Nor is this simply a matter of historical pedantry, a desire to ensure that early MOOC pioneers are assured their rightful place in history. While historical accuracy is always desirable, it does not impact how people use the legacy of that discovery once a victor has been determined. However, there is more at stake than simple journalistic accuracy. In Chapter 1, I argued that there is a battle for narrative in open education, and that narrative will have a strong influence on the future direction it takes. If MOOCs are the most prominent aspect of open education, then the narrative associated with them will create an impact for other aspects. If the dominant narrative is that of Silicon Valley, then this frames what is deemed the appropriate model for other forms of open education. If you wish to create an open course, then the model for doing so and criteria for deciding what it should achieve has been determined to serve the needs of this overriding weltenschauung. Or if you wanted to structure a programme for releasing low-cost staff outputs (the sort of thing we will examine in the next chapter), you could find yourself being asked to couch it in terms of MOOCs.
All of this is not to suggest that the MOOC phenomena hasn’t been important both in terms of the education sector itself and more significantly, for learners. As Siemens (2012) stated, ‘Anyone who goes out and educates, or at least provides a learning opportunity for people in developing parts of the world and does so without cost and increases their prospect for opportunities, in my eyes is a terrific idea.’ It might seem churlish to complain about the tone of press coverage when set against the thousands of learners who have had positive, even life-changing experiences in MOOCs. The aim of this chapter was not to provide a critique of MOOCs and their applications (which was covered in the preceding chapter), but rather to use MOOC coverage to examine
