I agree with you, it’s the political economy of this that should concern us, not the intellectual merits or personality-driven appeal of one MOOC over another. We really need to be careful not to turn ourselves into a kangaroo court of peer assessors for our colleagues, even if we don’t know them, even if their sudden luminary status seems to make them fair game. It doesn’t.

But we should certainly be vigilantly pointing out that if this is a landgrab, some institutions will be able to invest much more capital in extracting wealth from their initial stake than others. That seems to be where we are at the moment, and the international markets who are supposed to generate all the profit are certainly no strangers to this kind of cultural exploitation. So the real challenge is to preserve global and regional diversity of the overall educational ecosystem.

The thing is, I’m not sure we’re yet seeing the fully achieved global political economy of massification, unbundling, disruption, whatever. We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it really fast.

MfD