Pedagogy Topic Overview
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their potential effect on education has been broadly documented by numerous researchers. Convincing arguments ranging from their efficacy in the classroom to their potential ability to change institutions have been made (Callahan). Moreover, MOOCs are portrayed as having global instructors, designers, and audiences. For example, the University of Hong Kong’s MOOC, “Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens,” offered through edX is a course designed to draw in a global learning audience. And so, while MOOCs have been thoroughly discussed in conversations about how we disseminate knowledge, in this brief overview, I interrogate whether MOOCs can change hierarchies of knowledge themselves. Using HKU’s MOOC as a case study, I examine the ways in which MOOCs have the potential to change epistemological structures through global engagement. This potential, however, does not mean that all MOOCs are inherently transformative, but that MOOCs and other online course formats can be deployed as useful tools to rethink and reconfigure how knowledge is constructed.
Although MOOCs may seem like tools that would liberate knowledge from institutions and be an equalizing factor for learning, this has not been the case. In fact, MOOCs are limited in various ways, and researchers have shown that they do not have the reach and appeal that developers had in mind. The demand for MOOCs as opposed to brick-and-motar course offerings was most likely to help accommodate exponential number of students enrolling in universities. For example, in India MOOCs, according to Pawan Agarwal, have the potential to improve the education system by reducing cost per student and alleviate faculty shortages. Agarwal’s article was initially published under the title, “An Opportunity for India” and was subsequently changed to “How MOOCs Can Help India.” The article and especially with its original title mobilizes language in a way that performs a certain kind of positive outlook on MOOCs. MOOCs are an “opportunity,” and they can “help” other places that must “find [their] way soon” (Agarwal).
This conception of MOOCs, however, reinscribes global hierarchies and privilege stratifications. In Agrawal’s article, there is the specificity of place, India, but the framing of MOOCs as an “opportunity” positions India as somewhere in the past, a problematic place to seek one’s education. Others have claimed that MOOCs are ideal for “the third world” (Patru and Balaji). Indeed, places outside of the United States have been developing MOOCs (Waldrop). The implications of MOOCs for “the third world” is problematic. It supposes that countries outside of the US and most of Europe want to “catch-up,” and it is no surprise that the same authors encourage MOOCs that focus on skills in these spaces to make these spaces viable for companies to build factories in these places. MOOCs have also been found to be largely ineffective with equalizing education across different social boundaries. Participants and learners are largely white, male, middle-class, and have higher levels of education. Considering these various issues that have emerged around MOOCs, these open online courses then can also be used as tools to reinforce neoliberalism by maintaining social, economic, cultural, and gender hierarchies.
With the focus on skill acquisition, global neoliberalism can flourish by providing companies alternative labor sources. Furthermore, while skill acquisition MOOCs can provide livelihoods to people, it keeps their labor based in skill economies rather than critical or creative work. In other words, technical MOOCs that are touted to give opportunity to the “third world” cannot changing the hierarchies of global education and economics. They instead reinforce existing systems and hierarchies. Diversification of MOOCs and the available content that is taught are, therefore, necessary for the success of the platform.
This is not to say that MOOCs have only been developed for the hard sciences or technical skills, but for MOOCs to be effective on a larger scale they need to diversify their form and content. The University of Hong Kong’s Department of Comparative Literature has developed and run a MOOC about Hong Kong cinema. This MOOC had its first run in 2016 and a “rerun” in 2017. The course was offered for free to anyone who signed up through the edX website, and participants could opt-in for a certificate for which the learner could pay. Students who did not sign up for the certificate were listed as auditors. Signing up for the certificate was not mandatory, and those not enrolled in the certificate did still have access to the assignments and assessments in the course. The course was also structured more traditionally with the releasing of new material each week, but student access to the previous weeks remained active if they wanted to review the previously taught materials.
Each session was broken down into a series of subtopics and themes. For example, the second week focused on Bruce Lee and kung-fu cinema in a global context. The subtopics and themes included poly-ethnicity, Blaxploitation, yellowface, and Asian masculinity. Each week also included a quiz that was due by the following week and a “Global Gabfest,” where participants responded to a prompt. For the Bruce Lee week, the prompt was as follows, “Hong Kong cinema became globally popular because of the unexpected success of Kung fu cinema with Bruce Lee as its number one super star. Does the Kung fu craze still exist today? Does Bruce Lee continue to serve as the Kung fu paragon of virtue?” Learners responded in short paragraphs, and there were usually around ten participants in each gabfest. The course had a total of six weeks-worth of content, and each week is supplemented with a weekly roundup that was a video of a conversation between the lecturers and a recommended readings and bibliography page. Participants in the course are given numerous course possibilities once the week’s new material is posted. At the end of the course, the course is archived, but its contents remain active for participants who had signed up. Overall, the course is quite flexible in that it is a choose-your-own-adventure type of format.
HKU’s MOOC shows the ways in which MOOCs can be deployed in more fluid ways to facilitate access for learners. While much of the information is based on the short videos on the topics and subtopics where an instructor speaks to the camera and relevant clips are inserted, there is also a running transcript on the page. This aspect of the course opens the course to more audiences. The transcript gives access to those who are hearing impaired, and it goes through all the video content in the course. Scripted lectures are not the only things transcribed, but the conversations discussants have in their weekly roundup are also transcribed and rolled when the video is playing. The transcription of the lectures and conversations also grants access to students who may be not native English speakers. While the course is held in English as per the policy for the University of Hong Kong, the transcription of the video is a system that can be paused, looked up, and reviewed in a fluid way (“Curriculum Reform”). It gives a sense of where the speaker will go in their segment unlike subtitles. Transcripts can also be downloaded as documents, and it is a way for the content to be slowed down to the learner’s pace.
The transcribing of the lectures and dialogues is a practical way to open the accessibility of the course. At the same time, the course not only is engaging with distributing access to a global audience, but it also focuses on a topic that emphasizes global awareness away from one location as center. The course focuses on Hong Kong as a meaningful site of cinematic production. Rather than emphasizing Hong Kong’s connection to Hollywood or to the emerging film industries in the People’s Republic of China, the MOOC makes a case for Hong Kong cinema as a local phenomenon that has global implications and connections. Hong Kong cinema in the MOOC begins with Bruce Lee or Mabel Cheung among others, but these figures and the topics covered create bridges with Blaxploitation and Beijing respectively. The course sheds light on a local topic and constructs connections with the global. In other words, it facilitates a global awareness through local cinema. There is no center or reinforced global hierarchy through the content of the course but rather a reiminaging. The MOOC contains the possibility of reconfiguring the discourse of knowledge that surrounds cinema and film studies.
The HKU MOOC and others allow us to rethink how and where learning can take place. The “Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens” MOOC illuminates the ways in which certain activities make participants aware of learning conditions. The global gabfest with the word, “global” in its title, already draws attention to how participants are coming from various places in the world. In the initial week of the course, the instructors also asked students to mark themselves on a map to show where the learners were located. Many of the participants came from the United States, France, Germany, India, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Thailand, and many more. This marked awareness of the global participation not only by the instructors but also for the other participants to see and identify pushes us to think about where learning happens. It is not only in a physical classroom or lecture hall but from different sites.
While I do see the HKU MOOC as largely open and freeing, it does not necessarily allow learners to practice education as their own freedom. Here I consider both bell hooks’ argument about education as a transgressive practice of freedom and the assumed freedom of education that MOOCs are assumed to bring. MOOCs are limited, and they are not inherently liberatory. They do not bring freedom with them, but they can be used as tools towards education liberation and freedom from hegemonic discourses. As bell hooks points out in her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, all forms of education are not equally freeing. It is the pedagogical impetus of the instructor to teach to transgress, to perform beyond set boundaries, and to use education to empower rather than inculcate and subdue. It is not teaching classroom itself that is liberating, but teaching can be transgressive and thus, freeing. I see MOOCs in the same light. MOOCs can be used in transgressive ways to not only recapitulate information but to teach transgression and educational freedom.
The global gabfest activity is a space where instructor-student interaction could flourish. In the HKU MOOC, however, there has some interaction based on the global gabfest. Participants responded to the questions prompted by the course, and in the weekly roundup video, the instructors would bring together some of the important insights provided by the students. At times, the students did respond to each other, but there were no lengthy (more than five responses in a thread) interactions. Although the instructors did address some of the issues that the students posted in the roundup, it is difficult to track a sustained form of interaction. Once the instructor responds, the conversation seems to be stilted for the participants. In week five, Gina Marchetti encourages others to post about the film after as the forum remains open. Of course, responding to each student in a MOOC that could have an endless sea of students is an unreasonable demand and extremely time consuming. Yet, must it mean that instructor and students should not have to communicate this way at all? The global gabfest or online forum format is a space where instructor feedback to the participants would not only respond back to the learner about their thoughts and ideas, but the instructor could take cues from this area and adjust the course material accordingly. Rather than demanding that the HKU MOOC respond to their students in this form, I suggest instead that the gabfest with its more informal tone is a space where untapped potential for instructor-student communication and transgression of boundaries lies. MOOCs can readily facilitate or have the potential to foster more fluid boundaries between instructors and students.
MOOCs also make more forms of media available in an integrated platform. With “Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens,” we see some of this inclusion of different forms of media to foster learning with the transcript, rewatchable videos, and interactive forums. This media production, however, is one-sided. Only instructors and course moderators create content outside of writing forum posts. Participants can “gab” but do not produce their own forms of media. This lack of learner-produced media is perhaps due to the assumption that media is difficult to produce and a creator would need special skills to do so. Indeed, constructing a video remix or digital argument is difficult, but with the online platform, the lack of variety in media is striking.
Here, Femtechnet’s model is particularly useful in bringing forward the media potential of online platforms and collaboration. The way in which Femtechnet engages in networked feminist scholarship provides strategies beyond research with colleagues. According to Femtechnet, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Workbook is not a MOOC but a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC). The DOCC sources knowledge in distributed ways from scholars in various fields and from various backgrounds (What Is a DOCC?). It also emphasizes collaboration between scholars, students, activists, and media-makers. The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook includes video dialogues and other media materials, such as “Community-Based and Publicly Engaged Learning.” On this page, the topic of “self-directed learners” is telling. Unlike a MOOC, the DOCC delineates what a learner is in terms of the participant designing the course for themselves with the material provided by the DOCC. The DOCC is student driven. It is not a course where the instructor disseminates knowledge and may or may not interact with the learners’ responses. In a DOCC, it is up to the learner to design their own course for their own needs.
A DOCC with its self-oriented design for learners allows participants to create their own course, a practice of educational freedom, and, at the same time, the MOOC gives more structure to students who seek it. A course with a less linear organization like the one from Femtechnet is advantageous when students can choose what they want to pursue and what they topics in which they want to dive deeper. Including more assignments that are more media-rich in nature can also help to use the online platform of the MOOC more effectively. Traditional lectures are also a helpful tool for information gathering and learning for students, but these methods must be supplemented with other forms. In other words, combining or remixing MOOCs and DOCCs, their various teaching forms, and pedagogical practices is a necessary task for effectively utilizing online platforms for learning and for discursive freedom. Although the MOOC form is not inherently freeing, it can be useful in the practice of education when thought of differently and articulated in various ways. It is not simply a transfer of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom format, but it is a platform that can radically change the ways in which we practice education as freedom, liberating its instructors and participants from ideological neoliberalism and reconfiguring global hierarchies.
Citations:
Agarwal, Pawan. “How MOOCs Can Help India.” Scientific American, 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-moocs-can-help-india/.
Callahan, Vicki. “Toward Networked Feminist Scholarship: Mindful Media, Participatory Learning, and Distributed Authorship in the Digital Economy.” Cinema Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 156–63.
“Curriculum Reform.” HKU Teaching and Learning, https://tl.hku.hk/reform/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2017.
Hooks, Bell. Teaching To Transgress. Routledge, 2014.
Patru, Marian, and Venkataraman Balaji, editors. Making Sense of MOOCs: A Guide for Policy-Makers in Developing Countries. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2016.
Porter, Sarah. To MOOC or Not to MOOC: How Can Online Learning Help to Build the Future of Higher Education? Chandos Publishing, 2015.
“The Hong Kong Cinema Workbook- A MOOC Redesign.” The Hong Kong Cinema Workbook- A MOOC Redesign, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/thehongkongcinemaworkbook/index. Accessed 13 Nov. 2017.
Waldrop, M.Mitchell. “Online Learning: Campus 2.0.” Nature, 2013, http://www.nature.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/news/online-learning-campus-2-0-1.12590.
What Is a DOCC? http://femtechnet.org/docc/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2017.