education with that of the MP3 on the music industry. This conforms to the Silicon Valley narrative, proposing a revolution and disruption: 'Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC).' It also suggests that the commercial, external provider will be the force of change, stating, 'Our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.'
All of the elements can also be seen in Clark’s (2013) piece where he declares that (referring to Khan) 'It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn't have any HE baggage.' It appeals to the Silicon Valley narrative to have a saviour riding in from outside HE to save it. If the influence of those inside higher education, such as Wiley, Downes, Siemens, etc., is acknowledged, that weakens the appeal of the story.
Kernohan (2013) performed a semantic analysis of eleven popular MOOC articles. Taking Kernohan's articles to conduct simple word counts the word 'disrupt' (or derivative) occurred 12 times, 'revolution' 16, and 'company' 17. Obviously this is a selective choice of terms ('open' appears 48 times for comparison), but the presence of these terms indicates a particular framing of the MOOC story that allies with the Silicon Valley narrative.
We can now see why MOOCs proved so popular with journalists. Firstly they seem to offer a solution to the ‘education is broken’ meme, which had been gaining currency. Secondly, they met all the criteria for the Silicon Valley narrative: they proposed a technological solution, they could be framed as the result of external forces and they provided a revolutionary model. Nearly all the early MOOC articles framed them as disruptive to the standard higher education model. And they were established as separate companies outside of higher education, thus providing interest around business models and potential profits by disrupting the
