Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 11

Enter the Anti-MOOCs: The Reinvention of Online Learning as a Form of Social Commentary
ucational and financial press. By the end of
2012, MOOCs were the topic of discussions
at the highest levels at virtually every major
university.
With the tremendous focus and attention
on the phenomenon, inevitably the
hype began to build. Traditional universities
were doomed, so the conventional wisdom
went, condemned to irrelevance by an onslaught
of MOOCs. According to Wired, in
early 2012, Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun mused
that ten might survive.
MOOCs in Transition
Barely a year later, the tide has turned.
What education experts and journalists
once lauded as innovative and
exciting has now become the subject of criticism
in a stream of news stories and blogs
that questioned how far apart the promise
and reality have been. After a year of hype
and curiosity, concrete data on the results of
the early MOOC offerings finally surfaced,
and the results have added fuel to the critical
fire.
Even Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s
founder, has adopted a new perspective
based on the initial findings. In a comment
to The Chronicle of Higher Education, he
said, “A medium where only self-motivated,
web-savvy people sign up, and the success
rate is 10% doesn't strike me quite yet as a
solution to the problems of higher education.”
Thrun’s shift in stance is significant,
and signals a new view of MOOC s that is
more critical and less willing to be supportive
of MOOCs in general. As Jonathan Rees
quipped on his More or Less Bunk blog,
“Anti-MOOC really is the new black.“
In July 2013, the end of San Jose’s
State University’s high profile MOOCs-forcredit
experiment with Udacity after just
six months marked the turning point for
many. The pendulum of public fascination
began to swing back with a vengeance, and
an outpouring of articles and commentaries
suggested that MOOCs, far from being the
“Single most important experiment in higher
education,” as The Atlantic put it in July
2012, are increasingly under a very critical
microscope. That same month, George Siemens’
observed on his ELEARNSPACE blog
that, “Critiquing MOOCs is now more fashionable
than advocating for them.”
Some thought leaders, on the other
hand, view the initial disappointing data
spawned by MOOCs as unsurprising, and
symptomatic of higher education in general.
Jonathan Tapson detailed these viewpoints
as falling into two rather succinct perspectives:
first, many advocates of the status quo
argue that a high-quality student-teacher or
student-peer interaction is all but impossible
on the web. Second, as MOOCs have
very low completion rates (from 5 to 16%),
they are quid pro quo not effective substitutes
for real education.
Tapson counters this last point, by
noting “a small percentage of a very large
number is still a large number. When 14%
of the 160,000 students who signed up for
Udacity’s Introduction to Programming
passed, that added up to 23,000 completions.”
He went on to observe that across the
four universities in which he had worked,
this common freshman course probably had
fewer than 10,000 completions in those institutions
entire history. Udacity managed
this in three months, he observed, with a
staff of less than a dozen, and on a budget
far less than the sum those four university
departments probably spent on it combined.
Others, including Doug Guthrie at
Forbes, are very concerned about the ongoing
revelations of poor test results, high
dropout rates, and disgruntled university
instructors. He partly attributes these outcomes
to a lack of innovation in higher edu-
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