Resistance to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the US Higher Education System

The digital transformation,characteristic of recent decades,now pervades many aspects of everyday life,and MOOCs are an illustrative example of this process. Massive Open Online Courses are university-level courses on a specific subject delivered online via digital platforms,and the vast majority of them are free-of-charge. Initially launched with an open and collaborative intent as part of the Open Educational Resources movement, they soon turned into commercial products. MOOCs enjoyed wide coverage by the media, which were particularly enthusiastic about their potential as a cost-effective form of education reducing social inequalities in access to education. Likewise, skeptical views raised a series of concerns about the risk of creating new inequalities, further reinforcing existing ones,and eventually favoring the few to the detriment of the open and collaborative original intent. By presenting three cases of resistance to the adoption of MOOCs for academic credits that occurred at three (very) different universities in the United States, the paper sheds light on the tensions and threats generated by such digital transformations in education. The paper investigates the extent to which the introduction of such a type of digital transformation challenges the existing distribution of power among actors in the HE system; ultimately, whether this innovation further increases inequality among social groups, threatening the autonomy and quality of faculty labor. The three cases confirm the emergence of tensions i) between faculty and academic leadership in charge of the governance of HE institutions at both local and national level; ii) between the neoliberal approach of MOOCs advocates and claims of autonomy from the academic staff. At the same time, the paper highlights the success of resistance movements that may have contributed to growing disenchantment and changes in the business model of MOOCs.