(MIS)UNDERSTANDING MOOCS: DISCOURSE NETWORKS, ANTAGONISM AND THE STRUCTURING OF NETWORKED MEDIA

                             ABSTRACT

 

As with many technologies, the public reception of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has

not been without conflict. Alternatively praised as the salvation of higher education or loathed as the figure of its ultimate degradation, the hyperbole characterizing discussion of MOOCs nevertheless marks the seriousness by which people have argued over what should be understood as a MOOC, and what they mean for a global system of higher education.

This thesis analyzes the discourse network emerging at a prominent point of impact in these discussions: the online discussion forums of The Chronicle of Higher Education over the first two years following the public introduction of MOOCs. Like many networks, these discussion forums are riven by asymmetries of participation: a few contribute much while the majority little. Focusing on the frequencies of participation among actors involved in these forums and the disproportionate practices of production and distribution they enact, this analysis asks: How do discursive practices vary between frequent and infrequent participants to the forums, and how do these frequencies of practice contribute to processes structuring online discourse?

Conducting a case study of the online discussion forums, a grounded approach first explores the discourses and antagonisms, points of incongruity within the discussions, articulated within the forums. Through content analysis, these are then explored in relation to the interactive, rhetorical and articulatory practices of the most frequent and infrequent participants. Conclusions drawn point to inverse tendencies for interaction within the forum, with the most frequent participants directly engaging other participants in points of antagonism and, as a sociotechnical process, constructing durable media configurations

structuring the online discussion threads.

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. v

List of Tables …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… vi

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………………………… vii

Chapter 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1

Thesis Outline …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4

Literature review ………………………………………………………………………………………… 5

Theory and method……………………………………………………………………………………… 6

Case Study …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7

Chapter 2 Literature Review ………………………………………………………………………………………. 9

Online Discussion Forums ………………………………………………………………………………….. 10

Centripetal functions of online forums …………………………………………………………… 11

Centrifugal functions of online forums ………………………………………………………….. 13

Frequent Participation ………………………………………………………………………………………… 15

Structure …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 17

Chapter 3 Theory ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 25

Discourse ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 26

Sociotechnical Theories of Practice ……………………………………………………………………… 32

Discursive Structure …………………………………………………………………………………………… 34

Chapter 4 Method …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 42

Content Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 44

Grounded Theory Methodology …………………………………………………………………………… 48

Chapter 5 Case Study: MOOC Discourses and Antagonisms …………………………………………. 54

Professional Concerns ………………………………………………………………………………………… 55

Pedagogy ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 59

Commercialism …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 63

Antagonisms……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 66

Chapter 6 Case Study: Frequent Participants ………………………………………………………………… 69

Online Discussion Forums of The Chronicle …………………………………………………………. 70

MOOC discussion forums: June 2012 – June 2014 …………………………………………. 71

Content Analysis: Frequency Groups …………………………………………………………………… 74

Frequent Participants ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 80

The Dreamer ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 81

The Professoriate ………………………………………………………………………………………… 84

Single Posters …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 87

Chapter 7 Implications ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 90

Frequent Participation and the Structuring of Practice ……………………………………………. 90

The Chronicle as Discourse Network …………………………………………………………………… 95

Chapter 8 Conclusion and Future Work ………………………………………………………………………. 99

References ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 104

News Article References …………………………………………………………………………………….. 113

Comment References …………………………………………………………………………………………. 118

 

 

LIST OF FIGURES

 

Figure 1-1. Total comments posted to forums of The Chronicle by frequency group…………………….73

Figure 1-2. Distribution of participant comments and responses………………………………………….74

 

 

 

LIST OF TABLES

 

Table 6-1. Online discussion forums of The Chronicle……………………………………………………72

Table 6-2. Interactive practices among frequent participants and single posters…………………………75

Table 6-3. Content analysis of rhetorical practices (Totals)………………………………………………76

Table 6-4. Content analysis of rhetorical practices (Interaction: Monologues)……………………………77

Table 6-5. Content analysis of rhetorical practices (Interaction: Replies)…………………………………78

Table 6-6. Content analysis of rhetorical practices (Interaction: Responses)……………………………..79

 

Chapter 1 

 

Introduction

Incitement, rather than proclamation, best characterizes the New York Times article describing

2012 as “The year of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012). Opening to the fever-pace at which MOOC platform providers such as Harvard and MIT’s edX, or Stanford-born commercial start-ups like Udacity and Coursera, are “growing faster than facebook” (Andrew Ng, as quoted in Pappano, 2012), the Times article places readers at the precipice of… something. Before we are told precisely “what is a MOOC anyway?,” Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, appears to let us in on the big secret: “I like to call this the year of disruption… and the year is not over yet” (Agarwal, as quoted in Pappano, 2012).

The incitement of the piece follows not from who and what are described- MOOC course offerings, student and faculty anecdotes, emerging issues such as student assessment- but from the who and what that are not: the to-be disrupted. Aaron Bady (2013), finding at the end of the MOOC rainbow the demise of public commitment to higher education, notes that these issues are obscured precisely because the real disruption has already occurred:

there’s almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes. It’s been given a great deal of hype and publicity, but that aura of “innovation” poorly describes a technology—or set of technological practices, to be more precise—that is not that distinct from the longer story of online education, and which is designed to reinforce and reestablish the status quo, to make tenable a structure that is falling apart. (n.p.)

The status quo to which Brady refers represents an ongoing crisis spurred by disinvestment in higher education, and inequalities between students and universities which can afford traditional, residential practices of education, and those which, increasingly, cannot. According to Bady, MOOCs stand to not only accentuate this crisis, but “to institutionalize it, render it permanent.”

Yet the incitement of the year of the MOOC follows less from the realization of these predictions, and rather from the speed at which the press could readily proclaim “disruption” before its unwary victims could voice their own stake in these developments. Whether described by Stanford’s president

John Hennessy as a fast approaching “tsunami” (Hennessy, as quoted in Auletta, 2012), or The New York

Time’s Thomas Friedman (2012) gleefully welcoming the “revolution,” Bady (2013) finds that “in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability.” Prepped for landfall, professors, instructors, students, administrators, and the spectrum of interested observers of higher education looked to and sometimes voiced their own opinions in the popular press whose celebratory warnings might soon become their own lived realities.

The fallout of such incitement emerged in The Chronicle of Higher Education, on whose pages and digital forums became waged a comment-to-comment combat in which every MOOC pronouncement was met with outbursts ranging from staunch opposition to watch-it-burn cheerleading. Porterfield (2013) speaks for many, writing:

The past year has seen the meteoric rise of the MOOC, or massive open online course, which lets

100,000 strangers—or more—log on to free classes branded “Stanford” or “Harvard.” The New York Times went so far as to call 2012 the “Year of the MOOC.” Amid the cacophony of voices calling for colleges to cut costs and reduce student debt, many of us who work in higher education find ourselves playing defense on an issue we don’t yet know enough about. (n.p.)

Defenses were erected through reactionary op-ed pieces such as Porterfield’s, stumping, for instance, for 2013 to be “the year of the seminar.” More often, however, op-ed contributors and reader comments featured anger and hyperbolic fears. “I don’t want to be MOOC’d,” bewails one professor of many at “smaller, lower-ranked institutions… —those typically with a city rather than a state in their names” (Sumell, 2013). For many, the MOOC, whatever it was, is or could be, conjured a menagerie of fears and insecurities in which, surely, could only be read the end times.

All the while The Chronicle, happily informing its readers, has maintained a special section of its website devoted to “What You Need to Know About MOOCs” (n.d.), complete with timeline, article aggregator, and a first line echoing The New York Times: “Call it the year of the mega-class.” Steve Kolowich, a staff reporter covering technology and frequent contributor on MOOC developments, sets the tone for the Chronicle’s reporting:

If MOOCs portend a “tsunami” of change in higher education, as observers have said, then many colleges have been willingly swept in by the undertow. In less than two years, massive online courses have grown from side projects of a few techie professors into companies fueled by tens of millions in venture capital funds and the imaginations of the entire education industry. For universities worldwide, membership in edX or Coursera has become the hottest ticket in town.

(Kolowich, 2013h)

With each article and every accruing discussion forum, the merits and atrocities, actors, practices, and institutions bound to this technology as innovation/disruption/tsunami/revolution- all under the banner of “MOOC”- are vigorously articulated and re-articulated in an evolving sociotechnical configuration. In tracing the processes by which contributing practices interact and ultimately structure the discourse of The

Chronicle, the wake of the “year of the MOOC” comes into view not so much as an accounting of inexorable disruption, but a particular, living, and evolving edifice organizing the limits in which such accounting can be understood. As a result, The Chronicle emerges as a nexus of practice that, in bold outline, traces what such a thing as a MOOC can be and, more subtly, what it cannot.

Yet behind this nexus of practice, or rather at its heart, operates a network of actors not only divided over what is to be made of MOOCs but, perhaps just as significantly, divided along the frequencies of production and distribution characterizing their participation in the forums. This becomes more consequential when participation is granted its breadth of effect, as a practice involved in the becoming of a sociotechnical process, as well as its digital materiality that sees a network of media continually configure itself and expand through the conditional structures enacted out of regularities of production and distribution defined by participatory practice.

A common yet insufficiently understood feature of many forums, as well as to those of The Chronicle, regards the extreme participation of a minority of users, while others contribute infrequently or not at all. The issue of participation frequency consequently opens a significant question: How do practices vary between frequent and infrequent participants, and how do frequencies of practice contribute to processes of production and distribution structuring online discourse? These questions together seek entry to the processes by which distributed practices structure emergent forms of networked media with which we routinely engage in our everyday lives.

Thesis Outline

The case of The Chronicle represents but a single example of how new forms of co-produced, social media emerge through a nexus of digital space (Bruns, 2008; Castells, 2011; Jenkins, 2006a). In this light, discussions surrounding MOOCs can be recognized as an instance in which “the public has gained greater control over the means of cultural production and circulation” (Jenkins, 2014, p. 273). As shifts in social media now see digital audiences becoming content co-producers, new opportunities arise for co-produced “artifact configurations” to emerge in dynamic forms across all areas of social life.

(Boczkowski, 2005).

However, despite sustained interest and important insights, the nature of the processes organizing the co-production of social media continues to remain opaque (Carpentier, 2011, Larsson, 2012;

Orlikowski & Scott, 2015b; Van Dijck, 2009), contingent on material-discursive practices that are

“diverse and fractured” (Couldry, 2011, p. 490). Consequently, understanding the online co-production of user-generated content begs questions surrounding the practices production of distribution by which artifact configurations emerge through the contributions of participants and the interactions between them. A salient and insufficiently analyzed aspect of these practices is the extreme asymmetries of participation among actors involved.

Literature review

Research concerning online discourse develops through interest in the capacities of Web 2.0 infrastructures to facilitate processes of mass, many-to-many communication and the consequences of these processes to support diverse social forms. While avoiding an initial architecture or platform-centric conception of user-generated content as a premise for an analysis of online discourse, the extant literature considering online discussion forums tends to find the materiality of the medium recede to interests in the contexts and characteristics of communication and the social forms to which they contribute.           These accounts are categorized as centripetal and centrifugal respective to the theoretical and empirical articulation of difference outlining the limits of the social forms under investigation. Centrifugal accounts find processes wherein difference collapses toward a common center- whether as a specific vision of community, identity, or form of communicative agreement and understanding. Centrifugal accounts, on the contrary, identify the elaboration of difference and the fragmentation of social forms supported by online communication.

Amidst these sundry accounts, however, a growing body of literature has recognized asymmetries of practice among actors- often individual “users”- regarding their interactions in the forums. Most prominently, an active, even dominant, minority who frequently contribute to online discussion forums and tend to receive the most attention and communications from others. Despite multiple accounts identifying their involvement, the specific contribution of their practices, as they might affect the general processes of online communication and the characteristics of the forums themselves, has not been analyzed.

This omission becomes more glaring given developments in network science since the turn of the millennium. The large body of research finding regular, structural asymmetries in networks, commonly described as the “long tail” of relational distributions.  Arising through processes of network growth in which the “rich get richer” to the emergence of highly connected network actors, these structural asymmetries have been insufficiently explored as they stand to inform research into the processes defining large-scale networked communications.

As a result, this thesis is oriented by two guiding questions. First, how do discursive practices vary between frequent and infrequent participants? This question follows from an emerging problematic that finds participation in networked processes highly skewed between the practices of frequent and infrequent actors, and empirical and theoretical understandings of network structure characterized by such asymmetries.

The second question thereby follows the first: how do frequencies of practice contribute to processes of production and distribution structuring online discourse? The notions of production and distribution respectively characterize an understanding of discursive practice that recognizes the frequency and material contributions of agents, as well as the spatio-temporal and symbolic patterning of their practices. Approaching this question looks to asymmetries of practice in collective processes as potential mechanisms contributing to the organization or structuring of sociotechnical forms.

Theory and method

The discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau (1990; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), informed by sociotechnical theories of practice, directs an approach to these questions. Discourse regards the everyday practice of actors, linguistic and non-linguistic, as an articulation of differential elements. As discursive practice performs the onto-epistemological structuring of the meaningfulness of the real, discourse also constitutes the conditions of possibility of any practice or ensemble of practice. The concept of structure regards the limits by which an ensemble of sociotechnical practice takes meaningful, enduring form.       Pursuing the two research questions as they address the sociotechnical process by which MOOCs were discussed, argued, and (mis)understood in the forums of The Chronicle, a mixed approach was adopted in the use of content analysis to address frequencies of practice constituting the discussion forum, as well as grounded theory methodology to develop an understanding of the discourses and their limits emergent to the forum. This methodological approach seeks a qualitative, thick description of the symbolic practices inscribed in the comments of the forum, as well as an understanding of the distributions of practice constituting MOOCs as an object of conflict and understanding.        These methods become utilized in a case study of comments submitted to The Chronicle discussion forums over a two-year period between 2012 and 2014. A dataset comprising 3950 comments posted by 999 participants to 72 newspaper discussion forums details a process of open discussion in which actors, human and nonhuman, joined together in a process articulating and co-producing the discussion forums as material configurations defining an emergent understanding of MOOCs.

Case Study

The case study of The Chronicle develops in three parts. First, grounded theorizing develops three central discourses arising among the comments to the forum: the professional concerns of educators, issues of pedagogy, and commercialism in higher education. These discourses articulate an ensemble of differential elements- words, concepts, and arguments- foregrounding, and constituted by, central antagonisms riving discursive practices of actors and precluding a settled or common understanding of what a MOOC is, as well as what it can and should do. Across these discursive formations, central antagonisms develop that define a fractured yet nevertheless simplified discursive space.

The next stage of analysis utilizes content analysis to identify patterns in the production and distribution of practices- through measures of interactive and rhetorical practice- constituting the forums. This analysis highlights the asymmetries of participation among actors in the forum, as well as important patterns respective to the frequency of actors’ participation. Most importantly, the most frequent participants exhibit a strong tendency toward direct interactions with others in the forum. Inversely, those who participate least (contributing only one comment) tend to issue general, undirected comments. This tendency is explored in a close reading and content analysis of the most frequent participants’ articulatory practices in relation to those less frequent commenters. Not only do the most prominent participants interact with the comments of others more often, but tend to be more critical and less equivocal in their comments and replies. Moreover, integrated in a sociotechnical process, these practices function to construct durable configurations of networked media that provide for forms of structuring across the discussion forums.

This study thus presents implications for how we understand discourse networks as they emerge to define meaningful forms through the production and distribution of networked media. The concept of the discourse network is considered as increasingly important for analyses in information science, communications and media theory. Discourse networks stand to conceptualize not only how digital communications technology contributes to the enactment of meaningful social forms- such as might define public understanding of MOOCs- but also how these forms are the accomplishment of processes that are far from determined. Rather, a discourse network involves a multiplicity of heterogeneous actors engaged in practices of production and distribution of media that are highly asymmetric and disproportionate. Moreover, these networks become constructed through social as well as technological logics (Latham & Sassen, 2005), wherein the concept of antagonism lends understanding to the forms of differencing, limit and, consequently, structure, form and meaning these networks support. This study thus begins to understand how these practices contribute to the structuring of networked media, and points to promising directions for future research

(MIS)UNDERSTANDING MOOCS: DISCOURSE NETWORKS, ANTAGONISM AND THE STRUCTURING OF NETWORKED MEDIA

Sharing is caring!