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These numbers seem small by web standards, but were impressive for a start-up company.

The difference in communication was not in the manner of participation. That was still fundamentally that of lectio or the qara’a.^§AS1.2.2a MOOCs are essentially video recordings of lectures, assembled into “courses,” and where it still becometh the disciple of knowledge to be silent and listen. The difference is only a minor recalibration of the terms of participation.

In MOOCs you can view the lectures in your own time and place, and they are free or affordably cheap, depending on the level of recognition the learner wants for their participation. They are conveniently broken into 8–12 minute pieces. A viewer can replay something they didn’t understand the first time. They skip the parts they already think they know, or they can play them at double speed, and the lecture is still intelligible. For these recalibrations in the lecture as a medium of communication, MOOCs soon had millions, then tens of millions of enrollments.

Koller continues, and you can hear echoes of St Benedict’s cajoling:

Of course, we all know as educators that students don’t learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it … even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. We’ve tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform … For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question.¹⁰⁰

This is a minor refinement of St Benedict’s relations of communication. The spread of digitally recorded, internet-delivered lectures has been rapid, in ordinary classrooms too, where in the wake of MOOCs, the craze of the “flipped classroom” has taken off.¹⁰¹ Instead of lecturing in real time and collocated space, the teacher records their lecture on video. With a camera today on every computer and phone, recording is easy and cheap. But, fundamentally, this is still the lectio or qara’a. New life has been breathed into a communicative form that is a millennium and a half old.

When we went back to Daphne Koller’s TED Talk, two and a half million people already had viewed it, itself a lectio or qara’a. We work in e-learning too. We know Daphne Koller and have ourselves been creating MOOC courses since Coursera’s early days. But we only feel we know MOOCs because we have participated in these things, not just as the objects of communication, but as subjects, turning our representations into these recalibrated forms of communication. This is how we have learned the meaning of the MOOC, by mastering this transposition from representation to communication, not just by being its disciples. As for the interpretation of our meanings, apart from star-ratings and short reviews, that is as lost on us as it is in any communication-centered medium.

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⁹⁹ www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Jacob Bishop and Matthew Verleger, 2013, “The Flipped Classroom: A Survey of the Research,” paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education, 23–26 June, Atlanta, GA; Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2015, “Learning and New Media,” pp. 373–87 in The Sage Handbook of Learning, edited by D. Scott and E. Hargreaves, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2015, “Assessment and Pedagogy in the Era of Machine-Mediated Learning,” pp. 350–74 in Education as Social Construction: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by T. Dragonas, K.J. Gergen, S. McNamee and E. Tseliou, Chagrin Falls, OH: Worldshare Books; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2017, “Conceptualizing E-Learning,” pp. 1–45 in E-Learning Ecologies, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, New York: Routledge.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 56–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Daphne Koller on MOOCs §AS1.2.2b