The Massive Online Open Course (MOOCs) our group is exploring, The Science of Well Being, offered through Coursera created personal tensions for me that can be distilled into weighing the value of the opportunity to engage with the content presented by Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos and the costs that were passed on to me as a student. I also struggled with the idea of content  presented in a way that I can describe as homogenous and with a superficial community but without ways to create community building in the course. This course was seemingly created to meet the needs of a fictional audience perhaps generated from looking at algorithms and data analysis and then curating the content based on that information. It occurred to me this course was made for a student who Tressie McMillan Cottom (2015) named the “roaming autodidact” the idealized student who can jump into self propelled learning such as MOOCs and other online technology, extracting what they need and jumping from resource to resource for learning but who lacks intersectionalities, community and identity. The personal tensions I experienced through this engagement led me to become curious about the broad trade offs MOOCs make as education providers and what that means at a societal level. I will attempt to look closely at how MOOCs rise to the occasion to democratize education and how they also contribute to the erosion of the democratization of learning in my ongoing critical inquiry work. 

According to Ye and Kozulin (1991), democratization of education is concerned with:

free choice of educational options, the relatively easy access to any level of education, a smooth transition from one level of education to another, freedom with regard to creative endeavours for the teacher and the student, the easy granting of copy-rights and patents, social guarantees, and much more in the way of measures that remove the shackles from education and liberate the individual potentials of all those involved in education. (p.75)

Furthermore Ye and Kozulin (1991) tell us that teachers and students being able to demonstrate self expression and self assertion of personality are at the heart of democratization of education. 

Based on the materials I have reviewed from library resources, discussions with my group, our instructor, Irwin Devries and through the experience of engaging with the Science of Well Being MOOC my critical inquiry will consider the alignment of MOOCs with the principles of democratization of education and the trade offs MOOC make within those principles. 

The content of the MOOC  we engaged with is concerned with people’s well being but at the same time captured data through curated activities, emphasized a behaviourist approach to the learning, removed intersectional considerations of students and lacked conditions for student and teacher creativity and contribution to the learning community. These qualities create challenges to accept the MOOC as a democratizing force as they limit the freedoms of student and teacher, but they are counteracted by the benefits of the MOOCs in terms of the content being shared from an expert in her field broadly, the zero financial costs to be part of the course and access content and the accessibility to students from all over the world.

I look forward to digging in further to this topic and invite my colleagues’ comments around MOOCs ability or inability to contribute to the democratization of education, building a shared understanding of democratization of education and also how to resolve the spelling of democratiz/sation. 

References:

McMillan Cottom, T. (2017). Lower ed: The troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy. New York, NY: The New Press.

Ye. G. Bondarenko & A.V. Kozulin (1991). The democratization of higher education, basic principles. Higher Education in Europe.(16)1, 74-78. DOI: 10.1080/0379772910160109