Cities, MOOCs, Global Networks

The last several days of higher ed media coverage have been rich with discussions about the tangle of global networks being formed.  A case in point is this announcement, by Imperial College London and Zhejiang University, to collaborate on a new initiative in London's White City. Much like the Amsterdam's plans to establish a new university ('On Amsterdam's Plans to Establish a Third University'), and the Cornell-Technion experiment in New York City, these global networks are quite tightly configured and very urban-centered: they are being harnessed to create new spaces of knowledge production to creatively unsettle and hopefully strengthen city-region innovation systems.

On the global/urban theme, today's coverage also included news about the expansion of a Boston-based massive open online course (MOOC) platform - EdX - such that it will now double in size and serve universities from many more parts of the world. The EdX press release explains the nature of the expansion, while these two images from the EdX website - the first reflecting membership yesterday, and the second membership today - make it very clear EdX is now a much more global (if unevenly!) platform:

EdX (20 May 2013)

EdX (21 May 2013)

See below for further information about the founding universities of the two big MOOC platforms - Coursera and EdX - as well as the non-US universities that have joined these platforms over time.  Please note that I have not included information about the inclusion of additional US universities after platform formation - this is only a list the non-US members that were added over time.

Coursera -- Established Fall 2011 | Four founding US universities as of April 2012

• Princeton University
• Stanford University
• University of Michigan
• University of Pennsylvania

Coursera -- Expansion on 17 July 2012 includes three non-US universities

• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
• University of Edinburgh (UK)
• University of Toronto (Canada)

Coursera -- Expansion on 19 September 2012 includes five non-US universities

• University of British Columbia (Canada)
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
• Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong SAR)
• University of London (UK)
• University of Melbourne (Australia)

EdX --  Expansion on 20 February 2013 includes five non-US universities

• The Australian National University (Australia)
• Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
• McGill University (Canada)
• University of Toronto (Canada)

Coursera -- Expansion on 21 February 2013 includes 16 non-US universities

Latin America

• Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
• Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico)

Europe

• Ecole Polytechnique (France)
• IE Business School (Spain)
• Leiden University (Netherlands)
• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen (Germany)
• Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy)
• Technical University Munich (Germany)
• Technical University of Denmark (Denmark)
• University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
• University of Geneva (Switzerland)
• Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain)

Asia

• Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR)
• National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
• National University of Singapore (Singapore)
• University of Tokyo (Japan)

EdX -- Expansion on 21 May 2013 includes 10 non-US universities

Asia

• University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR)
• Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (Hong Kong SAR)
• Kyoto University (Japan)
• Peking University (China)
• Seoul National University (South Korea)
• Tsinghua University (China)

Australia

• University of Queensland (Australia)

Europe

• Karolinska Institutet (Sweden)
• Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)
• Technische Universität München (Germany)

The expanding, albeit unevenly, global footprint of U.S. MOOC platforms is fascinating for a number of reasons.

First, debates about the governance of this phenomenon cannot help but become increasingly complicated.  It's difficult enough governing higher education institutions within a single nation or sub-national region and yet here we have dynamics including accreditation, quality assurance, faculty and student rights and responsibilities, pedagogy, student confidentiality, intellectual property (IP), etc., becoming rapidly denationalized. What this development process does is profoundly unsettle all relevant discussions, debates and governance options. And while we see some fruitful debates in articles like 'MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used' in today's Chronicle, it is striking is how underlain they are by what sociologists of education deem 'methodological nationalism' - the assumption that we're still operating in, and thinking in, an era where the national is the key frame for debates, research, regulation, assumptions, and so on. A scan of the comments in the Chronicle article reflect a genuinely needed debate about relational responsibilities and ethics but it is as if the development process is primarily taking part in a container - a very US container. And yet MOOCs are open access and generate global footprints, by design -- see this map posted today, for example, of the 45,000 students enrolled in Emory professor Steve Everett's 'Introduction to Digital Sound Design' MOOC if you want a sense of the reality of the student spread of many (not all) MOOCs.

Can we debate about MOOCs in post-national ways? If so, where should we be debating about MOOCs and the implications of their global expansion? Are MOOCs governable at a global scale? So many questions, so few answers.

Second, and on a related note, representatives of Coursera and EdX are becoming, for practical reasons, the most informed repositories of data and knowledge about inter-institutional and international patterns, processes, and politics, regarding MOOCs. As with the deterritorialization of academic freedom, which puts senior ministers and monarchs in the Gulf and Asia at the center of bilateral relations between state and university, the global expansion of MOOCs puts the leaders and senior officials of Coursera and EdX at the center of bilateral relations between platform and university. There is thus a power geometry to the MOOC development process that is strikingly similar to that universities also have with world university rankers. In short, there is no associational intermediary shaping how universities relate to the two big MOOC platforms - it is a bilateral one that is centered much like the London Eye dynamic I described here. Is this to be expected? Is this to be desired? What are associations of universities and disciplinary bodies (e.g., Geography, History, Computer Science, Physics) doing besides watching the development process unfold?

In closing, cities are functioning as the basing points, and target spots, for the globalization of higher education.  There is a complicated relationship between the emergence of EdX and Coursera and their respective home city-regions. And now we're seeing universities from around the world seeking and/or being invited to forge relations with these two platforms, and then using their technological prowess, marketing savvy, and fiscal resources to amplify and extend their extra-institutional reach, including at a regional and global scale.

But what are the implications of a development process unfolding further along these lines? Will regional initiatives, like Europe's OpenupEd platform, or national initiatives like the UK's Futurelearn or Australia's Open2Study, enable more effective and diverse experimentation with MOOCs? Or are they setting themselves up for failure by locking in at a national and/or regional scale, thereby precluding the openness to membership that EdX and Coursera are displaying? Are EdX and Coursera acting like exclusive clubs, leaving national and regional agencies to create their own platforms for universities unable to break in (assuming they wish to)?

One way or another, the Boston and San Francisco Bay Area city-regions have blended ideas born elsewhere (including in Canada) with their own experiences, drawn in substantial resources, and powered up a global MOOCs juggernaut. And yes there is far too much hype (especially in the austerity-rattled U.S.) regarding MOOCs, but this is no time to back off on sustained engagement with such a fast changing phenomenon.

Kris Olds