Serving the Purpose: Coursera and the Productive Power of Online Education Platforms

University of Amsterdam

Faculty of Humanities

Media Studies: New Media and Digital Culture

Serving the Purpose: Coursera and the Productive

Power of Online Education Platforms

Master’s Thesis

4 September 2017

Name: Olga Resetnaka

Student number: 11353686

Thesis supervisor: dr. Niels van Doorn

Second reader: dr. Stefania Milan

Table of Contents

Abstract

3

1 Introduction

4

2 Education and Society

8

2.1 What is Education and Its Role? 8

2.2 In Between Public and Private

13

2.3 Human Capital and the Economic Way of Looking at Life

15

17

3 MOOCs: a Revolution?

19

3.1 The Evolution of Distance Learning

20

23

3.3 Critical Approaches to MOOCs

30

4 Following the Platform Logic

35

4.1 What Makes a Platform?

35

4.2 The Productive Power of a Platform

38

4.3 An Empirical Approach to Studying Coursera

40

5 Findings: Towards Understanding Education and its Role

43

5.1 Coursera as a Multi-Sided Market

43

5.2 Strategic Positioning

44

5.3 The Value of Data

45

5.4 Affordances as Producers of Norms

45

5.5 Limitations of Study

46

6 Conclusion

46

Abstract

When Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) emerged in full force in 2012, they were greeted as heralds of revolution in higher education. Yet despite this, arguably the most revolutionary aspect about them, and that is MOOC providers being platforms, has thus far escaped sufficient scholarly attention. Proceeding from a position that no technology can be considered neutral and rather constitutes a productive force, this thesis is set to investigate what implications application of the general logic that guides all platforms to education might have for understanding its purpose and role. To formulate an exhaustive answer to the posed research question, I first explore the meaning of education and the way its role has evolved from serving a social function to serving economic needs. In particular, I address the legacy of a neoliberal theory of human capital and effects of governmentality. Second, I provide a historical overview of the MOOC movement and present critical perspectives on the subject that point towards the need of studying powers that underlie MOOCs. Third, using the case of Coursera, the largest MOOC provider to date, I undertake a multi-level analysis that addresses both back-end and front-end of a private commercial online education platform, thereby connecting the underlying business model with design and technical specificities of the medium. In this manner I elucidate how the productive power of Coursera essentially rooted in the profit motive is in effect transforming how education in understood and valued in the modern knowledge economy.

1 Introduction

On 25 May 2017 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to Harvard to finally get his university degree, after dropping out 12 years ago in pursuit of the social network’s development. But while Zuckerberg, now one of the wealthiest people on Earth (“The World’s Billionaires”), was being awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, millions of students around the world and mostly at far less elite institutions than Harvard were receiving real degrees, earned through academic achievement and following a considerable time and money investment. To some, particularly to those fortunate to have a financial cushion to fall back on, Zuckerberg along with other famous university dropouts may serve as a proof that one does not in fact need a degree to succeed. To the rest, however, recognised education credentials are still believed to be a gateway to better employment and way of life.

The National Center for Education Statistics projects that in 2017 a total of 3,824,000 post-secondary degrees will be conferred in the United States alone, with nearly half of those being of bachelor’s level (Hussar and Bailey 66). And according to the report, total enrolments in degree-granting post-secondary institutions (23) together with the number of degrees conferred (29) are only expected to continue to increase, even if not dramatically, up to academic year 2024-25. Yet at the same time, the cost of obtaining a degree is rising, placing a great burden on families that decide to put their children through university and leaving many graduates deep in dept. According to The Economist, in the decade preceding 2012 fees in private non-profit universities in the US had seen an increase of 28% and public universities raised their fees by 27% in just five years to 2012 (“The Digital Degree”). Partly this can be attributed to the growing expenses that institutions have to endure (McFarland et al. 299). To remain competitive and able to offer a high-quality education, they have to invest in faculty salaries, research, and a growing number of student services. But a shift in the political agenda may also be at play here. Having started when Ronald Reagan served in office, but also supported by the last two Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who both “have said that universities face a poor outlook if they cannot lower their costs” (“The Digital Degree”), this trend is only likely to evolve under the presidency of Donald Trump, with his administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continuing to advocate for

further budget cuts to overall education spending as well as student aid (Harris).

The rising costs of university attendance have even made many question the very value of a degree, especially due to the drop in financial benefits associated with, for instance, a bachelor’s degree as opposed to a high school diploma (Vedder and Strehle). University graduates entering employment today do not find themselves at an earnings advantage that they might have enjoyed 20 or 30 years ago; and with a larger proportion of adults now being university graduates, many end up in jobs where duties do not require an advanced degree. Yet despite this falling rate of return on university investment, the value of knowledge in the present economy is not diminishing. On the contrary, the demand for well-educated people is high and the fast-changing market also requires constant skills upgrading be able to fulfill the workplace expectations of the future (Rainie and Anderson). So the truth is, contrary to what many fresh graduates may be thinking during festive celebrations, their education is far from being complete. This is also recognised by the founder of Facebook. In his commencement speech, Zuckerberg specifically addressed the elimination of many jobs by automation and technology. According to Zuckerberg, continuous education together with universal basic income, affordable childcare, and flexible healthcare are needed not just to keep people employable throughout their lives but to provide everyone with equal opportunity and freedom to pursue purpose, in other words — a role in life that they find meaningful. This way Zuckerberg aims to tackle a challenge that stands before his (and my) generation of millennials — “to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose,” for apparently “purpose is what creates true happiness.”

As for the educational component in regards to both of its goals, a possible solution might have appeared in the recent years from the same world of technology that is now transforming so many areas of human life. Known by the acronym of MOOC, standing for Massive Open Online Courses, it has taken the form of specifically designed and structured education materials available to the interested public on the web, either free of charge or, depending on course content and developer, for a fee. After first such standalone experimental courses offered by Stanford University proved to be highly successful, a number of companies providing MOOCs were founded, attracting thousands of student users on one side and hundreds of educational institutions and business

partners on the other. Serving as a site where supply and demand for education can meet they have generally followed in the footsteps of other successful companies who have adopted a platform business model to play the role of intermediaries in a variety of markets. First and foremost, this concerns the very first such enterprises — all three of American origin — Coursera, edX, and Udacity. It is following their launch that 2012 was dubbed “the year of the MOOC” (Pappano), and a number of internationally, regionally and locally operating competitors, such as FutureLearn, iversity, XuetangX, NovoEd, France Université Numerique, Miríada X, and NPTL, soon emerged. Now, according to a report from Class Central, “the total number of students who signed up for at least one MOOC” is estimated to be 58 million (Shah).

Given such scale of the MOOC movement, it is more likely that it will stay and develop in one form or another rather than disappear as a fad. Online education platforms — be they commercial or non-profit — appear to be democratising education, a development that is enchanting tech enthusiasts, the press, and general public. But proceeding from a position that no technology can be considered neutral, it is reasonable to assume that besides providing access to courses online education platforms are also advancing certain conceptions, understandings, and expectations. My question then is, in what way are online education platforms both reshaping the nature of education and our perception of its purpose and value? And what role do their economic business models play in this process?

Using the case of Coursera, the largest MOOC provider to date, I offer an examination of an online education platform from its both back-end and front-end, thereby connecting platform’s underlying business model with its interface level that is made available to the user. The chosen approach situates this work within the field of media studies, particularly contributing to the branch of medium theory that attends to the materiality and specificities of the medium as opposed to its content (Bucher, Programmed Sociality 30). Additionally, this work is also aimed at other disciplines, media, policy and decision-makers, who would benefit from an enhanced understanding of what MOOC platforms are and what implications in regards to education their use entails. For this purpose, the case study of Coursera is preceded by an extensive, multi-part theoretical framework that helps to understand how education in this day and age has come to take on this particular

form and establishes a conceptual lens with which the posed research question can further be answered.

In Chapter 2, I seek to examine how a perspective on the meaning of education, its purpose and role in society has evolved from a philosophical to an economical perspective. First, I turn to works of French sociologist Émile Durkheim and renowned American educator John Dewey who have conceived of education as primarily a social function, whose role is in the transmission of society’s norms and values to ensure its continuity and preparation of citizens in a meaningful participation in a democratic society. Second, I address some of historical processes, ideas and that have shaped American higher education, facilitated its privatisation and marketisation, and subsequent move online. In particular, I address the legacy of a neoliberal theory of human capital and effects of governmentality on the need for lifelong learning.

To paint a holistic picture of MOOCs, Chapter 3 provides an overview of their precedents in distance education and addresses the role of digital technologies in their advancement. This is followed by a literature review, which demonstrates that although the rapid increase in the number of MOOCs has attracted a lot of attention from the academic community, especially in what concerns the questions of accessibility, social mobility, and democratisation of education. Nonetheless, some research avenues have not yet been exhausted. And this thesis aims to contribute where an apparent research gap exists, and that is by studying the medium of a platform and the powers that drives it as a commercial enterprise.

It should be pointed out at the outset that ideas and historical developments described in Chapters 2 and 3 mainly pertain to the United States due to the fact that it is homeland of the first MOOC providers. But in view of the global outreach of online education platforms (Macleod et al. 57), I deem such an approach not only justifiable but also important for a better understanding of MOOCs and their implications, which with the help of the Internet can now be distributed across borders.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the notion of platform in different conceptions of the term as it is employed in the fields of new media studies and economics and explain in what way platform can be seen as a productive power. Further, by bringing together different perspectives, I propose a platform political economy approach to studying MOOC

providers and explicate the research methodology for a case study of Coursera.

Chapter 5 presents the analysis of Coursera, as an example of a private MOOC provider that operates as a platform. First, a special attention is paid to Coursera’s business model and the ways this platform positions itself to different stakeholder groups. Second, a role of data in overall platform logic is addressed. Third, I perform an analysis of Coursera based of what it has to offer to its prospective users, namely through its interface and affordances that are designed into the platform both incidentally, as products of culture, as well as intentionally, rooted in its underlying economic business model.

I conclude the thesis by drawing a number of socially relevant implications as to what real consequences the design and underlying logic of online education platforms might have on how we understand education and its purpose and what type of knowledge we increasingly value. To support my assertions, I offer an example of University of Amsterdam’s initiative to offer courses for credits as a possible repercussion of the MOOC movement.

2 Education and Society

Education is such a common notion that rarely does one attempt to understand what it in fact means. Yet the aim of education as well as what is expected as its outcome would clearly follow from the way this concept is understood. For this reason, I devote this chapter to addressing the notion of education and the way its understanding has changed throughout modern history in accordance with national institutional contexts, which determine what role is assigned to education in society. A conceptual framework that this chapter establishes will serve as a basis for thinking about education in relation to online education platforms as well as about the societal and institutional requirements, norms and values that shape the perception of education in the West and increasingly globally today.

2.1 What is Education and Its Role?

of French philosopher Émile Durkheim who is regarded as the father of sociology of education (Pickering 180). But unfortunately, as Durkheim himself recognises, there is difficulty in coming to terms with what education is and what it ought to be. In an article written in 1911 entitled “Education: Its Nature and Its Role,” turning to the constructs brought forward by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, who focused on the development of “perfection” in the individual, Durkheim condemns them as failing to recognise that people “must not all be devoted to the same kind of life” (76). Durkheim also denounces James Mill’s utilitarian definition, according to which the objective of education is finding personal happiness as well as the pursuit of happiness for others. In Durkheim’s view, this definition leaves both education and its end undetermined and “to individual fancy,” since “happiness is an essentially subjective thing that each person appreciates in his own way” (77). Durkheim criticises these definitions on the grounds that “they assume that there is an ideal, perfect education, which applies to all men indiscriminately” (77). But according to Durkheim, there is no ideal or uniform education that one can easily define; and that it varies greatly is evident from the course of human history:

In the cities of Greece and Rome, education trained the individual to subordinate himself blindly to the collectivity, to become the creature of society. Today, it tries to make of the individual an autonomous personality. In Athens, they sought to form cultivated souls, informed, subtle, full of measure and harmony, capable of enjoying beauty and the joys of pure speculation; in Rome, they wanted above all for children to become men of action, devoted to military glory, indifferent to letters and the arts. In the Middle Ages, education was above all Christian; in the Renaissance, it assumes a more lay and literary character; today science tends to assume the place in education formerly occupied by the arts. (Durkheim 77)

Durkheim attributes this multiplicity of types of education not to the mistakes of those who lived before and erred as to what education should be, but to the idea that “each society, considered at a given stage of development, has a system of education” that is in

accord with the conditions of time and place (77-78). It is determined by customs and ideas, which are the “product of a common life”, and the “ineluctable necessities” that reflect society’s needs, its values and preferences, as well as the general social order with its existing inequalities and power relations. Moreover, each system of education is also largely formed by the work of preceding generations and is, then, the result of an entire human past. In an attempt to develop his own conception for education, Durkheim thus comes to a formula that is based on the common characteristics of past and present educational systems. According to this twofold definition, “Education is the influence exercised by adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life. Its object is to arouse and to develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined” (80). Durkheim’s focus on a child in this definition is based on an assertion that each generation is faced in a newly born child with a “tabula rasa,” “an egoistic and asocial being” that is incapable of a “moral and social” existence (80). The duty of education is then to socialise individuals, beginning from their very childhood, into being responsible citizens and truly human beings who will contribute to the continuance and wellbeing of society. Durkheim argues that “each society sets up a certain ideal of man, of what he should be, as much from the intellectual point of view as the physical and moral” (79). It is this ideal in accordance with which education shapes children and essentially sets the conditions of society’s existence, because without “a sufficient degree of homogeneity” among its members society cannot survive (80). Shared similarities give individuals a sense of belonging to the community and supports cohesion within it, it fosters mutual understanding and interaction, nurtures cooperation and solidarity, guards against conflict and helps maintain balance. With this in mind, Durkheim is opposed to the encouragement of knowledge for its own sake; instead, according to his functionalist perspective, education and knowledge have to be closely related to reality and should benefit humanity (Pickering 182). Writing at the time of Second Industrial Revolution and recognising the benefits and complexities of the specialised division of labour in an industrial society, he particularly argues that individuals must adapt themselves, in accordance with their aptitudes, to the different functions that they are to fulfil (76). The more civilised and differentiated the society

becomes, the more diversification and specialisation it tends to require. The role of school and university is to supply such an advanced society with specific skills and knowledge that are required by the manifold of occupations and that is why “education, beyond a certain age, can no longer remain the same for all those to whom it applies” (79).

A similar vision of education and its role one also finds in the works of philosopher of education John Dewey. In his celebrated Democracy and Education written in 1916, Dewey presents education as a necessity proclaiming, “What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life” (11). According to Dewey, continued existence of society depends on the transmission of practices, habits, ideas and ideals, hopes, expectations, social standards, and opinions by means of communication from the older to the younger (3-4). Communication is key to Dewey, as it is closely tied to community: people live in a community because of the things that they have in common; and communication is the way in which they obtain them (Dewey 5). Education presents one such form of communication, allowing for beliefs, aims, and knowledge to be passed from one person to another. This process ensures continuity of life, beyond physiological sense, of the social group despite its ineluctable renewal through birth and death of constituent elements. Yet the mode of education differs from group to group. As Dewey suggests, undeveloped social groups, in which capacities of the young and concerns of adults are comparable, may rely on “incidental” learning of customs and practices by children through their direct engagement in adult activities. But the more advanced societies become, the more they require deliberate forms of teaching and training, without which it is impossible to transmit all “resources and achievements” for children to further partake in adult life (Dewey 8-9). And thus formal education at school and university in a more complex society becomes a necessity.

For both Durkheim and Dewey education is primarily a social function. It prepares individuals for a productive and valuable existence in and for the society. The classroom and school, serving as micro-societies, are to socialise individuals by creating (providing) an environment in which they get to interact and learn normative patterns of thinking and behaviour, thus preparing them for their future membership in a larger social system. But as Dewey rightly observes, “The conception of education as a social process and function

has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind” (112). As the title of Dewey’s book implies, he himself is particularly concerned with the role of education in advancement of a democratically constituted society. For Dewey, democracy is not limited to governmental bodies and procedures; rather it is “a dynamic process of daily active and equitable participation” that permeates not only the formal political apparatus but also culture, economics, and other spheres of life (Apple and Teitelbaum 195). For this reason education has to be essentially civic in nature, producing citizens endowed with skills, knowledge, and personal initiative that would enable them to actively engage in public life. Moreover, members of such a society must be educated to adaptability so that they can cope with the social change, because “life is development, and [. . .] developing, growing, is life” (Dewey 59).

Following from this, educational process constitutes a continuous process of growth, the only aim of which at all levels is added capacity for growth (Dewey 63). But whereas Durkheim argues that “in order that there be education, there must be a generation of adults and one of youth, in interaction, and an influence exercised by the first on the second” (78), Dewey suggests that since all living creatures, that is children and adults alike, are engaged in growing, education should apply to all, irrespective of age (61). This means that education should not cease when one leaves school; its aim should be to insure growth throughout one’s existence. In other words, Dewey advocates for lifelong education.

What becomes apparent then is that education is virtually inseparable from society, playing an essential part in supporting its very existence and development. The principles and ideals of an educational system are a reflection of the nature of social life, a product of a particular political, economic, and cultural moment. But following the reverse logic, it is possible to argue that an educational system also acts as a productive agent that shapes it, so to speak, from within. It creates the conditions of the time and place in which it simultaneously exists. And thus by evaluating an educational system one can also pass judgement on the society which has given rise to it as well as on the norms and values that are being advanced by the means of it. This line of thought becomes particularly viable in view of Dewey’s assertion that an abstract idea like education has no aims — instead, it is “persons, parents, and teachers, etc.” that have them (125).

Agreeing with this, I am set to examine the consequences of the engagement of private actors such as MOOC platforms with their own aims in the provision of education. But first, a wider socioeconomic context from which MOOCs were able to emerge needs to be addressed to be able to fairly assess the ensuing effects.

2.2 In Between Public and Private

When discussing the meaning and purpose of education inevitably does one come to face the question of who is responsible for its provision. Writing at approximately the same time, both Durkheim and Dewey emphasise the role of state in this process. For Durkheim, a dual goal of ensuring both a level homogeneity among the members of a community and a diversity necessary to meet all of an advanced society’s needs demands that education is not “completely abandoned to the arbitrariness of private individuals” and that the state is be able to exert a degree of influence on all that pertains to education (83). Similarly, Dewey recognises that for any educational pursuit to be truly effective, certain organisational powers that would permit its realisation are required (108). In other words, if a democratic ideal of society is indeed desired, education is need of state support. Moreover, an executive organ of a public educational system will have to be responsible not only for the supply of facilities or other resources necessary for instruction, but also for the provision of an equitable and easy access to intellectual opportunities (102), thus compensating for the effects of economic inequalities and securing to all an equal preparation for future careers (114).

But in what concerns American higher education, the answer to the question of responsibility is inherently not that straightforward. One reason for this is that the US higher education is based on the ideals of limited government and freedom of expression, the belief in the rationality of markets, commitment to equal opportunity and social mobility (Eckel and King iii). In the course of nearly four centuries, starting from the founding of Harvard College in 1636, these philosophical underpinnings have formed it into a system that is unparalleled in size and diversity of institutions and students and is also unique in its freedom from government control (Eckel and King 19). Yet these same core beliefs have also made it a subject of tensions and heated debates. By Constitution education is not a federal responsibility, and therefore historically federal government

plays a limited role in public higher education and its funding, with many important decisions being left to the discretion of state or even the institutions themselves (Eckel and King 4). Instead, the primary driving force behind the character of the US educational system is the power of the market with its ability to improve quality through competition. Publicly and privately administered institutions alike are in constant competition with each other “for students, resources, faculty, and prestige” (Eckel and King 16). But with the government unable or unwilling to keep pace with educational expenditures needed for this race, public higher education institutions have little choice than to respond by raising student tuition fees and resorting to other strategies that increasingly focus on efficiency, cost reduction and diversification of revenue sources (Eckel and King 6). In other words, to keep up with the competition, they must virtually operate as private enterprises.

The implications of this continuous trend towards privatisation are manifold, including adaptation of the curriculum to “consumer” preferences, increased concentration on institution’s image and marketing activities, narrow scientific focus and production of more easily marketable applied knowledge in academic research, engagement in practices, sometimes unscrupulous, that allow to “capture more and better students — particularly those who can afford to pay high tuition prices” (Eckel and King 15-16). A limited government regulation of higher education market also encourages private companies to devise their own educational products and services in the pursuit of profit from tuition fees. MOOC platforms can be seen as one such example. However, institutions also use them for promotional purposes, which is indicative of another way in which privatisation facilitates their existence.

Another important implication of the growing privatisation is the tendency to view higher education as a private good, serving individual needs, rather than a public good, equally available to all and serving the needs of society as a whole. Despite existing research indicating that there is a social return to higher education that is valuable to many more citizens than just those who choose to pursue higher education (Ehrenberg 53), policymakers are increasingly ready to shift the responsibility to fund public institutions from taxpayers directly to students and their families who allegedly are the most immediate recipient of benefits derived from education and thus should also bear a

greater share of investment costs. Standing in contrast to Durkheim’s and Dewey’s views on the role of public education as well as to Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of equality and equal opportunity that form the core of American constitutional democracy, the deterioration of public spending on higher education is generally associated with the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (Clabaugh). But the roots of this process can be discerned even earlier, and incidentally at the very moment when federal government expanded its role in higher education.

2.3 Human Capital and the Economic Way of Looking at Life

In the aftermath of World War II, the US higher education had seen changes as never before. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights, which granted millions of returning veterans a range of benefits that particularly could be used to fund high school and university attendance or vocational education so that former servicemen could reintegrate into the US workforce. The bill (law) brought an influx of enrolments in higher education institutions, and by 1947 nearly half of a total number were veterans (“The G.I. Bill of Rights”). The effects of this massification and diversification, later further facilitated by civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s, did not go unnoticed by economists, and education was increasingly becoming a subject of their interest. Primarily this came to be manifested when the notion of human capital was formally introduced to economics and popularised by such acclaimed American economists of the Chicago School as Theodore W. Schultz and Gary S. Becker.

To put it succinctly, human capital refers to the stock of physical and mental aptitudes of people that allow them to perform labour in a way that produces economic value. Accordingly, investment in human capital includes all the ways in which “the quality of human effort can be greatly improved and its productivity enhanced” (Schultz, “Investment” 1). Although human capital does also encompass innate abilities, health, inculcated habits and values, as well as other factors that directly contribute to one’s productivity, knowledge and skills are regarded as the most important of all.

The concept of human capital itself is not new and, as Goldin suggests, can be traced back at least to Adam Smith (56). Yet the term “human capital” has not acquired a widespread use in economics writings until the late 1950s when Jacob Mincer’s

“Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution” was published in the Journal of Political Economy. Already in October 1962 a whole issue of the same journal was devoted to “investment in human beings.” And in 1964 Becker published an entire book on the subject — Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. A growing interest in human capital is connected to the phenomenal economic growth the Unites States had experienced after the War. Expanding at a rate of 3.5% per year between 1945 and 1970, it brought about substantial increases in family incomes, allowing many Americans enjoy the standards of living associated with the middle class (“The Post-War Boom”). Because some of this economic growth could not be explained merely by the accumulation of physical reproducible capital or the increase in man-hours, it was presumed that the reason lies is the expansion of scientific and technical knowledge and their systematic application to labour and other inputs in production (Becker, Human Capital 24). In particular, Schultz argues that part of the unexplained increases in the US national income in the decades preceding his writing, and that is starting with the Great Depression and into the post-World War II period of economic boom, represents “a return to education in the labor force” (“Investment” 13). Likewise, the unexplained rise in real earnings of workers is attributable to “the investment that has been made in human beings” through education (Schultz, “Investment” 6). Similarly to Schultz, Becker contends that education and training constitute the most important form of investment in human capital and claims that high school and higher education in the US play a great part in raising a person’s income and that earnings of well-educated people are generally beyond average (Human Capital 17).

As such, with stability and prosperity returning to the US after the World War II came also the recognition of the role good economy plays in the wellbeing of people. Economy becomes to be seen as a precondition of a good society; and economists take the place of philosophers not only explaining the realities of life but also producing influential work on education, shaping the understanding of what it is and what it does. Becker himself acknowledges that the numerous studies, including his own, on the economic benefits of education have promoted the inclusion of human capital in education policy discussions (“The Economic Way” 44). And so, with the help of theory’s advocates “who could

persuasively explain the logic and the emerging empirical evidence” about investment in human capital through educational policies came to be seen as an effective way facilitate faster economic growth and reduce poverty (Holden and Biddle 40). This presents an important shift from sociological perspectives on education that were characteristic to the first decades of the 20th century to what Becker in his Nobel Lecture calls an “economic way of looking at life,” and thus also mark what is now better understood as neoliberalism, considered by some to be “the most important movement in political and economic thought in the second half of the twentieth century” (Mirowski 426). As a belief system, neoliberalism denotes a free market ideology, limited governmental regulation of business and fiscal austerity, and a culture of individualism, interest, and competition. As a political rationality it extends economic principles into all spheres of life, making states, companies and people act in accordance with the logic and laws of the market. Rudiments of neoliberalism’s key tenets in relation to education can be easily recognised in the early ideas of human capital, which make education, first of all, an instrument for achieving economic goals of a nation, as opposed to or at least on par with other societal goals such as advancement of democracy, equality and communitarian solidarity. But notably, the legacy of human capital continues to manifest itself not only in the progressive privatisation and marketisation of higher education and the deterioration of public funding, but also is in other dimensions.

2.4 Knowledge Economy and the Need for Lifelong Learning

Schultz suggests that accounting for human investment helped to resolve “many paradoxes and puzzles” pertaining to economic growth (“Investment” 3). But this approach has also introduced the recognition that human resources possess not only quantitative but also qualitative dimensions, thus marking a departure away from a classic conception of labour in an industrial society “as a capacity to do manual work requiring little knowledge and skill [with which] laborers are endowed about equally” (Schultz, “Investment” 3). Schultz explicitly states that people are not born with all economic capabilities, and nor do they obtain them in full upon leaving school (Investment 62). Consequently, skills and knowledge that positively impact the ability to

do productive work in a society where knowledge and information increasingly play a more important role in production of value than manual labour require deliberate investment in higher education, on-the-job training, additional courses, seminars, and similar activities. Yet, in his discussion of on-the-job training Becker particularly asserts that a firm operating in a competitive market is only likely to invest in specific training of a worker that will contribute to its own profitability than it is in general training that increases a worker’s productivity overall and which can be applied elsewhere (“Investment” 13). This study presents a theoretical groundwork for the ideas on human capital, according to which individuals must invest in themselves and bear the costs for obtaining the abilities that will bring personal economic benefits. Moreover, they must do so continually, since human capital, just like any other form of reproducible capital, not only deteriorates when not put to use but also depreciates and becomes obsolete with time (Schultz, “Investment” 13). The way to maintain and replenish human capital is thus through lifelong learning.

But whereas for Dewey in his aspiration to democracy continuous learning throughout one’s life signifies “the deepest form of freedom” in the sense that it provides people with “opportunity to find ‘large and human significance’ in their lives and work” (Roth), the ideological footprint of human capital theorists rather points in an opposite direction. Human capital theory proceeds from an assertion, or an assumption, that individuals act rationally when deciding on investment, deliberately assessing both benefits and costs (Becker, “The Economic Way” 43), which is clearly at odds with an idea of free development. Rather, this constitutes a purposeful behaviour of an entrepreneur — an “entrepreneur of himself,” a “homo economicus” (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics 226), who, although autonomous, is guided by the logic of investment, interest, and competition. As such, following Foucault, neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a power structure in which individuals are simultaneously governed and govern themselves (Read 29).

Becker and Schultz in their perspective on human capital mostly focus on a return on investment in terms of income. Yet I tend to agree with Feher in that a neoliberal subject is not so much concerned with deriving profit from one’s human capital as with its growth and appreciation (27). Individuals appear to be free to choose the commitments

and behaviours that would allow for such a development of sense of self-worth. But freedoms are also an integral part of neoliberal governmentality strategy, allowing to advance political and economic goals, such as reducing public spending, while effectively “operat[ing] on interests, desires, and aspirations (Read 29). And because there is always a “contest” between the ways a subject may come to appreciate and to value him or herself (Feher 31), there is always a possibility for the governing of those who seek to increase the value of their human capital (Feher 27). This governing proceeds through employment of discursive strategies to frame arguments in a way that they invoke certain sentiments and promote certain behaviours over others. As such, neoliberal governmentality defines the very conditions of the market and incites individuals to adopt conduct that they themselves find “valorizing” (Feher 27). Lifelong learning, then, emerges as vivid example of neoliberal discourse. As a particular technology of power that, on the one hand, it enables a “production of infinitely knowledgeable subjects” to serve dominant economic interests, and on the other hand allows for both “individualisation of responsibility for education” and “abolition of welfare obligations of states” (Olssen 221). Writing in 2002, Becker proclaims it “the age of human capital” and continues to advocate that people in the modern economy need to invest in themselves throughout their lives. And interestingly, he asserts that growth of the Internet will revolutionise how skills and knowledge are being acquired by allowing distance learning “where teachers and students may interact closely even though they are separated physically and in time” (293). The next chapter thus looks into the practice of distance learning and explores to which extent Becker’s predictions were fulfilled.

3 MOOCs: A Revolution?

The previous chapter outlined the context that had contributed to possibility and success of private MOOC providers. But this account would not be complete without also addressing the role of technological innovations in transforming or assisting educational processes. It is now common that digital technologies in the classroom provide faster access to information, aid in research and note taking, facilitate new modes of interaction and collaboration. But perhaps just as importantly, the emergence of networked digital

technologies has impacted teaching and learning at a distance, with e-mail, high-speed Internet, VoIP, social networking sites, video hosting platforms allowing students and educators to connect in a convenient manner regardless of their physical location. Simonson et al. even argue that distance education is “one of the most dramatic of the recent technology-based innovations influencing education” (4). And thus before looking into the rise of online education platforms, the next section explores some of historical precedents of MOOCs with a focus on this particular mode of education.

3.1 The Evolution of Distance Learning

Indeed, the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web has played an important role in advancement of distance learning. Nonetheless, it has to be acknowledged that the practice itself existed long before the first computers were invented; and there were in fact many other technological innovations that had been put to use to facilitate the process. The earliest example of distance learning, it is generally considered, dates back to 1840s when Sir Isaac Pitman came up with the idea to teach his newly invented shorthand method through a correspondence course (Matthews). By the late 1800s, this approach was also adopted by a number of American, European and Canadian universities that “tried to fulfil their mission for educational outreach” by offering degree programmes delivered by mail (Haber 21).

Back then, distance education courses not only reflected “the growing public thirst for education” (Sumner 274) brought on by the demands of the Industrial Revolution for an educated workforce (Sumner 273), but also were seen as a solution to the “problems of scarcity and exclusivity” inherent to traditional university (Matthews). Some initiatives, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home founded in Boston, Massachusetts by Anna Eliot Ticknor being one such instance, also aimed at educating women (Sumner 274). Correspondence courses, as Matthews points out, allowed universities to offer not seats at a single physical space, but “the opportunity to learn” to all those without access to campus. In the US, these opportunities of educational advancement were supported by government programmes at the federal and state level that looked to improve the conditions of living in rural communities and “underserved agricultural regions” (Haber 21).

The emergence and further development of distance learning have close ties to the development and proliferation of technologies that act as mediators between geographically separated teachers and students (Sumner 271). The first correspondence courses have been possible due to expansion and increasing reliability of postal service, as well as low-cost printing (Haber 24). Later, radio, television, telephone, audio and video recording technologies, and, finally, computers have all facilitated the practice in their time (Matthews, Sumner 271). What mainly distinguished the computer from the technologies before it was its ability to offer various kinds of educational necessities and formats, such as audio, video, text, information storage and sharing capabilities, in one place, effectively making it a primary medium for distance learning (Haber 28). But as Haber further argues, “it was the networked communication facilitated by the Internet’s rise in the 1990s that turned computing technology from a support tool to a potential replacement for the traditional classroom” (29), because they offered access to educational materials to multiple users simultaneously and possibility of two-way communication, which brought educational process closer to an in-class experience.

In 1990, FirstClass, the first learning management system (LMS) for a personal computer, was developed by SoftArc and put to use at Open University in the UK to reach its distant learners (“History of Learning Management Systems”). Software of this kind was largely employed by educational institutions to automate interaction between students, lecturers and the administration (Haber 3). But LMSs were also used to deliver schedules, lectures, reading assignments, homework, and computer-based assessments to students both on and off campus. In most cases, however, these systems did not substitute the traditional mode of on-campus education, but rather supplemented it.

At first, the application of networked new media tools in distance learning was limited. Most of the communication technologies used in 1990s were asynchronous (Bodain and Robert), meaning that instruction and learning took place at different times and immediate teacher-student interaction was limited. Besides hypertext documents, the majority of educational institutions made use of the Web, e-mail, newsgroups, and in some cases also audio and video recordings. These were “considered simple to develop and implement and not too expensive (as compared to the synchronous ones)” (Bodain and Robert). Synchronous communication technologies, such as chat, VoIP, and

videoconferencing, while were better at replicating a classroom experience, also required a more sophisticated supporting infrastructure that was not widely available at the time.

But soon, the rising affordability of personal computers and the advent of broadband connection meant many more people could have access to educational resources. By the late 1990s, the opportunities that this opened up for educational institutions were embraced by the followers of OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement who freely shared their course content on the Internet. Among the most notable pioneers of OCW initiative was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2000, the MIT faculty proposed OpenCourseWare as a way to pursue university’s mission of advancing knowledge on the Internet. In 2001, the website was launched and by November 2007 “virtually the entire MIT curriculum” was made freely available (Our History). As part of the project, MIT published syllabi, video recordings of full lectures, digitised notes, lecture slides, homework assignments, and examination materials. By opening resources professors used in teaching their full-time students, MIT aimed to bring benefits to both “educators and learners who otherwise would not have access to such materials, whether for reasons of geography, cost, or culture” (Vest). MIT also hoped to inspire other institutions to do the same with their course materials in the belief that “open knowledge [could] help bring people of all backgrounds together and promote greater mutual understanding among nations” (Vest), thus generally being in line with Dewey’s and Durkheim’s vision of education as means to foster democracy and civic society based on common interests.

OpenCourseWare remains a permanent activity for MIT and the university continues to advance the initiative through which, it is claimed, “educators improve courses and curricula, making their schools more effective; students find additional resources to help them succeed; and independent learners enrich their lives and use the content to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges, including sustainable development, climate change, and cancer eradication” (“About OCW”). In the meantime, OPW movement has grown into a global network of educational institutions, individuals and organisations who “promote, support and advance openness in education around the world” and “envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the high quality education and training they desire; where education is seen as an essential, shared, and collaborative social good” (“About the Open Education Consortium”). Today, echoes of

these ideals can still be heard in the rhetoric of online course providers who allude to democratisation of education and its potential for social mobility, even though the packaging of course materials and the logic that underlies their operation have changed greatly and rather point to the pursuit of different aims.

3.2 Emergence of MOOCs and of Optimistic Views

Technically, the first massive open online course was Connectivism and Connective Knowledge developed by fellow Canadian academics Stephen Downes and George Siemens in 2008 (“A Brief History of MOOCs”). Taught on campus at the University of Manitoba and to about 2300 participants online, it was set to explore a theory of connectivism and its application in teaching and learning. At the core of this approach lies “the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks” (Downes 9). The nodes in the personal learning network could be represented by fields, ideas, concepts, and, most importantly, people, all acting as information sources in an integrated whole (Siemens, “Connectivism”). The amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding is, then, made possible through the extension of a personal network and in building connections between specialised information sets (Siemens, “Connectivism”).

Downes and Siemens used the web consisting of potentially thousands of human and nonhuman nodes as an ideal environment for implementation of their ideas. Because “the knowledge is found in the connections between people with each other and [. . .] learning is the development and traversal of those connections” (Downes 27), the course was built around a variety of online communication tools. Daily newsletter, discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites were used to facilitate connectivity and interactions among the particpants and helped the class naturally grow and evolve, thus increasing “the potential for the quantity and variety of nodal connections that define success for networked learning” (Haber 38-39). Unlike more traditional courses delivered via learning management systems, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge was less structured, but just as well did not imply compulsory lectures, reading assignments, or tests. On the contrary, all curriculum materials provided by authors of the course were

optional and working with them did not require learning or remembering. Students were free to navigate the content environment and select things that were relevant to their personal preferences, context, or experience. They further were encouraged to engage in the process of creation and sharing of their own material, and to participate in unique community-based conversations that were able to bring individually developed perspectives together and move the whole learning process in a totally unplanned direction (Downes 27). Basically, Downes and Siemens in their course have followed the practices and effectively utilised the traits and affordances of what O’Reilly has famously termed the Web 2.0. In other words, through the cultivation of a culture of participation, content creation, and connectivity they, quite literally, “have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence” (O’Reilly 22). And although there is ambiguity as to what constitutes educational outcomes in this case, is that not, conceptually, the right way to learn for existence in a networked society? Moreover, being based on experience, discovery, critical engagement and personal initiative, essentially provides what Dewey deems necessary to foster a democracy.

MOOCs that are organised along such connectivist principles have been since referred to as cMOOCs. Courses that have adopted a different kind of approach and rather focus on taking advantage of the opportunities that allow for a large-scale student outreach came to be known as xMOOCs (“A Brief History of MOOCs”). According to Siemens himself, the first model was about “creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning,” while the second emphasises a more traditional learning approach and instead of “knowledge creation and generation” is focused on “knowledge duplication” (“MOOCs Are Really a Platform”). However, in the recent years, it is precisely this latter type that has seen the wider adoption among course developers and providers, and thus will also be the main focus of this thesis.

xMOOCs, or what is now being generally understood as MOOCs and what will also be referred to in this work as such, originated in the fall of 2011 when Stanford University first offered its three most popular computer science courses free to the worldwide online audience. Among those courses was Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence that, probably thanks to the university’s reputation and renowned professors closely associated with Google, attracted an

unprecedented number of 160,000 enrolments, with over 20,000 students completing the course (“A Brief History of MOOCs”). The other two included Introduction to Machine Learning and Introduction to Databases taught by professors Andrew Ng and Jennifer Widom respectively.

What mainly distinguished these MOOCs from OpenCourseWare and also made them more attractive to the audience was a more deliberate design for online delivery, which, as some would argue, “knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social networking” (Pappano). Each of the Stanford courses featured short format-videos, in-video quizzes, multiple-choice quizzes, subtitles, and even subtitle translations in the case of Artificial Intelligence course (Ng and Widom 37). Machine Learning and Databases courses also made extensive use of a discussion forum in which course participants could post and answer questions, receive technical and educational support. The forum was cleverly designed as to allow to vote questions and answers up or down with the idea that community would filter the spam out and the most useful entries would eventually appear at the top of the list (Ng and Widom 38). But as opposed to Downes and Siemens’s approach, in this case student collaboration was not the primary goal.

Course developers claim the guiding principle of these two latter courses was doing what is best for students, yet this primarily was manifested in the embrace of “mastery learning” for automatically graded exercises (Ng and Widom 38). The course developers allowed students to attempt assignments as many times as required until they could get them right, thus demonstrating that they put greater importance on learning outcomes rather than on assessment of performance, thereby encouraging anyone to try their hand at completing the course, irrespective of background, age, or personal speed of progress. However, it must be acknowledged that all three Stanford courses also offered students to earn a “Statement of Accomplishment” upon successful completion (Ng and Widom 34), something that radically set these MOOCs apart from previously available online courses, with OpenCourseWare and cMOOCs adherents primarily seeing the value and motivation in knowledge rather than in the acquisition of credentials.

Among the most significant pedagogical innovations that Stanford experiments introduced is the ability to move away from traditionally long lectures delivered in a physical classroom to an essentially bite-sized, easily comprehensible format, in which

each segment in a series of videos was devoted to covering a single concept or aspect of a larger topic (Koller). Moreover, at any time students were now able to pause the instructions, rewind, skip certain parts, or dwell on the subject, if necessary, before moving to the next one. Essentially MOOCs have appropriated not only technologies from other new media environments, but have also adjusted educational format to cultural practices and expectations of a generation used to YouTube and Netflix. Koller suggests that thanks to this it was possible “to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education” and offer learners “a much more personalized curriculum.”

The videos themselves also radically differed from the ones made available as part of OpenCourseWare initiative. Previously, lectures addressed to a live audience of students were normally recorded by a camera set at the back of the auditorium and depicted instructors using a real blackboard as aid, thus giving a taste of an actual classroom experience (what an actual classroom experience could be). According to Leckart, the videos for the early Stanford MOOCs were filmed in an improvised studio and featured alternating shots of professors speaking directly to the camera and close-ups of pieces of paper on which they would write down variables, diagrams and calculations while also giving voiceover explanations. Leckart, who had personally taken the Artificial Intelligence course, notes that while videos were “sometimes weirdly entertaining,” they did help, which at least partly could be attributed to them being interactive. The courses were organised around active learning wherein students are prompted to engage with the course material and apply it in practice as opposed to passively listening to a lecture. While the concept of active learning is in itself not new, the new technology now allowed for an easy and convenient employment of this approach through affording students to answer a question or provide a solution to a problem set via an interactive form right there in their browser. And so whereas cMOOCs fostered interaction between humans, xMOOCs primarily support that of a human-computer.

MOOCs that follow the Stanford model normally have a start and end date and run over a fixed period of time, which most often is between six and ten weeks (Hollands and Tirthali 30). Usually students are required to complete the assessments in the set time frame, before access to course materials becomes restricted, although some courses may be completely self-paced and remain open to participants indefinitely (Hollands and

Tirthali 30). The reasoning behind the first kind of practice is rooted in a conviction that if videos are always available, they can be watched at any time, “but if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it” (Norvig). The same principle applied to homework which had end of the week due dates, thus prompting students to progress gradually and not leave all of coursework until the last moment.

In addition to being “more structured and sequenced,” what set this kind of MOOC apart from what had preceded was their design “to deliver education at scale” (Hollands and Tirthali 25). In this case scalability pertained to both the software and pedagogy. As Ng and Widom recall, “When building out these early MOOC platforms, one lesson we learned repeatedly was that if a piece of software is not designed from the outset to scale to a huge number of learners, then it will probably not work in a MOOC” (39). The software thus was built not only to withstand thousands of simultaneous users, but also, as particularly in the case of Machine Learning and Databases courses, to support an extensive amount of discussion among thousands of students in a clear and usable way (Ng and Widom 39), so that the community could monitor itself and avoid any misinformation about particular problems to take place. Students themselves, as opposed to professors, turned out to be the fastest and the most efficient way to help other students. Nevertheless, Ng and Widom also praise scalable forms of education for providing educators with “opportunity to have a much greater impact on the world than was ever possible before” (41), apparently assuming that such an “impact” (whatever it implies) would necessarily be of a positive nature.

The success of these early educational experiments, especially in what concerns the ability to reach large numbers of students, has inspired the people behind these courses to bring their projects to the next level. Recognising a business opportunity, in February 2012 Sebastian Thrun who has long “understood that university education was a system in need of disruption” went on to found Udacity, a for-profit company set out to build an alternative, “digital university, with a less conventional curriculum, one based on solving problems, not simply lectures on abstract topics” (Leckart). Two months later, Stanford professor Andrew Ng and his colleague Daphne Koller co-founded Coursera. And competition from the East Coast emerged almost immediately, with the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology and Harvard University joining their forces to create edX, a non-profit MOOC provider that was essentially a continuation of MIT’s now decade-long OpenCourseWare efforts.

While many other online course developers followed the examples of first MOOCs and adopted their defining properties, it was the launch of “the big three” (“The Big Three”) that brought about a real breakthrough for massive open online courses. The New York Times columnists welcomed this development with optimism and in anticipation of an imminent revolution in higher education. First and foremost, MOOCs were praised for giving “millions of students access to the world’s best teachers” (Brooks). What access entails here is primarily the ability to see the distinguished professor on a screen of a digital device. But not really addressing that such a device may be unavailable to some, proponents argued that MOOCs now, potentially, allowed anyone with an Internet connection to enrol in a course for free and pursue their interest, refresh previously acquired knowledge, or develop desired skills — be it for pleasure or with career prospects in mind. No more entry requirements, admission tests, limited enrolments, or strict lecture schedules, even if at the expense of recognised credits. And along with giving students such convenience and widening access to include different social groups, MOOCs, as Thomas L. Friedman argues, could also generally help solve “many problems around the world [that] are attributable to the lack of education.”

In her TED talk Daphne Koller draws particular attention to the great potentials of an increased access to education. She states that Coursera’s “goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free” (Koller). In this way, Coursera is set to “establish education as a fundamental human right” that applies to anyone around the world; to facilitate lifelong learning; and to “enable a wave of innovation”. Last point is based on assertion that truly gifted people can be found anywhere, and if only they were given an education “they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us” (Koller). Similarly, Anant Agarwal, the CEO of edX, is keen to “transform education, both in quality and scale and access” and believes that goal could be attained through the embrace of online technologies and introduction of drastic changes to teaching, learning, grading and peer interaction (Agarwal).

Such views put Koller and Agarwal on a par with other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who envision and market their products as being able to bring about a revolution with a single fix that they introduce, the grand aspirations that have been both cleverly mocked in Silicon Valley (2014) TV series and more thoroughly critiqued in Morozov’s work on technological solutionism. Yet despite the ambitious goals these platform creators set for themselves, they fail to address the meaning of education and its role for a wider society in a more philosophical — should education serve the needs and promote values of a society or should it attend to the necessitates of an individual in an increasingly competitive human capital market? And while their discourse appears to be resonating with Dewey’s ideas of equal opportunity for all, it nonetheless strongly emphasises the personal responsibility a student, thus ideologically reinforcing the neoliberal governmentality and the status quo in higher education.

In contrast, Sebastian Thrun’s understanding of education and the purpose of MOOCs is rather more explicit. First and foremost, he sees them as way to quickly learn the needed skills (Walters). Similarly to other MOOC platform developers, Thrun recognises that there is a need for lifelong learning, especially in what concerns “a fast-moving industry such as technology” from which he himself is coming. Yet he envisions MOOCs not as a replacement but an augmentation of traditional education (Walters), and Udacity is designed with the aim to fill in where modern universities are currently falling behind. Particularly that is by being able to quickly adapt the curriculum to the ever-changing demand and by bridging the gap between knowledge and skills acquired in academic environment and future employment.

But as Friedman accurately puts it in his column, “big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” While digital technologies have indeed played an important part in making the emergence and spread of MOOCs possible, it is the current state of traditional education in combination with other socioeconomic factors that has no doubt contributed to the success of MOOC. Friedman connects their rapid development with the rising costs of obtaining a higher education degree and the increasing importance of having one in the present knowledge economy. Notably, in the 25 years preceding the launch of major MOOC providers, the share of state and federal support in the revenues of American public higher education