CHAPTER 5
MOOCs
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Introduction
Having looked at a long established practice of open access publishing in Chapter 3 and a relatively stable approach of OERs in Chapter 4, this chapter will consider the rapid and rather volatile world of MOOCs. No subject in educational technology in recent years has generated as much excitement amongst educational entrepreneurs and angst amongst established academics as MOOCs. If open access represents the clearest case for the argument that openness has been successful, then MOOCs are probably the best example of the second strand of this—that the battle for the future direction is now occurring.
It was MOOCs after all, and not OERs, open access or open scholarship, that caused veteran elearning expert Tony Bates (2014) to despair, 'I can't express adequately just how pissed off I am about MOOCs—not the concept, but all the hubris and
