“The Revolution to Come”MOOCs and the Politics of

the Postindustrial University

Michael A. PetersUniversity 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 SchleicherDeputy Director and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the

OECD's Secretary-Generalhttp://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 DataBy 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.

Theorizing Openness

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 OpennessThe 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 SocietyKnowledge 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 Opennesshttp://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, 20122. An Avalanche is Coming, Higher education and the revolution ahead, Barber et al,

20123. NYT Schools for Tomorrow : Virtual U – The Coming of Age of Online Education, 20134. 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 modelThe 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.”

Drivers of change

An Avalanche is ComingHigher 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 2013http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2013/04/avalanche-is-coming_Mar2013_10432.pdf

Summers’ ForewordAn 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 world1. 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 AftermathIn 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, 2013http://www.nytschoolsfortomorrow.com/

Agenda 1OPENING 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 2DEBATE: 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 3THE 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

EducationA white paper

By Li Yuan and Stephen PowellMarch, 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

MOOC Timetable

Political EconomyThe 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 NZEdx – 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.

Course Offerings

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 MOOCsJuly 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 partnershipsForms of parallel privatization

Monstrous?

MOOCs as game changers

Academic Labour PolicyMOOCs 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 issuesAs 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 CapitalismCognitive 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 HEMOOCs and the Future of the Humanities (Part One)

A roundtable at the LA Review of BooksIan 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 PhilosophiesThis 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 LabourExpressive, 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 UniversityThe 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)

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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

Truthouthttp://truth-out.org/news/item/18120-massive-open-online-

courses-and-beyond-the-revolution-to-come

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