MOOCs: The Internet and Discursive Shifts in the Field of US Higher Education (Preliminary Results)

• In Event: 556 - Regular Session. Innovation and Change in Higher Education

Abstract

Recent popular press coverage has pointed to resurgent interest in online course delivery at the university level. Using a data set of trade publications analyzed through qualitative hand coding and preliminary quantitative text mining methods this paper evaluates these trends. In particular it explores shifts in discourse between the pre-dot-com period of online activities in the field of higher education (1999-2000) and it’s most recent resurgence (2011-2012). It finds support for three hypotheses, the first of which is that 1) frames of individual empowerment, and autonomous learning, increased while those associated with distance education and content monetization decreased. This discursive shift was paralleled by 2) a decrease in conflict between faculty and administrators, and less attention focused on workers rights and copyright contestation. Third, this paper finds support for the hypothesis that 3) recent developments signal the birth of a field, and the increasing significance of prestige and centrality of these technologies to this new social space. The analysis in this paper uses text-mining software that is an interim step toward more advanced analysis using Topic Modeling that is currently underway (to be complete by March 2014).

Author

• Ben Hidru Gebre-Medhin, University of California-Berkeley