Anthropology in and of MOOCs

The suddenness with which Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, sprang upon us left many within the academy grasping for interpretations. Early proponents touted them as revolutionary tools that could enhance on-campus learning while also making high-quality education accessible to a vast global population, reforming a malfunctioning university system, and producing new kinds of data on how people learn. Critics countered that behind this latest techno-utopian fad lurked an all-too-familiar conservative agenda to downsize the university; the global ambitions of a few elite, resource-rich schools; Silicon Valley corporate interests; and the disciplinary priorities of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM fields). With some critical distance, the eight scholars in this Vital Topics Forum draw upon their experiences as anthropologists involved in MOOCs and anthropologists doing studies of MOOCs to propel us beyond such facile responses. Doing what anthropologists do best, they employ contextually rich analysis to upend received wisdom about what MOOCs mean, provide processual accounts of how they are made, and offer first-hand observations of how students are using them on the ground. I begin with the caveat that this collection certainly does not capture all there is to say about MOOCs, even within our discipline: its focus is limited to cultural anthropology, even though our colleagues in other subfields have been actively involved in making MOOCs and debating their value (on archaeology, see Alcock et al. 2013). This forum also does not address the verbal aspects of computer-mediated communication that are most intriguing to me as a linguistic anthropologist. Finally, it leaves crucial issues related to labor conditions within the university relatively unexamined. Taken together, however, the essays here do begin to lay a conceptual groundwork for a cultural anthropological approach to MOOCs as a media world -- an orientation that links 'media production, circulation, and reception in broad and intersecting social and cultural fields: local, regional, national, transnational' while also attending to 'the impacts of media technologies themselves' (Ginsburg et al. 2002:6). Adapted from the source document.