Making ‘MOOCs’: The Construction of a New Digital Higher Education within News Media Discourse

One notable ‘disruptive’ impact of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been an increased public discussion of online education. While much debate over the potential and challenges of MOOCs has taken place online confined largely to niche communities of practitioners and advocates, the rise of corporate ‘xMOOC’ ventures such as Coursera, edX and Udacity has prompted popular mass media interest at levels not seen with previous educational innovations. This article addresses this important societal outcome of the recent emergence of MOOCs as an educational form by examining the popular discursive construction of MOOCs over the past 24 months within mainstream news media sources in United States, Australia and the UK. In particular, we provide a critical account of what has been an important phase in the history of educational technology— detailing a period when popular discussion of MOOCs has far outweighed actual use/participation. We argue that a critical analysis of MOOC discourse throughout the past two years highlights broader societal struggles over education and digital technology—capturing a significant moment before these debates subside with the anticipated normalization and assimilation of MOOCs into educational practice. This analysis also sheds light on the influences underpinning how many people perceive MOOCs thereby leading to a better understanding of acceptance/adoption and rejection/resistance amongst various professional and popular publics.


Article abstract
One notable 'disruptive' impact of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been an increased public discussion of online education. While much debate over the potential and challenges of MOOCs has taken place online confined largely to niche communities of practitioners and advocates, the rise of corporate 'xMOOC' ventures such as Coursera, edX and Udacity has prompted popular mass media interest at levels not seen with previous educational innovations. This article addresses this important societal outcome of the recent emergence of MOOCs as an educational form by examining the popular discursive construction of MOOCs over the past 24 months within mainstream news media sources in United States, Australia and the UK. In particular, we provide a critical account of what has been an important phase in the history of educational technology-detailing a period when popular discussion of MOOCs has far outweighed actual use/participation. We argue that a critical analysis of MOOC discourse throughout the past two years highlights broader societal struggles over education and digital technology-capturing a significant moment before these debates subside with the anticipated normalization and assimilation of MOOCs into educational practice. This analysis also sheds light on the influences underpinning how many people perceive MOOCs thereby leading to a better understanding of acceptance/adoption and rejection/resistance amongst various professional and popular publics.

Introduction
One of the most notable 'disruptive' impacts of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to date has been the increased public discussion of online education and e-learning. Of course, much debate over the rights and wrongs of MOOCs has taken place online (through blogs, Twitter and other social media platforms), but thereby confined largely to niche communities of likeminded education technology practitioners and advocates.
However, the rise of corporate 'xMOOC' ventures such as Coursera, edX and Udacity has prompted popular mass media interest at levels not seen with previous educational innovations. Indeed, perhaps the most tangible impact of MOOCs to date has been their stimulation of an unprecedented volume and urgency of debate about higher education in the digital age.
This article (and the broader MRI-funded project that it provides a 'first glimpse' of) addresses this important societal outcome of the recent emergence of MOOCs as an educational form-examining the popular discursive construction of MOOCs over the past 24 months within mainstream news media sources. Such an approach provides a counterpoint to many of the other research articles in this Special Issue. In particular, this article provides a critical account of what has been an important phase in the history of educational technology-detailing a period when popular discussion of MOOCs has far outweighed actual use/participation. As such, a critical analysis of MOOC discourse throughout the past two years highlights broader societal struggles over education and digital technology-capturing a significant moment before these debates subside with the anticipated normalization and assimilation of MOOC-like online education, in whatever form, into educational practice. This analysis also has a practical benefit of shedding light on the influences underpinning how many people perceive MOOCs-leading to a better understanding of acceptance/adoption and rejection/resistance amongst various professional and popular publics.
In terms of theoretical approach, this project is situated within the tradition of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), and is therefore concerned primarily with the ways in which the discourses around MOOCs reproduce and/or disrupt social and political inequalities within higher education. This approach is well-suited to testing the ideologies and values that have surrounded the recent rise of MOOCs-especially in terms of claims related to: the democratizing of educational opportunity; the challenging of institutional monopolies within higher education; and the benefits/limitations of a diversity of educational provision. As Taylor (2004) argues, taking this approach is of particular value in documenting multiple and competing discourses within education, in highlighting marginalized and hybrid discourses, and in documenting discursive shifts over time. Given the fastchanging and complex nature of the development of MOOCs over the past few years (e.g., from the connectivist model of the 'cMOOC' to the corporate and institutionallyfocused model of 'xMOOCs'), a discourse analysis perspective can provide a muchneeded socio-political analysis to the prevailing claims and counter-claims currently surrounding this area of educational activity. 3. In whose interests do these portrayals of MOOCs work? What issues and concerns are less prominently portrayed?

Research Methods
The article adopts a discourse analysis approach to investigating these questionsdrawing on established methodologies from social linguistics and the social sciences that have also begun to be used increasingly in educational research (see Rogers et al., 2005 for an overview). First, a large-scale corpus of text was established encompassing news media stories produced between January 2012 and December 2013 in the following two areas of English language discourse production:  The initial phase of data analysis reported upon in this article used a frame analysis of MOOC discourses (Gerhards, 1995;Goffman, 1975;MacLachlan & Reid, 1994). This aimed to analyze the 'tone' of the media discourse on MOOCs and 'sketch' how MOOC issues are viewed. The data reported on in this article relate to two elements of each newspaper article. First, is the headline attached to the article-usually written by a newspaper's sub-editor and intended to provide 'initial summaries of new texts and foreground what the producer regards as most relevant and of maximum interest or appeal to readers' (Brookes, 1995, p. 467). In this sense, 'headlines help readers construct an ideological approach to the content of the article … provid[ing] the dominant image of a given event and the way the event is apt to be stored in the mind of readers' (Johnson & Avery 1999, p. 452 Our analysis of these texts was both quantitative and qualitative in nature, thereby aiming to identify the overall patterns of how MOOCs have been interpreted by different sources. Particular attention was paid to identifying patterns between type of discourse and the characteristics of the sources involved (i.e., type of publication, institutions/individuals that are represented and so on.). A further aim of this analysis was to cross-tabulate specific discursive themes/concerns with different types of institution/stakeholder/country-thereby beginning to explore the patterning of MOOC discourses across different sub-groups and contexts.

Research Findings
The analysis and coding of the headline and definition texts resulted in 14 distinct themes-the nature and prevalence of which is described in Table 1 and below. The most prevalent meaning within the data was that of a vague sense of inevitable, substantial 'change' (n=125). MOOCs were described as a 'digital change agent'

Peripheral Issues and Meanings
As can be seen from Table 1, a number of less prevalent meanings and issues were also apparent within the text corpus. First amongst these were a set of issues relating to the higher education marketplace (n=50) and competition between education providers. These descriptions tended to focus on the role of MOOCs in reordering the higher education marketplace. On one hand, universities' involvement in MOOCs was presented as a prerequisite for remaining a competitive higher education provider-as the Guardian ( reported 'doubts about uncollaborative and 'imperialist' US platforms'. Nearly as much concern was shown over matters of assessment (n=40), particularly with regards to matters of credentialing, grading, qualifications and measuring quality.
One primary concern here was how MOOCs fitted with the traditional university forms of credentialization, with questions raised over 'campus credit for online classes' (New York Times, 12.3.2013). Two specific 'issues' along these lines recurred within the data.
Firstly, were issues of grading and assessment, with questions raised over proposals for some MOOCs to use automated grading software, or 'a digital auto-grader' as the MOOCs were rare-that is, 'information wants to be free, but does education?' (Washington Post, 2.11.2012); 'more to MOOCs than moolah' (Times Higher Ed, 10.1.2013). Even less concern was shown with the content of MOOC provision (n=18).
The content of these courses was mentioned only with respect to subjects and topics of study that were seemingly incongruous in a technological setting (e.g. 'making his there is a significant 'alternative' heritage of shaping influences behind the seemingly rapid rise of MOOCs that is obscured and silenced in the news media. Also problematic is the partial visibility within news media discourses of many of the These partial portrayals all serve to obscure some of the most significant dynamics of the recent rise to prominence of MOOCs-not least power imbalances and the domination of elite interests, continued hierarchies and unequal social relations between institutions, teachers and students, and the perpetuation of long-standing inequalities of opportunity and outcome. Take, for example, the notion conveyed in mainstream news stories that MOOCs are taught by privileged professors and taken by masses of students regardless of their circumstance. This belies the reality of a situation where many MOOCs are being taught by largely undistinguished and disempowered faculty and taken/completed mainly by a minority of educated privileged students (see Emanuel, 2013). Not only are these news media discourses obscuring the emerging evidence of MOOCs benefiting students who are already academically privileged rather than democratizing educational participation, but they also serve to side-line important issues relating to the casualization, deprofessionalization and outsourcing of academic labor. Similarly obscured are issues relating to the economics of MOOCs. Where is the reporting and discussion of the role of multinational corporations such as Pearson in supporting the administration of MOOCs, or multi-million dollar investments by venture capitalists? Taken on its own terms, these news media discourses reflect little of the major implications of MOOCs with regards to the potentially radical reform of relationships between the individual and the commons, the public and the private, nonprofit and for-profit interests. The over-riding sense that one gains from reading these accounts is that of MOOCs as straightforward product rather than MOOCs as complex and messy process.

Conclusions
There is much more that our research project will address in subsequent analyses-not least how these descriptions, understandings and meanings are remediated from their 'old media' origins in arenas such as the New York Times into online comments pages and then onto the blogosphere, Twitter and other social media forums. Yet while the current commentary and debate about MOOCs undeniably is taking place on a diverse poly-medial basis, it would be unwise to dismiss the discursive construction of MOOCs in the established news media sources covered in this article as somehow peripheral to 'real' meaning-making in the digital age. On the contrary, these old media continue to be sites where the vast majority of the general public (and a good proportion of education professionals) are being exposed to the notion of 'MOOCs'. These also are the media sources that continue to exert a disproportionate influence on policymakers and decision-makers, both in government and within higher education institutions. As such, these news media should be seen as having a large bearing on the continued progression of MOOCs from niche educational technology fad to mainstream educational form. Seen in this light, then, there is clearly a need for more informed and nuanced descriptions and meanings to be added to these debates within news media around the world. While it might appear a minor matter, contesting the language, definitions and implicit assumptions currently being used to describe MOOCs within popular discourse could be seen as an important task for those in the educational technology and elearning communities to take up. As the data in this article have demonstrated, language and discourse are integral elements of the politics of contemporary education-maintaining the parameters of what is, and what is not, seen as preferable and possible. Challenging-and offering alternatives to-something as apparently trivial as the ways in which MOOCs are being talked about in mainstream news media is therefore an important element of influencing the future conditions of digital higher education. Supporters and opponents of MOOCs in their various guises are well advised to take note, and to take action.