Designing the Digital University

Designing the Digital University: Materiality, Embodiment, and Mess

Liz Losh

Keynote, Digital Pedagogy Institute 2016

2012 was declared to be “the year of the MOOC” by no less than the New York Times, but stories of failure abounded  about Massive Open Online Courses in the years that followed.  The public read tales of defections, meltdowns, protests, and palace coups by faculty and scandals involving vandalism, cheating, and harassment by students.  With retention rates hovering at 5%, few universities are maintaining the revolutionary fervor that characterized the optimistic press releases and photo ops of previous years.   

This talk argues that MOOCs themselves might have been remarkably uniform as vehicles for content delivery, but they spurred a valuable diversity of pedagogical reactions among faculty to their particular format for free large-scale distance learning.  Public debate and discussion about MOOCs has spurred a variety of innovative pedagogical experiments in higher education: SPOCs (Small Personalized Online Courses), DOCCs (Distributed Open Collaborative Courses), POOCs (Public Open Online Courses), and many other new forms of online teaching.