I enrolled in a Coursera MOOC with the title »Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media«. MOOC means ‘Massive open online course’.  It is massive because a high number of participants can take the course simultaneously, even thousands of students at the same time. ‘open’ means, that they are accessible individually, normally for free. Online course means that the course is delivered entirely through the internet.

The topic is very interesting, and I am sure that I will learn new aspects to it. I have the possibility to acquire a certificate for 49$. Normally I would do that, because I like to get certification when I accomplished something for it is my time I invest.

I ask myself if my Coursera MOOC truly is open education. Is it?

First, we have to define ‘open’. As Bayne et. al. state there is no coherent definitions of ‘open’ (p. 248). So what does ‘open’ mean then?  So far I had in mind that ‘open’ means that an educational offer is free, that everyone who wants to participate has access. For me, ‘open’ also possibly means that contributions that I or others share are openly accessible. I always tied ‘openness’ to an optimistic culture of sharing. So there are no access restrictions, everything is open on the net.  That’s why Common Creative licenses are important. But basically I renounce the copyright.

In the Coursera MOOC I have enrolled in I can freely access the material and work through it. But I don’t have to prove that I understood. It won’t be certified anyway, so there’s no use to do that. This is already my first problem. The course is open, and as I am using it as an open course, I can’t have the possibility to assess my progress. In my understanding, “open” means “equal” to a certain extent. Something is open, so that everyone has the chance to work on topics with equal rights and under the same “open” conditions. This already is not possible. I’d like to know if I understood well, but I can’t be sure that I did. So if I want to check my learning success, then I have to pay.  Is that course still ‘open’? There being a difference between someone who pays and someone who can’t or simply doesn’t, it seems somehow related to inequality or hierarchy. As Bayne et al. state, openness would mean flat hierarchies. Clearly this is not the case.

As a motivated and self-directed individual I have no problems to work through an open course like mine. But this seems one of the pillars for MOOCs in the first place. What about those who should increase their competence but are not motivated? How do they succeed? In an educational setting there are several roles and relationships that seem to be crucial to learning success. On the one hand there is the (unmotivated) student, on the other hand we have a teacher who is a professional in education and motivating others. In my MOOC the teacher is absent. I don’t have any direct contact or feedback from a professional who guides me if I need it.

Well, I may even succeed on my own, but am I a better person than others because I am motivated and they are not? How can we draw the line here without discriminating against others? Do I have the right to judge others who are not like me? As Bayne notes, “openness relies too much on the logic of self-direction” (p. 248) and consequently fails to “engage in the de-emphasis of teacher contact”. In fact, I consider relationships to be a core quality of an educational environment that is completely lacking in my Coursera MOOC: the professors in MOOC are banned on video, I can read their articles. But even if I can see and hear the person, they are not present, they will not answer me when I post a question in the forum. If there is some kind of relationship in the course, it is because of peer feedback, what may or may not happen, I am on my own. So, “education is divorced from complexities of culture, sociality and the power of the political”, as Bayne et al. state again (ibid.).

If we agree with John Seely Brown that “learning is social and “content is constructed through conversations  about that content and through grounded interactions” (Brown, J. S. and  Adler, R. P., 2008, p. 18) and emphasize the importance of social interaction for learning”, I won’t be able to study or learn through a MOOC in which I am left isolated and on my own. I won’t be able to experience exchange of ideas or discussions throughout the course, and therefore, no new content will be constructed. To stay with Brown and Adler, my MOOC works the Cartesian way: knowledge is a substance transmitted through video and text to the student. (Brown and Adler, ibid) Thus, the student is not able to critically approach the subject, he/she has just to accept what he/she has got. It would be different with tutors and experts guiding me through a subject, being present if needed, facilitating interesting discussions with people from other countries from diverse situations and directing a discussion from their expert point of view. Openness as accessibility alone might work for intrinsically motivated students to get a first impression on a subject. But it is not enough for deepening knowledge towards competence and professional performance.

Bayne, S., Knox, J., Ross, J., (2015) Open education: the need for a critical approach. Learning Media and Technology, Vol. 40, No. 3, p. 247-250.

Brown, J. S. and Adler, R. P., (2008) Minds on Fire, Open Education, The Long Tail, and Learning 2.0, educause, 2008.