However, rather than working with “massiveness,” these positions are suggested to oppose large participant numbers. Concluding remarks propose an irreducible diversity of participation, rather than a generalised categorisation of “student,” and call for future considerations of the MOOC to move beyond individualism and self-interest.

Five critiques of the open educational resources movement

This paper will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources (OER). It is intended to examine and critique the theories which underpin the promotion of OER in higher education, not provide guidance on their implementation. (1) I will introduce the concepts of positive and negative liberty to suggest an under-theorisation of the term ‘open’. (2) OER literature will be shown to endorse a two-tiered system, in which the institution is both maintained and disaggregated. (3) I will highlight a diminishing of the role of pedagogy within the OER vision and the promotion of a learner-centred model for education. (4) This stance will be aligned with humanistic assumptions of unproblematic self-direction and autonomy. (5) I will discuss the extent to which the OER movement aligns itself with economically orientated models of the university. I offer these critiques as a framework for the OER movement to develop as a theoretically rigorous area of scholarship.

From MOOCs to Learning Analytics: Scratching the surface of the 'visual'

The visualization of big MOOC data enables us to see trends in student behaviors and activities around the globe, but what is it that we are not seeing?

Open education: the need for a critical approach

This special issue is concerned with developing critical approaches to open education: about delving deeper into what we mean when we use this term, how it is recognised and understood, and how the particular claims of open education influence policy and manifest in practice. We hope the work collected here will contribute to the continued development and embedding of this area of educational practice. ‘Openness’ has become a highly charged and politicised term, a movement operating in many areas outside of education (for example, open knowledge, open government, open access, open data, open source, and open culture). In the process, it has acquired a sheen of naturalised common sense and legitimacy, and formed what seems to be a post-political space of apparent consensus. Invitations to question openness are quite rare, particularly within a field like education that is above all motivated by a desire to exchange knowledge, to make it accessible, and to positively affect the lives of individuals. However, it is precisely this view of openness – as a virtue of natural worth – that is problematic, not only because it masks alternative perspectives, but also because it does so with an apparent moral authority that renders the critic at best a technophobe and a cynic, and at worst an elitist and a champion of the status quo. Indeed, we think that in this moment when it is perhaps least fashionable to question open education that critical perspectives are most urgently needed. Open education is gaining increasing traction, perhaps most noticeably through relatively recent high-profile online initiatives such as the open educational resources (OER) movement and massive open online courses (MOOCs), but also many other moves which attempt to widen access to education or challenge the perceived dominance of established institutional provision. Prominent conferences are devoted to the subject, such as the Open Education Conference. In 2015 it was entitled Mainstreaming Open Education, and in 2016 it is set to be Open Culture, signalling not only a growing confidence in open education as a field in itself, but also the sense

Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education

Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course critiques the problematic reliance on humanism that pervades online education and the MOOC, and explores theoretical frameworks that look beyond these limitations. While MOOCs (massive open online courses) have attracted significant academic and media attention, critical analyses of their development have been rare. Following an overview of MOOCs and their corporate means of promotion, this book unravels the tendencies in research and theory that continue to adopt normative views of user access, participation, and educational space in order to offer alternatives to the dominant understandings of community and authenticity in education.

Postdigital science and education

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. This has inspired the emergence of a new concept—‘the postdigital’— which is slowly but surely gaining traction in a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to the arts (Bishop, Gansing, Parikka, & Wilk, 2017 ; Monoskop, 2018), music (Cascone, 2000), architecture (Spiller, 2009), humanities (Hall, 2013 ; Tabbi, in press), (social) sciences (Taffel, 2016), and in many inter-, trans-, and post-disciplines between them (Berry & Dieter, 2015). Through this research, the term postdigital is slowly entering academic discourse. The University of Edinburgh’s Center for Research in Digital Education is seriously considering rebranding toward the postdigital (Bayne & Jandric, 2017, p. 204, see also Jandric, 2017, p. 201) ; Coventry University recently established the Center for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, 2018) ; authors of this editorial are editors for the forthcoming journal Postdigital Science and Education

Data power in education

The burgeoning field of learning analytics (LA) is gaining significant traction in education, bolstered by the increasing amounts of student data generated through educational software. However, critical discussions of LA are in short supply. Drawing on work in the cultural studies of data and critical algorithm studies, this paper begins by examining three central issues: the distancing and “black boxing” of LA disciplinary practices, the mythologizing of objective data, and the concern for future prediction. The second section describes the design and implementation of the “Learning Analytics Report Card” (LARC), a pilot project that sought to develop experimental approaches to LA. As such, rather than seeking to simply produce analytics, the LARC attempted to foster critical awareness of computational data analysis among teachers and learners.

Learning in the age of algorithmic cultures

This Editorial describes the main challenges at the intersections between algorithmic cultures and human learning. It briefly analyses papers in this Special Issue of E-learning and Digital Media ‘Learning in the age of algorithmic cultures’ and shows that researchers in the field are still struggling with grand ideas and questions. It suggests that studies of algorithms and learning are in their infancy and emphasizes that they carry potentials to confirm our existing ideas and surprise us with fresh insights.

What’s the Matter with MOOCs? Socio-material Methodologies for Educational Research

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are fully online programmes of study, usually offering free participation, and often attracting enrolments in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Following partnerships between the prominent MOOC platforms and a number of elite universities, MOOCs have attracted unprecedented media attention and played an unparalleled role in surfacing issues of online education into the ‘mainstream’. In the words of Pappano’s often-cited New York Times article, 2012 was for education ‘the year of the MOOC’ (2012). The dramatic rise in attention was perhaps encapsulated by the UK universities minister David Willets publicizing his support for MOOC partnerships (Coughlan, 2013), and Daphne Koller, head of the US-based MOOC organization Coursera appearing at the G8 Global Innovation Conference (UKTI, 2013). No more simply a trend within the narrow field of educational technology, the MOOC seemed to have become international news. Thus, while critical responses to the MOOC have highlighted the long histories of technological innovation (Logue, 2012), and indeed ‘open’ education (Peter and Deimann, 2013) overlooked in the hyperbole, these high-profile courses have done much to place the ‘online’ at the centre of educational concerns. As the recent report from Universities UK asks, is the MOOC ‘Higher Education’s digital moment?’ (Universities UK, 2013).

eLearning and Digital Cultures: A multitudinous open online course

The fields of eLearning and distance education are long established, as are cultures of openness in tutoring and institutional instruction. So what s new about MOOCs? This article considers what huge enrollment numbers and an increasingly global audience mean for education in the digital age.