The Rise of the MOOC: The Second Wave of Elite Online Higher Education

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

I am an organizational sociologist (and PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley) with an empirical interest in higher education, politics, and social change. My dissertation, which combines mixed methods to evaluate the historical framing of online course delivery in higher education with case studies of Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley, evaluates how institutions change as practices move from the periphery to the core of organizational fields. My empirical focus is on how distance education, a historically marginal and low status practice, has been reframed and transformed into a cutting edge vehicle for reform associated with elite organizations and individuals (MOOCs being the key example). Preliminary analysis points to the ascendance of a particular group of actors: technical experts attached to elite departments of academic computer science. These experts, buoyed by the success of reform in other fields, used particular frames, practices, and networks to re­conceptualize distance education and, to a lesser extent, the institution of the elite american research university. In addition to field level analysis of organizational and professional dynamics relating to online course delivery, this dissertation will also speak to the impact of the rise of computer science and engineering on status hierarchies among elite American universities.

My dissertation is built on two central axes of comparison. First, I use newly available topic modeling techniques on a sample of higher education trade publications (The Chronicle of Higher Education) to evaluate the shifts in discursive framing of internet course delivery over the internet era. Building on that analysis, I identified four centrally situated universities around which the second part of my dissertation is organized. In parallel to the regional comparison developed by Annalee Saxenian (1994), I evaluate reform projects which emerged in Silicon Valley (Stanford and Berkeley) and Cambridge (MIT and Harvard). This four university framework also gives me a number of other significant possibilities for comparison. Evidence for these comparisons consists predominantly of semi­structured interviews. I spent the 2013­14 academic year in Cambridge, MA interviewing faculty, administrators, and technical experts at Harvard and MIT about their efforts to create edX. Over the course of 2014­15 I returned to the Bay Area to work on my second regional case which focuses on Stanford, out of which Coursera and Udacity emerged, and UC Berkeley.

For the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellows Poster Session at the 2016 AERA Conference in Washington, DC, I will present the framework of my dissertation argument as well as preliminary results from two major sections of my dissertation. Using topic modeling techniques to evaluate the content of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I show that a distinct break in the framing of online course delivery took place between early internet era (1997­2001) and the rise of the MOOC in 2012. Next, I will present preliminary results from interviews at Harvard, which address the efforts undertaken by the quintessential incumbent in the field of American Higher Education to compete with a newly ascendant group of schools strongly associated with, and defined by, the culture of engineering and computer science.

Author

• Benjamin Gebre-Medhin, University of California - Berkeley