Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 14

Internet Learning
approaches. The administration at American
University has issued a “moratorium
on MOOCs,” according to The Chronicle of
Higher Education. “America is purposely
avoiding experimentation before it decides
exactly how it wants to relate to the new
breed of online courses. I need a policy before
we jump into something,’” said Scott A.
Bass, the provost, in an interview.
Larry Cuban, in an article for the
Washington Post, noted that MOOCs have
attracted advocates, of course, but also a
growing number of skeptics and agnostics,
and these two groups are fueling the
anti-MOOCs response in a variety of ways.
Skeptics, for example, include those who
question the premise of learning online as
opposed to face-to-face in lecture halls and
seminars. Cuban references a recent poll in
which nearly 60 percent expressed “more
fear than excitement” for expanding online
courses. Some of the more active skeptics
are urging faculties to take action, lest computer
screens replace professors.
Agnostics, Cuban argues, question
the hype of MOOCs revolutionizing higher
education while seeing both pluses and
minuses to virtual learning. They know
that approaches such as offering lectures to
hundreds of undergraduates are themselves
cost-saving strategies. Hybrid teaching
practices might indeed be pedagogically
superior to large lectures.
Respected blogger Audrey Watters,
who may be considered part skeptic and
part agnostic on this point, coined the term
“Anti-MOOC” in a post about a consortium
of ten universities. The group announced a
program offering online, for-credit courses
in which any students at their respective
schools could enroll. Called “Semester Online,”
the program includes Brandeis University,
Duke University, Emory University,
Northwestern University, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University
of Notre Dame, University of Rochester,
Vanderbilt University, Wake Forest University,
and Washington University in St.
Louis. In this case, the “anti” was aimed at
the notion of massiveness — enrollments
would be capped at around 20 per course
section, a direct rejection of one the pillars
of the large-scale offerings. The University
of Maine at Presque Isle is another institution
attempting this kind of an anti-MOOC
approach: a free online offering that is
more like the "high-touch" experience of a
conventional online course which Michael
Sonntag, the provost, calls a “LOOC” — a
“little” open online course.
A partnership between the New
Media Consortium (NMC), ISTE, and
Hewlett Packard is packaging anti-MOOCs
into a comprehensive strategy to deliver
professional development to science, engineering,
and mathematics teachers at the
HP Catalyst Academy. While still building
a model that is intended to scale, their notion
is to focus primarily on pedagogical
innovation, using the medium itself to help
deliver the learning. A course on social media,
for example, is conducted entirely in
Facebook.
Probably the definitive Anti-MOOC
can be found in Digital Storytelling 106, a
very popular online course better known
as “DS106”. The online digital storytelling
course at University of Mary Washington
(UMW) is one of the few that adhere to the
original connectivist notion of a massive
online course, open to all, but one must be
a registered student at the university to receive
credit. Their course also differs from
the current MOOC scene because there is
no one assigned faculty member to teach it.
For the past several years, DS106 has also
been taught at several other institutions,
and UMW is currently exploring how to
give credit to other state college students as
well as incoming high school students..
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