The MOOC and the Multitude

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) take university lectures and other educational materials and make them available for free as online “courses.” Liberal and neoliberal MOOC supporters laud these courses for opening up education to the world while incorporating market dynamics to improve quality and drive down costs. Skeptics claim MOOCs are a bald attempt to privatize higher learning, thus creating an apartheid educational system with traditional universities serving the wealthy while everyone else is left with cut‐rate online learning. This essay draws on the political theory of autonomist Marxism, arguing that MOOCs are capital's defensive reaction to the threats of resistant universities on one side, and unmanageable Internet‐based learning on the other. It then looks at which MOOC designs would support education for the “multitude,” which is the term used by autonomist Marxism to describe an autonomous, diverse, networked political body.

A Construction Method of MOOC Courses in Colleges and Universities

“…The test questions meet the requirements of the test objectives and cover the main knowledge points within the scope of the examination. The quantity and difficulty distribution of the examination content should be consistent with the structure of the teaching content [8].…”

Research on the small private online course (SPOC) teaching model incorporating the just-in-time teaching (JiTT) method based on mobile Internet for learning college physics

“…Many previous studies have shown that web-based multimedia learning modules are more attractive to students and more efficient in terms of both study time and in-class activities, and thereby have a positive effect on student achievement [4,[6][7][8][9]. Furthermore, alongside the backdrop of the Internet, the massive open online course (MOOC) [10,11] and the small private online course (SPOC) [12] models have emerged. Compared with a MOOC, a SPOC is a more suitable teaching method for students in college.…”