The Single Canon: MOOCs and Academic Colonization
Abstract
The struggle to make good choices is especially difficult in general education courses that are often surveys of periods or themes, where certain canonical standards have been established. The rhetoric around Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) often lends itself to the single provider model and supports a more general move toward limiting canons and of privileging only certain ways of thinking. Lauter elaborates his argument by explaining how the tensions between in and to, as well as the tensions between past and future, are false ones, and that 'the bodies of knowledge we teach' are constructed based on how we feel the past might form a foundation for the future. More expansively, a move to limit canons by way of single provider models also becomes a political and cultural issue. The challenge of providing resources that can be massively disseminated is that almost exclusively it is Western institutions or companies that provide the primary mechanisms for deployment.
Recommended Citation
Head, Karen. "The Single Canon: MOOCs and Academic Colonization." MOOCs and Open Education Around the World, Routledge, 2015, pp.12-20.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315751108
Department(s)
English and Technical Communication
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
978-131575110-8
Document Type
Book - Chapter
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2015 Routledge, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
12 Jun 2015
