MOOCs and Foucault's Heterotopia: On Community and Self-Efficacy

Important: sense of community is predicated on process of interaction.

A Community of Learners and MOOCs

The unknown: massive number of students in MOOCs challenge what we know because they allow instructors and students to interact outside of traditional educational structures.

Community: "A feeling that members have belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together" (McMillan and Chavis, 9).

Emplacement: Connectivism

George Siemens' connectivism allows for the correlative space to examine how Freire and MOOCs question traditional education.

MOOCs demonstrate how Freire's theory should work.

Connection between community and self-efficacy: if individuals are encouraged and nurtured externally (i.e. instructor or fellow MOOC students), then the community benefits from active and engaged self-efficacious learners.

Future of MOOCs: designers, instructors, and MOOC platform providers must find different spaces, new horizons of emplacement, and individual-community building potentialities to further the model of truly open education.

Heterotopias: reflect redefinition of community in terms of self-efficacious individuals forming purposeful learning communities and those communities bolstering and encouraging self-efficacy in its individuals.

Digital Architecture of the (no)Place

Emplacement: Problem-Posing

Within the place/no-place opposition of the heterotopia is a "place" that allows for highly-theoretical penetration of connectivity between self-efficacy and community.

Freire: problem-posing education: contra 'banking style,' encourages egalitarian, active learning.

MOOCs encourage active learning because they direct the process; students are not ignorant receptacles, but rather individuals who have information to share and contribute in the learning process.

Student Self-Efficacy and MOOCs

Self-efficacy can be an important mitigating factor in education: it entails effort, participation, engagement, and output.

The heterotopia: the active renegotiation of knowledge, relational interplay between students and instructor, and a sense of trust all build community through self-efficacious individuals.

Dichotomy: individuals remain lurkers or they engage their self-efficacy and participate in the community of learners.

MOOCs and Heterotopia

What motivates individuals to participate in, and more importantly successfully complete, MOOCs?

Increase in experience = increase in self-efficacy

Key questions are raised from inverse in MOOC participation.

The Underlying Dichotomy

A community of learners and individuals' self-efficacy

Foucault's thesis of heterotopias helps us contextualize MOOCs' marked out space, the tensions of community and self-efficacy with that space, and how the future of disseminated learning changes digital architecture.

Why Foucault and MOOCs?

"We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed."

(Des Espace Autres [Of Other Spaces], 22)

Foucault's language of the "placeless place," the mirror of knowledge, is akin to MOOCs.

MOOCs tread on the utopia of education - the promise of knowledge, power, and social mobility; this marks out space that undermines monetary value of education and creates new possibilities.

Heterotopic emplacement bridges the gap between community and self-efficacy because mutual dependence of each one reflects a (em)place(ment) that is both place and no-place.

MOOCs and Foucault's Heterotopia:

On Community and Self-Efficacy

James Willis, III, Ph.D.

Elizabeth L. Spiers

Patricia Gettings