Putting the Meh in MOOCs
Martin Weller,
The Ed Techie,
Dec 07, 2021
Martin Weller reviews three papers for the GO-GN annual research review that leave him underwhelmed. "Overall, I was left with the feeling of 'is that it?'," he writes. "Next year marks a decade since 'The Year of the MOOC' and after all that disruption (sooo much disruption), and death of universities, what we actually have is less 'Massive' and more 'meh'." Well, yeah. But I think the problem isn't with MOOCs, it's with the nature of academic research. Working in small teams using very small data sets under 'reserach'-oriented publishing constraints, researchers can only study small instances and advance in small increments (if they advance at all). "We have online courses that don't revolutionise employment, don't democratise education and whose pedagogy is flawed," writes Weller. Well, we have instances of those things. But these results hardly generalize.
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