• Corpus ID: 214610777

OF HEATHENS, PERVERTS AND STALKERS: THE IMAGINED LEARNER IN MOOCS

@inproceedings{Shah2015OFHP,
  title={OF HEATHENS, PERVERTS AND STALKERS: THE IMAGINED LEARNER IN MOOCS},
  author={Nishant Shah},
  year={2015}
}

• Nishant Shah
• Published 2015
• Art

Debates about the form, formats, functions and futures of massive online open courses (MOOCs) have been for the most part generative in helping to shape new platforms of active learning. However, they generally give very little attention to the figure of the learner. Contemporary MOOC discourse and practice tend to assume a diverse, distributed user who only needs infrastructures for access and a certain level of digital literacy to become an active learner. Thus, both the proponents and critics of MOOCs promote the idea that building online and open courseware, supported by infrastructure growth, will automatically translate into an inclusive and diverse set of learners online. In this essay, I suggest that our imagination of learner ‘diversity’ within the MOOC neglects the contested histories of how a learner is ‘made’. I shift the debate from ‘Who is a learner?’ to ‘Who gets to become a learner?’ to argue that the figure of the learner is subject to a massive infrastructure of policing, penalizing and punishment; that learning does not happen through quantified codes and protocols engineered towards finite intentions, but through affective and accidental relationships with the learning resources; and that the figure of the learner is subject to technologies of domination and protocols of control that are inflected with questions of gender and power. I propose that complicating and unpacking the figure of the learner helps us to realize the limitations of our imaginations of MOOCs and opens up the possibility of building new connected learning environments that can account for truly diverse users to become active learners.