Communities of Learning and the effect of existing hierarchies

Last week (March 1, 2013) , I had the honour of  being asked to sit in on a PhD defence committee. The thesis was about the impact existing hierarchies have on the learning that goes on in communities of learning. I very much enjoyed participating since the topic of communities of learning is close to my heart and to my own research on networked learning.

Martin Rehm's research was carried out in a large international organisation that set up 3 month, online learning programmes for its employees. Some 200 - 300 people participated in each one of the various studies. His main conclusions may be thus summarised.

1. The participating employees happily participated in the discussion fora that drove the communities; their contributions were about both social and content-related issues, but the latter dominated; the employees felt the forum helped them better to learn.
2. Employees higher up in the organisational hierarchy contributed more than did employees lower in it; however, there were a number of 'lowly' employees who contributed in numbers equal to their higher-up peers; finally, people higher up performed better at the final exam.
3. Everyone pretty much read the contributions of everyone else, but they were much more specific in the way they reacted to contributions;  in social network analytic terms, employees lower in the hierarchy tended to engage with employees higher up more so than with employees lower down; this  means that the higher in the hierarchy you are the more central is your position in the community; Rehm described this as a hierarchical vortex.
4. Employees at all levels made both social and cognitive (task-related) contributions; over time, the number of cognitive contributions went up relative to the number of social ones; overall, the level of cognitive contributions was higher for employees higher up in the hierarchy.

These findings show two things: first, communities of learning help you to learn; second, organisational hierarchies get copied into an organisation's communities of learning, perhaps are even reinforced by them. The first finding is a reason for joy, the second one a reason for concern. After all, learning is not just about filling in the gaps in your existing knowledge, about horizontal transfer of knowledge that I have and you lack or vice versa. In a knowledge-driven economy, it increasingly also is about exploring new avenues, about developing new insights, about being creative. This allows an organisation to reinvent itself, to be innovative and, ultimately, to remain competitive. Existing hierarchies ensure that the current jobs get done, but are no guarantee that the future jobs get done too. If anything, organisational learning should be a means to foster innovation rather than, at worst, to stifle it. For that to happen, the hold that existing hierarchies have on organisational learning should be relaxed if not overturned. How can this be done?

Martin Rehm makes a number of suggestions. I interpret them in a rather loose way here. He first suggests that learners should be given roles that upset the existing hierarchy. So 'lowly' employees become moderators. Second, higher management could be made aware of the current situation and its undesirable effects, in the hope they alter their behaviour and stimulate employees lower in the hierarchy to become more active and challenge received organisational wisdom. Or, third, communities of learning could be deliberately composed in ways to minimise the effect of hierarchy. Unfortunately, I fear the first two of these measures will not work as they all in some way or other upset existing hierarchical relations. As these relations determine your fate in the company once the community-based learning period is over, employees will avoid risks and behave in accordance with the existing hierarchy. The third one comes close to what I myself would want to explore, though I am not sure that Martin intended it this way.

The most radical interpretation of the third suggestion would be to demand learners to participate anonymously in the communities of learning. Assuming it is at all possible to avoid being exposed, which I doubt, it is probably not desirable not to be able to identify who wrote what. If a company is to profit from its employees' learning insights, the person who contributed some piece of wisdom should be identifiable. An alternative, less radical approach would be to dilute the hierarchy by involving more employees than the relatively small training sessions. In the set up chosen, the full focus was on the communities of learning and the remainder of the organisation was ignored. Suppose we were to move the learning to the level of the company as a whole, involving everybody on a permanent basis in learning, with more formal bouts of learning for some punctuated by informal bouts for all? This would effectively turn the organisation into an instance of a learning network. Before discussing the questions of whether this works, a note on terminology.

For me,  there is a clear distinction between networks and communities. The distinction is not numerical, although networks tend to be larger than communities as communities are parts of networks and communities cannot become so large as to overload our cognitive abilities. In a community, people have a shared goal, at least for the time being; in a network, they only have a shared interest. Community members are fully and directly connected (everybody is directly connected with everyone else), even though the intensity of the interchanges they have may varies; fellow networkers, on the other hand, may be strongly linked but may also be weakly linked, via intermediaries, or not at all. A network, therefore, usually consists of several communities. These communities may wax and wane in size, may overlap to a larger or smaller degree, may emerge and go extinct, even on relatively short time scales. In contrast, a network is long lived, it typically outlives any specific community that is part (technically: a subgraph) of it. What would happen if we were to conceive of communities of learning as parts of such a larger network?

Taking a networked view would mean that everybody in the organisation is permanently learning from each other. This learning is mostly informal, that is, it is intentional, but not part of a formal training or continuous development programme, with lectures, tasks and exams. Occasionally and for a subset of people only, a period of formal learning may be organised. Such periods are different in that somebody (an instructor) deliberately structures the learning in a particular way, organises supportive structures (e.g. fora) and perhaps even sets exams. In this set up, the hope is that, since everybody in the organisation is learning permanently, if not formally then informally, the grip that hierarchies have on employee behaviour is slackened. Employees, higher and lower, over time will adjust their behaviour to the demands social learning makes on them, thus limiting the clout of the official institutional hierarchy. Of course, to find out whether this will indeed happen, long-term research is needed that pays particular attention to the dynamics of the learning networks and the communities of learning in it.

Rehm, M. (2013). Unified yet Separated: Empirical Study on the Impact of Hierarchical Positions within Communities of Learning. Doctoral Dissertation, Maastricht University.  Retrieved from repository U. Maastricht.

Note: link to thesis pdf added after publication, March 25 2013

Scoops on 'Networked learning - MOOCs and more' in February 2013

This month, I made a total of 43 scoops of topics related to networked learning. As a service to the readers of these scoops and as a means to maintain an overview for myself, below you'll find a list of all the scoops, with their publication date, title, author, source and permanent url (to my post, that is). Not sure whether there will be more instalments, but anyway, here's the first.

01-02-2013	The emerging MOOC data/analytics ecosystem	Simon BuckinghamShum	blog
03-02-2013	If You Believe in MOOCs, You Are Assuming Too Much	Richard N. Landers	NeoAcademic
03-02-2013	Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College	Maria Bustillos	The Awl
03-02-2013	Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes	Marc Parry	The Chronicle of Higher Education
04-02-2013	Coursera forced to call off a MOOC amid complaints about the course	Scott Jaschik	Inside Higher Ed
04-02-2013	How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it	Debbie Morrison	Online Learning Insights
05-02-2013	Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education	Inge de Waard et al.	IRRODL
06-02-2013	Grade Six Teacher "Extraordinaire" : Professional Learning Communities vs Personal Learning Networks	Lorraine Boulos	blog
07-02-2013	Opening up Education	Fred Mulder	presentation
07-02-2013	Analyzing MOOCs - A SWOT analysis	Andrew Spinner	@Understoodit
07-02-2013	Online learning goes official as five Coursera courses get approved by the American Council on Education	Emil Protalinski	The Next Web
08-02-2013	Keeping up with MOOC developments	Tony Bates	Online learning and distance education resources
08-02-2013	MOOCs: A review	Ethan Solomon	The Tech, MIT
11-02-2013	Online communities are transforming professional development for teachers	Fearghal Kelly	Guardian
11-02-2013	Networked Norms: How Tech Startups and Teen Practices Challenge Organizational Boundaries	dnan boyd	Zephoria blog
11-02-2013	The End of the University as We Know It	Nathan Harden	The American Interest Magazine
11-02-2013	Web 2.0 Labs	Steve Hargadon	Instructure
11-02-2013	Much Ado About MOOC	Cameron Norman	Censemaking
12-02-2013	MoocGuide	wiki
13-02-2013	Learning Analytics: ethical issues and dilemmas	Sharon Slade, Paul Prinsloo
14-02-2013	Memo to Trustees re: Thomas Friedman’s ‘Revolution Hits the Universities’	Kris Olds	Inside Higher Ed
14-02-2013	To MOOC or Not to MOOC - WorldWise	Nigel Thrift	The Chronicle of Higher Education
15-02-2013	HarvardX, edX, and online teaching, learning expand	John Harvard	Harvard Magazine
15-02-2013	We Don’t Need No Educator	Stephen Downes	presentation
17-02-2013	The MOOC Revolution: A Sketchy Deal for Higher Education	Geoff Shullenberger	Dissent, a quarterly of politics and culture
17-02-2013	Stop polarising the MOOC debate	Cathy Davidson	University World News
18-02-2013	MOOCs and online learning: Research roundup	Margaret Weigel	Journalist’s Resource
18-02-2013	Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching	Steve Kolowich	The Chronicle of Higher Education
19-02-2013	MOOCs and the funnel of participation	Doug Clow	LAK 2013 Conference
20-02-2013	Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken	Clay Shirkey	The Awl
22-02-2013	Using peer–support to connect learning network participants to each other: an interdisciplinary approach	Sibren Fetter et al	journal
22-02-2013	How EdX Plans to Earn, and Share, Revenue From Free Online Courses	Steve Kolowich	The Chronicle of Higher Education
22-02-2013	The corridor of uncertainty: Verification as MOOC add-on	Alastair Creelman	blog
24-02-2013	MOOCs and digital diploma mills: forgetting our history	David Wiley	blog
24-02-2013	The 3 Ms, quality and instructional design of MOOCs	Sui Fai John Mak	blog
24-02-2013	A MOOC by another name	Christina Hendricks	blog
24-02-2013	Three Kinds of MOOCs	Lisa Lane	Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog
24-02-2013	What responsibilities should MOOC platforms assume	Peter Sloep	Stories to TEL blog
25-02-2013	Europeans Take a More Cautious Approach Toward Online Courses	D.Guttenplan	New York Times
26-02-2013	MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses	Michael Gaebel	European University Association occasional papers
27-02-2013	MOOC completion rates	Katy Jordan	MoocMoocher
27-02-2013	MOOCs: What Part of Learning Goes on Where and How?	Marilla Svinicki	The national teaching and learning forum
28-02-2013	MOOCS Forum	Mary Ann Liebert	journal announcement

What responsibilities should MOOC platforms assume?

Money is an important consideration in education. For schools on public funding, it comes in the form of costs, which should be kept low in order to balance the budget. For MOOC providers such as Coursera and Udacity, it comes in the form of revenue, which should be maximised in order to keep the venture capital firms happy that have seeded them with start-up capital. On the matter of the need to provide higher education with enough money to keep it public, I have written twice last month (MOOCs, some moral considerations, MOOCs, arguments at cross purposes), so I will remain silent about that now. This time I want to share some thoughts about the responsibilities MOOC platform providers such as Coursera, Udacity and edX could have. They are the third element in the area of tension between the professors who provide the content and the universities with which these professors are affiliated.

Coursera has had the misfortune to experience two incidents in one month. First, on February 4th 2013, a course on online learning (Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application) had to be stopped because its design couldn't cope with the massive numbers of students (see Coursera forced to call off a MOOC amid complaints about the course), then exactly two weeks later, professor McKenzie resigned from a course on economics over a dispute on his teaching style (see Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching). This got me thinking, helped by the discussion that ensued in a LinkedIn group on MOOCs. One may blame Coursera for pushing things too hard in an effort to stay ahead of the competition, and, indeed, I did so in my comments on Scoop.it. However, true or not, it only scratches at the surface of what the problem really is. That is that responsibilities between the three parties of content author ('professor'), university and MOOC platform have not been delineated in sufficient detail.

The division of responsibilities between a university and the instructors it employs may seem the simplest to define, as mutual responsibilities supposedly have been defined long since. But that was related to lecturing classes, not to online classes. In online classes, particularly MOOCs, a professor who fails to deliver quality is exposed to the world at large immediately, threatening the university's reputation. In the case mentioned, the issue seemingly was over the way McKenzie treated his students, as adolescents who needed to be instructed by him, not as colleagues who want to pick a discussion about the foundations of economics. One of his students pointed out that she was a full professor in economics, the subject taught. She complained that McKenzie acted as a sage on the stage, not wanting to be challenged, not wanting to engage in serious discussion (see the discussion in the LinkedIn group mentioned already for more details). The point is not who is wrong or right, the point I want to make is that McKenzie came to the MOOC with a set of assumptions about what he was expected to do that his students took issue with.

One may wonder whether the MOOC platform provider (Coursera) should have instructed McKenzie and his university better. And some argued that in the interest of quality control they should have. The same applies to the earlier incident, where the instructor in question used Google groups to set up discussions between the course's students but apparently was unaware of the fact that there is an upper limit to the number of participants such groups can accommodate. Again, shouldn't Coursera have better instructed either the course instructor or her university? This highlights the importance of the question of what exactly the responsibilities of platform providers are. Two models come to mind.

A MOOC platform provider could be like an internet access provider. Internet access providers may offer some content of their own - usually in the form of a home page - but they act rather like electricity providers: they provide a transfer service, but do not interfere with what gets transferred (even though occasionally governments unwisely try to force them into that role). So, on this account, much as the utility company doesn't care about what you use your electricity for, the MOOC provider is oblivious to what content you push through their platform.

On the other hand, MOOC platform providers may adopt the model that Apple does with its iTunes service. The iTunes universe of apps, music, movies and books is a closed one, carefully monitored by Apple. This leads sometimes to complaints, when Apple refuses an app because it violates its policy. Apple can't be blamed for that. After all, being a private company, the notion of censorship does not apply to them; that only applies to governments. Apple also takes a rather large cut out of the revenue that content providers on iTunes make. In this sense, Udacity, Coursera and edX are already like Apple (see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education). How about the censorship? Although I know of no evidence that they refuse particular courses that participating universities suggest, MOOC platform providers certainly are selective about the universities they allow to participate in their platform.

Back to the question of the division of responsibilities of universities and their professors on the one hand and the MOOC platform providers on the other. Under the model of a MOOC provider as a utility company, both incidents fall squarely under the responsibility of the participating universities and the professors they employ. It is their content, they are responsible for its quality. This confirms their role of providers of quality education, but doesn't fit with the prominent role in the media that MOOC content providers claim nor their role as content aggregators. The actual distribution of responsibilities seems  better to match the Apple iTunes model. However, if MOOC platform providers were to adopt that, you may end up with them carrying out quality control and 'censoring' content. Do MOOC providers have the resources to do that? And what about a course on, say, nudes in impressionist paintings?

Contrasting these two models this way does not imply they exhaust the universe of possible models; nor does it imply blends are impossible. I used them primarily to highlight the issue of the division of responsibilities between the three parties involved in MOOCs. As an added bonus, they suggest ways in which we can think about such a division. What the two incidents show is that clarity on this matter is badly needed. As Tony Bates commented after the first incident: ... in education you are playing with people’s hopes and dreams. Do the job properly.

MOOCs, arguments at cross purposes

This post is about two articles that may serve as examplars of two kinds of arguments that have often been advanced with respect to MOOCs. They are about the question of whether society at large should reject or embrace MOOCs as a form of online learning.  

The first article I scooped on my networked learning - learning networks Scoop.it site the other day. It is written by Jennifer Cost and her colleagues, who are all involved in teaching at community colleges in California. If I may quote from the Scoop.it comment I made on this article: "An eloquent but ruthless account of why community colleges (in the US) should shun MOOCs". The authors very much feel that MOOCs do a disservice to society, and that we therefore should not get involved in them, indeed, should ban them before the corporate world has created a situation from which we cannot go back anymore (if we still can, that is, cf this scooped article). 

The other article, a blog really, is a reaction by Mark Smithers to the article by Jennifer cs. It is called MOOC FUD, and describes the paper by Jennifer cs as an attempt to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (after a tactic Microsoft was famously accused of using against its competitors). Mark is not impressed by their arguments and describes the article as follows: "In what can only be described as a rant, six community colleges members have taken to Inside Higher Education to produce a self serving article that bemoans the implications of the use of educational technology and, in particular, the rise of the MOOC."

I believe that at the heart of the disagreement between both parties lies a clash of philosophies, between conceiving of education as our chosen instrument to enculturate new generations and seeing it as a way to make money. Quite obviously Mark sits on the 'make money' side of the fence, as is evidenced by such terminology as delivery model, product, marketplace, consumer. This is precisely the kind of terminology Jennifer Cost cs. deride. For them, education is not a market, students are not customers, and education is not a product. Who is right?

I am afraid we're not going to be able to say so by analysing these two articles (nor any others, for that matter). The people behind them talk at cross purposes, they provide a very good example of what Thomas Kuhn called incommensurability, when he discussed clashes between scientific theories and introduced his notion of a paradigm shift. Such a shift occurs when contexts of discourse employ radically different terminologies, so different that there is no point for their proponents to attempt to talk productively to each other anymore. You either adopt the one paradigm or the other, and work with it, ignoring the alternative and its proponents.

On this account, Mark and Jennifer will never be able to conduct a productive argument. And perhaps they do not want to either. Jennifer cs' language is indeed inflammatory, hardly sensible as an attempt to convince your opponents. But Mark's accusation that Jennifer cs' arguments serve the ultimate purpose of making sure they  do not loose their job, are subject to that same criticism. 

Why am I making such a fuzz about this? I do because I feel we - that is, those concerned with education - do need to avoid arguing at cross purposes. I believe we can so by explicitly discussing underlying philosophies. Discussing whether MOOCs are pedagogically innovative, whether they represent a form of cultural imperialism, or whether they really save money is important but only secondary to the answering the question of how we as a civil society want to build and run our educational institutions. Mark Smithers avoids that question by adopting the talk of the business world, seemingly not realising that his discourse already makes assumptions about how we want to run our educational systems, as a business, that is. In my previous blog post, I tried to question the wisdom of such a stance, using Michael Sandel's insights as a starting point. Jennifer cs seem to want to discuss this issue, but already have made up their minds: "The debate here is not really one about technology and higher education ... No, what this MOOC debate is about is whether we blithely open the door to the gutting of what is most precious about what we [as professors] do." 

So I believe we need to tackle the issue of whether we should want MOOCs or not, by addressing the issue of whether we are ok with monetising education. There is one caveat, though. We may not get to the stage of having that discussion anymore. It is very difficult arguing with opponents who have deep pockets, such as the venture capitalists supporting the MOOC start-ups and the slew of companies that can't wait to join the fray. Pearson's Matthew Poyiadgi may serve as an apt example of how the latter kind of firms are trying to exert influence:

"I accept that tier-one universities such as Harvard or Cambridge will always have demand for places due to the prestige associated with studying there. But a student in Europe or Asia will refuse to pay large sums of money to sit in a mediocre lecture in their own country when they can learn online from world class tutors and be associated with a leading university."

If this isn't spreading FUD I don't know what is. 

MOOCs, what about them? Some moral considerations

In my previous blog post I discussed the question of whether we should approve of MOOCs from a normative point of view. Do MOOCs contribute in any way to an educational system which is better from a normative point of view? I argued that I had a hard time to believe they would, the reason being that they are run by private companies, funded by venture capital who are in it for the money. So MOOCs will not see it as their task also to educate people to be 'good' citizens (in addition to providing a service for which there is a market), nor will they be interested in the ideal of widening access to higher education (inclusion), they may at best as a by-product of providing the service they do. Since then, Markus Deimann (@mdeimann) alerted me to the work of Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, who recently published a book called What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. (Sandel will also run his course Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? as a MOOC, starting this spring.) The message of the book I find quite appealing, it applies exactly to what I was trying to say in my recent blog post. If reading a whole book is a bit much, in 1998 Sandel gave two lectures under the same name, which capture the essence of the theses he went on further to develop in the book. In the remainder of this post, I will briefly discuss Sandel's theses and then apply them to the MOOC case. Although the outcome is similar to what I already wrote, with Sandel's help the argument is much better articulated and therefore better justified.

The essence of what Michael Sandel claims is that there is a moral limit to what money can buy, to what we should put a monetary value on; that is, that there is a limit to commoditisation (of books), privatisation (of prisons or armies) and commercialisation (of universities) (examples are his). Two different arguments may be given to back this claim, he says, although they are not always differentiated (as indeed I failed to do). The first argument is the argument from coercion or from fairness. It holds that offering money for a service or good is not always morally defensible as people may simple not be in a position to refuse the offer. So the ideal of freedom of choice is violated. If you need money desperately, then you cannot afford to refuse money offered for, say, carrying someone else's child as a surrogate mother. Your position coerces you into accepting the offer and it is the unfair distribution of wealth that is ultimately to blame. This argument is not a principled argument, Sandel argues, as according to it, in an equitable world in which everybody can afford to choose freely, it would be ok to create a market for surrogate mothers.

However, and this is the second argument, many would feel that acting as a surrogate mother is never morally defensible. It is simply wrong and the equitability or inequitability of the world is an irrelevant consideration. This is what Sandel calls the argument from corruption. It holds that there are particular things we should refrain from doing as they are morally objectionable. Such arguments are difficult to make as they refer to specific moral ideals (unlike the argument from coercion, which refers to the general ideal of freedom of choice). Each instance of such an argument needs to be argued for afresh. So, surrogate motherhood is objectionable because it is morally objectionable, it is wrong to adopt such practices as a society. Such arguments are difficult because their justification has to steer clear of two objections. Claiming that surrogate motherhood is wrong, prompts the question of why this is so. One answer would be because it is 'unnatural' to give up your own child, but such essentialist arguments are wrought with problems. The answer could also be that it is wrong because we all think it is (conventionalism). The problem with this argument is that it builds on majority opinions. These are difficult issues, that have to do with the question of how moral claims can be justified at all. For my purposes it suffices to say that it is ok to claim to something is morally objectionable in its own right, without further argument.

My first objection to MOOCs is that it does not serve inclusion, indeed it promotes cultural imperialism. This argument can easily be construed as an argument from coercion. Developing countries lack the financial and human resources to develop an educational system of high quality, so when confronted with MOOCs they cannot afford the luxury of refusing them. For, say, an AI course this may be not so bad. After all, it may help to build local capacity that is conversant with the latest ideas in AI. But for, say, a humanities course this would amount to cultural imperialism as with the course value systems or governance models are surreptitiously imported. A blog post by Dheerah Sanghi, scooped and commented upon by me earlier this year, provides as good example of this kind of coercion. The morally right thing to do would be to help developing countries to develop the courses they need, through unselfish financial support or by helping them to acquire the needed human resources. If, with this kind of help, people in developing countries would still decide to subscribe to a specific MOOC or would decide to use Open Educational Resources (OERs) created in the developed world, this would be ok, according to this argument from coercion. After all, no coercion is involved. There also seems to be no more fundamental reason, one that invokes the argument from corruption, to object against such a practice.

The argument from corruption is relevant though in a different way. It questions the introduction of MOOCs in higher education at all. It holds that Sebastian Thrun's view of providing higher education for the masses via MOOCs, leaving higher education for the happy few to some ten remaining high-quality institutions, is wrong on moral grounds. As a moral principle, everybody should be allowed to develop his or her talents to the maximum extent possible. This is part of the Enlightenment ideal to create a just society, in which there is a place for everybody. From this ideal it follows that everybody should have equal opportunities to develop themselves. Creating a two-tiered system with MOOCs for the masses and proper universities for those who can afford it, does not sit well with such an ideal.  Admittedly, MOOCs need not jeopardize the ideal of equal opportunities, they could simply be one of the tools universities wield to provide higher education. However, MOOC ambitions don't stop there, as talks about MOOCs as a means to save the US higher education system attest to. Then cherished Enlightenment ideals are under threat. Seen that way, MOOCs should be classified as morally corrupting.

The take-home message is simple. Although higher education is expensive and apparently becoming ever more expensive, making it subject to the laws of markets is no solution, morally speaking.

Note added on January 16, 2013 Graham Attwell of Pontydygy Bridge to Learning wote a blogpost that underscores my argument. It involves vocational education and not MOOCs, but it is about privatisation. Graham discusses the case of vocational education in the UK, in which Pearson has played a larger part. Not anymore, though. To quote Graham:

Apprenticeship training in the UK was largely privatised with Pearson prepared to pay a big premium for what it saw as easy profits based on government funding. And when that funding didn’t raise the same profits that they had dreamed of they just pulled out. No wonder there have been so many complaints at the quality of apprenticeship training in the UK.

MOOCs, what about them?

MOOCs have caught the public eye and not just those of education professionals. The reason is that potentially they change the game of higher education. Not just because some claim they will (as does Sebastian Thrun of Udacity) but also because many fear or predict they will. So, engaging in ongoing debate about them is necessary, to steer their future development and to be prepared for their potential influence on higher education. At present, I am at the ASCILITE 2012 in Wellington, New Zealand, where this morning a 'great debate' was organised about MOOCs. The debate was lively, although it was a pity that the normative ('should MOOCs have a role in HE?') was not sufficiently divorced from the factual ('will MOOCs have a role in future HE?'). I here want to expand a little bit on two remarks I twittered during the debate. They regard the normative aspect of the debate.

cMOOCs aside - the Siemens and Downes kind which embrace networked or connectivist types of learning - the xMOOCs exemplify a development in higher education that mark a landslide. Private companies have always had a role in education and there is nothing wrong with that. However, with xMOOCs for the first time they may end up as helmsmen of higher  education. Sebastian Thrun predicts so much when he says that in five decades or so there's room for 10 universities only, the rest of the market being catered for by venture-capital sponsored companies such as Udacity, Coursera (or more likely, the companies that will have bought them). Is this what we really want? In my view, education in general and higher education in particular is a public good. The goals that it serves are manifold. They include preparing adolescents for the job market, but also educating them to become well-informed citizens who can make judgement calls. A viable democracy needs critical people. And then there is also the goal of helping these adolescents to find out who they are, what really interests them and what they want to do with the rest of their lives. I have a hard time believing that for-profit companies would be interested in promoting competencies and skills other than work-related ones. It is not a matter of blaming them for their disinterest in this, it is a matter of us deciding how we want to organise higher education: Run by a private company as a private good or by democratic institutions as a public good?

Second, MOOCs have been hailed as contributing to inclusion. Again, I have a hard time believing that MOOCs run by private companies will see this as their duty (I am still talking xMOOCs of course). They will, but only to the extent that providing courses for free is a means of 'scouting out' the really talented, almost as talented athletes, soccer players, etc.  (Cf On two kinds of MOOCs) True as this may be, you could still argue that a great many people in developing countries would still have access to high quality, higher education courses, which they otherwise would never have had. Although this is not entirely true - see the Open Educational Resources movement - there is also the issue of cultural imperialism. This will not be much of an issue for AI courses or courses learning to program with Python, but things start to change with courses on social network analysis and certainly with courses on social issues and culture. The developed world should make sure not to make the mistakes it has been making consistently all over again.

In conclusion, I think we should continue experimenting with MOOCs but at the same time we should be very suspicious of what Coursera and Udacity are doing with them lest in a year's time we academics have to admit we were lured into doing something we in retrospect had absolutely wanted to avoid. For those of you who want to read up a little bit on MOOCs, you may find a collection of 6 months of scoops here.

Note added January 3, 2013. There was an annoying mistake in the original text. In the final sentence of the one but final paragraph, it said developing world, which should have been developed. I have corrected this now.