2012 has been described at "The Year of the MOOC." This presentation describes where MOOCs came from and why they have drawn hundreds of media stories and commentaries and controversies and, more importantly, millions of investor dollars and claims that MOOCs represent "the future of education." Larger issues are at play—beyond high enrollment numbers in online classes—issues related to technological promise and education, views of students as consumers and of teachers as service providers, the rising price of tuition and shrinking public support of education, all embedded in a culture of entitlement challenged by unprecedented economic austerity. MOOCs, therefore, are as interesting for what they teach us about where we are technologically as they are for what they tell us about the value of education in our democratic society.

1. Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs): Entrepreneurial
Instruction or the Death of
Traditional Education
Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher
Department of Leadership, Policy
& Adult & Higher Education
NC State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
brad_m@ncsu.edu
SpeedCon 2012
November 17, 2012

2. MOOCs: Outline
 Your Experiences as Learners
 The Year of the MOOC
 MOOCs: Acronyms Everywhere
 MOOCs Defined: A Crib Sheet
 MOOCs: A Beginning
 MOOCs: The Media Attention
 MOOCs: The Money
 Fischer Black, Ben Nelson, & Richard
Lanham: On Learning & Higher
Education
 Students as Consumers: Appeal,
Problem, Inflation
 New Work & Economic Realities
 Higher Education on the Edge
 Higher Education & Global Economic
Collapse
 Digital Teaching & Learning
Potentials.*
Downloaded from:
*To download this presentation, see http://www.slideshare.net/bradmehlenbacher/

3. On Your Experiences as Learners
 Name a course in college that
influenced your thinking in important
ways?
 Name a task or project that influenced
your learning?
 Name an instructor who made a
difference in your life?
 Name a job that was particularly
instructional or that influenced your
direction in life?
 Name a group project you worked on
that was particularly positive?
 Name a place or time that seems
instrumental to your definition of self as
a learner?
Adopted from:
Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

4. The Year of the MOOC*
 “... one of the hottest subjects in
education has been MOOCs, otherwise
known as Massively Open Online
Courses…. MOOCs have been pegged
by some as representing the future of
the educational system†, democratizing
education, bringing quality learning
content to people of any age, in any  “What happened to the
corner of the world for a small fee—
newspaper and magazine
if not for free.”
business is about to happen
Adopted from: to higher education….”
Brooks, D. (2012). The campus tsunami. The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, May 3. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/brooks-the-campus-tsunami.html
Empson, R. (2012). 2U one-ups MOOCs, Coursera, now offers online undergrad courses from top schools for credit.
Techcrunch.com, November 15. Available online:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/2u-one-ups-moocs-coursera-now-offers-online-undergrad-courses-from-top-schools-for-credit/
†
Leckart, S. (2012). The Stanford education experiment could change higher learning forever. Wired Science, March 20.
Available online: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/
*Pappano, L. (2012). The year of the MOOC. The New York Times, Education Life, November 2. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all&

5. MOOCs: Acronyms Everywhere
 M for Massive: Define
massive? How many students?
Duration? Retention?
 O for Open: Open enrollment?
Openly licensed content? Open
source platform? Open-ended
classes? Is anything free?*
 O for Online: Can there be
offline versions? Study groups?
 Course: Or connection,
connectivism, community,
credit, certificate?
Adopted from:
Masters, K. (2011). A brief guide to understanding MOOCs. The Internet Journal of Medical Education, 1 (2). Available
online:
http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-medical-education/volume-1-number-2/a-brief-guide-to-understanding-moocs.html
Watters, A. (2012). The language of MOOCs. Hackeducation.com, June 7. Available online:
http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/06/07/the-language-of-moocs/
*Wiley, D., & Green, C. (2012). Chapter 6: Why openness in education? In Diana G. Oblinger (ed.), Game Changers:
Education and Information Technologies (pp. 81-89). Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE. Available online:
http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/chapter-6-why-openness-education

6. MOOCs Defined: A Crib Sheet
 Features of a
MOOC: Wiki or
blog for course
materials, open
enrollment,
readings or
audio/video
recordings,
networking
between students,
activities, sharing
knowledge,
student-driven
assignments,
participation,
content production,
auto-grading
and/or peer review
and assessment.
Adopted from:
Shaffer, J. (2011). MOOC crib sheet. Workshop at ISTE 2011. Available online: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/

7. MOOCs: The Beginning
 MOOC coined in 2008 by
Dave Cormier (U of PEI) in
response to online course
designed by George Siemens
(Athabasca U) and Stephen
Downes (NRC Canada,
mooc.ca)
 First MOOC: 25 tuition-paying
students at U of Manitoba and
2,300 general students who
took Connectivism and
Connective Knowledge
class for free
 RSS feeds, Moodle
discussions, blogs, 2nd Life,
synchronous online meetings.
Adopted from:
Connectivism 2008. (2008). Extended Education and Learning Technologies Centre, University of Manitoba.. Available online:
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism_2008#Week_9:_What_becomes_of_the_teacher.3F_New_roles_for_educators_.28November_3
Massive open online course. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Available online:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#History

8. MOOCs: The Media Attention
 Stanford U launches set of free
online courses
 Sebastian Thrun’s Stanford U
AI MOOC attracts over 160K
users (25K complete the
course) from over 190 countries
 Thrun founds Udacity, a for-
profit start-up based on the
course
 Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
at Stanford spin off Coursera
Adopted from: (16M venture funding).
Coursera. (n.d.). MOOC start-up. Available online: https://www.coursera.org/
Lewin, T. (2012). Beyond the College Degree, Online Educational Badges. The New York Times, March 4. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/beyond-the-college-degree-online-educational-badges.html
Lewin, T. (2012). Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls. The New York Times, March 4. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/moocs-large-courses-open-to-all-topple-campus-walls.html?pagewanted=all
Simon, S. (2012). Startup aims to rival Ivy League online: Elite Internet university to see top students from around the globe.
Edmonton Journal, April 6. Available online:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Startup+aims+rival+League+online/6420373/story.html
Thrun, S., & Norvig, P. (n.d.). Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Available online: https://www.ai-class.com/
Weissmann, J. (2012). Can This “Online Ivy” University Change the Face of Higher Education? The Atlantic, April 5. Available
online:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/can-this-online-ivy-university-change-the-face-of-higher-education/255471/

9. MOOCs: The Money
 MIT OpenCourseWare
announced in 2002 with over 2K
courses online, funded by the
William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and MIT (edX has
$60M MIT and Harvard funding)
 Salman Khan starts the Khan
Academy in 2009, funded by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and Google
 Ben Nelson secures $25M in
venture capital from Benchmark
Capital in 2011 to start an online
university, Minerva Project.
Adopted from:
Khan Academy. (n.d.). The team. Available online: http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team
Kolowich, S. (2012). How will MOOCs make money? Inside Higher Ed, June 11. Available online:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/11/experts-speculate-possible-business-models-mooc-providers
MIT OpenCourseWare. (n.d.). Unlocking knowledge, empowering minds. Available online: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Weissmann, J. (2012). Can This “Online Ivy” University Change the Face of Higher Education? The Atlantic, April 5. Available
online:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/can-this-online-ivy-university-change-the-face-of-higher-education/255471/

10. Fischer Black: On Learning
 “Why are we talking about
school so much? What you
learn on the job is nine to 11
times what you learn at
school. I don’t know the exact
number, but that seems a
reasonable estimate.”
Adopted from:
Fischer Black, a Goldman Sachs (GS) partner, legendary quant, and co-creator of the famed Black-Scholes option pricing
model, Quoted in
Farrell, C. (2012). Our (work) education crisis: Send in the MOOCs. Bloomberg Businessweek, September 18. Available online:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-17/our-work-education-crisis-send-in-the-moocs
Marks, J. (2012). This is the real revolution of MOOCs. David Murphy’s Occasional Blog, October 22. Available online:
http://opob.edublogs.org/2012/10/22/this-is-the-real-revolution-of-moocs/

11. Ben Nelson: On Higher Education
 Is this a good industry within which to start a
new company?
 Here are the industry characteristics. Here is
a multi-billion dollar industry providing a service
that’s doing gross margins of about 80 percent
or so. There are a couple dozen competitors in
this industry, the most recent entrant of which
will turn a hundred years old next year.
 The industry provides a service that has grown
in price three times the rate of inflation in 30
years. So the service has become substantially
more expensive. And for the privilege of buying
that service, this industry serves approximately
10 percent of market demand…
Adopted from:
Nelson, B. (2011). Taking on the Ivy League. TEDx SF: Independently organized TED event, December 5. Available online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEv8g80lcjo

12. Ben Nelson: On Higher Education
 Another 10 percent approximately is serviced by people
outside of that industry and substitute goods and about 80
percent just don’t get that service, they just can’t buy it,
even though they have the means and the ability to take
advantage of the service, they just can’t buy it.
 Now the last characteristic of this industry is that the service
that it is delivered by service professionals who not only have
no training to deliver the service but, in the course of their
evaluation, their promotion, their compensation, etc., not only
are not monitored in how they deliver the service, they’re not
trained in how to deliver the service, but there’s absolutely
little to no, and mostly no, penalty or reward for providing this
service well….
Adopted from:
Griffith, E. (2012). Ben Nelson is Building a Virtual Harvard. It’s Ambitious—Just Don’t Call it Disruptive. Pandodaily, April
3. Available online:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/03/the-minerva-project-lands-25-million-for-elite-virtual-university-ambitious-yes-just-dont-call-it-disrupti
Sumagaysay, L. (2012). GMSV Q&A with Ben Nelson, CEO of planned ‘elite’ online university. MercuryNews.com, April 4.
Available online: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_20324886/gmsv-q-ben-nelson-ceo-planned-elite-online?source=rss

13. Richard Lanham: 10 Assumptions that
Organize Higher Education
 Assumption 1—The ideal education is face-to-face, one-
on-one education
 Assumption 2—Higher education, in its ideal form,
proceeds in a setting sequestered in both time and space
 Assumption 3—The education that every university offers
should be generated in-house by resident faculty
employed full-time for this purpose
 Assumption 4—The ideal pattern of employment for a
university faculty is one that combines a maximum of
narrowness and inflexibility in job description with a
maximum of job security: the tenure system
 Assumption 5—The purpose of the university
administration is to protect the faculty from the outside
world
Adopted from:
Lanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of
Intellect: The Changing American University (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

14. Richard Lanham: 10 Assumptions that
Organize Higher Education
 Assumption 6—University faculties are animated by a
purity of motive different from, and superior to, the
world of ordinary human work
 Assumption 7—Universities are unique institutions. As
such, they cannot be meaningfully compared to any
others
 Assumption 8—Inefficiency is something to be proud of
 Assumption 9—The new electronic field of
expression does not change what we are doing but only
how we are doing it
 Assumption 10—The university lives in the same kind of
economy it has always lived in (pp. 160-176).
Adopted from:
Lanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of
Intellect: The Changing American University (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

15. Students as Consumers: Appeal
 21M teenagers between 12-17 use the Internet and 78
percent primarily at school (16M) (Hitlin & Rainie, 2005)
 These students want
 To complete their education while working full-time
 A curriculum and faculty that are relevant to the
workplace (vocationally oriented)
 A time-efficient education
 Their education to be cost-effective (and public
support has decreased while costs have increased)
 A high level of customer service (and class sizes have
grown)
 Convenience (Biggs, p. 2; De Alva, pp. 55-56).
Adopted from:
Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does. Buckingham, England: Society for
Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
De Alva, J. K. (1999/2000). Remaking the academy in the age of information. Issues in Science and Technology, 16 (2), 52-58.
Hitlin, P., & Rainie, L. (2005). The Internet at School. Report of the PEW Internet and American Life Project. Available online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2005/The-Internet-at-School.aspx

16. Students as Consumers: Problem
 The learners-as-consumers model of educational
interaction is problematic because
 If universities are able to maintain their altruistic goal
of serving the public good, learners may not be
satisfied with the workplace preparation offered by
some institutions;
 Although customers of financial institutions expect
high returns on their investments in limited amounts of
time, the business of financial institutions does not
allow this promise to be made; so too are learners
subject to the complexities of resources that are
brought together to provide them with rigorous and
useful courses and programs;
Adopted from:
Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

17. Students as Consumers: Problem
 The learners-as-consumers model of educational
interaction is problematic because
 Universities serve many constituents, not simply
learners, and are therefore going to be continually
faced with decisions that require trade-offs between
satisfying one customer base versus another; and
 Convenience, which presumes agreement and a
“good fit” and frictionless programs, is not the
responsibility of higher learning institutions (i.e., many
more applicants would like to attend MIT or Harvard
than are admitted, which is, again, similar to the
situation with financial institutions).
Adopted from:
Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

18. Student Consumers and Inflation
 The learners-as-consumers model has inflated grades,
producing a generation of unquestioning achievers:
 Students who receive awards for contributing and for
competing throughout their K-12 educations;
 “Two out of five students have a grade-point average
of A- or better, almost six times as many as in 1969,
and 60 percent of them nonetheless say their grades
understate the true quality of their work” (Lewin, 2012,
interview with Arthur Levine).
 Universities have inflated tuition to account for reduced
public support:
 Since 2001, tuition fees at 4-year public colleges in
the U.S. have risen an average of almost 6% annually.
Adopted from:
Leonard, A. (2012). Tuition is too damn high. Salon.com, May 11. Available online:
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/
Lewin, T. (2012). Digital Natives and their customs. The New York Times, Education Life, November 2. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/arthur-levine-discusses-the-new-generation-of-college-students.html?smid=tw-share

19. Higher Education on the Edge
 Our problem situations are unstable,
demand flexibility and a creative ability to
organize across similar but always different
problems and demand that we understand,
argue, and evaluate our work both
conceptually and pragmatically (Schön,
1983).
 Our understanding of knowledge and
expertise have changed: … knowledge is
contingent, framed by higher-order and
changing structures, publicly distributed,
and drawn from multiple, emergent sources
(Resnick, Lesgold, & Hall, 2005).
Adopted from:
Resnick, L. B., Lesgold, A., and Hall, M. W. (2005). Technology and the new culture of learning: Tools for education
professionals. In P. Gårdenfors and P. Johansson (eds.), Cognition, Education, and Communication Technology (pp. 77–107).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York, NY: Basic.
Sternberg, R. J. (2003). What is an “Expert Student?” Educational Researcher, 32 (8), 5-9.

20. New Work and Economic Realities
 Work is characterized by downsizing,
automation, flattening of work
hierarchies, increasing numbers of
relationships between companies,
continual reorganization, the breaking
down of silos or stovepipes in
organizations, and the increase in
telecommunications.
 March 2012 unemployment rate of
16.4% for American youths under 25.
 Globalization: number of students from
Lithuania who took Udacity’s 1st course
exceeded student body of Stanford.
Adopted from:
Shierholz, H., Sabadish, N., & Wething, H. (2012). The class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim. Report
of Jobs Wages and Living Standards, May 3. Economic Policy Institute: Research and Ideas for Shared Prosperity. Available
online: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp340-labor-market-young-graduates/
Spinuzzi, C. (2007). Introduction to TCQ Special Issue: Technical communication in the age of distributed work. Technical
Communication Quarterly, 16 (3), 265-277.
Wildavsky, B. (2012). Who won the great recession?: Higher Ed. Foreign Policy, 196, 60-61.

21. Higher Education and Global Economic
Collapse
 Expansion of American universities in 1940s connected
to enormous expansion of world economy
 Reduction in monopoly of socioeconomically
advantaged in 1970s
 Global economic stagnation results in reduced state
investment and investment in external funding
 During 1980s and 1990s, universities increasingly
privatized, the professoriate stabilizes, creation of
adjunct (contingent) culture
 Today, universities under attack for serving student
population poorly (in the light of scarcity) and under
attack from anti-intellectual consumer culture of the U.S.
Adopted from:
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NY, NY: NYU Press.
Edsall, T. B. (2012). The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity will Remake American Politics. NY, NY: Doubleday.
Greer, J. M. (2011). The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
Heinberg, R. (2011). The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
Wallerstein, I. (2012). Higher education under attack. Energy Bulletin, March 1. Available online:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-02/higher-education-under-attack

22. Digital
Teaching and
Learning
Potentials
 Current strategies for
integrating MOOC learning
into existing educational
spaces
 Online education is
always changing (non-
stable), instructionally and
professionally.
Adopted from:
Coppola, N. W., Hiltz, S. R., & Rotter, N. G. (2002) Becoming a virtual professor: Pedagogical roles and asynchronous learning
networks, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18 (4) 169–189.
Crotty, J. M. (2012). Distance learning has been around since 1892, you big MOOC. Forbes, Tech, November 11. Available online:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/11/14/distance-learning-has-been-around-since-1892-you-big-mooc/
Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robinson, A. J. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture:
Media education for the 21st century. An Occasional paper for digital media and learning. MacArthur Foundation. Available online:
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/{7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E}/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

23. Questions?
 “… the current rate of state budget cutting
does not appear to be sustainable for the
country as a whole” (Bowen and National
Science Board, 2012).
 Entrepreneurial instruction or the death of
traditional education? An argument for the
value of education in a democratic country.
Adopted from:
Basken, P. (2012). NSF raises alarm over falling state support for research
universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Government, September 25.
Available online: http://chronicle.com/article/NSF-Raises-Alarm-Over-
Falling/134626/
Caceras, Z. (2012). ‘A classroom of thousands’: Disrupting entrepreneurial education
with Massive Open Online Courses. Radical Social Entrepreneurs, August 1.
Available online: http://www.radicalsocialentreps.org/2012/08/a-classroom-of-
thousands-disrupting-entrepreneurial-education-with-massive-open-online-courses/