Students as End Users in the MOOC Ecology

This paper explores some of the cultural effects of turning students into End Users through their engagement with mooks. The construction of the “student” in the MOOC ecology through a discursive analysis of both the public rhetoric that is circulating from the companies and the legal documents that are publicly available allow us to begin exploring how the idea of student is being constituted as a social ideal and a legal subject. Looking at the specificity of the role of student in how MOOCs are being discussed in various realms, we are able to identify some larger cultural effects MOOCs are amplifying that are currently taking place around things such as big data, higher education, privacy, and neo-imperialism.

Speaker Details

Jade E. Davis is a Doctoral Student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication Studies where she studies under the direction of Ken Hillis. Her primary research centers on how digitization and social media effect how we know and understand culture and society. She is also interested in big data, ethnomining, and their effects and potential for use in critical ethnographic work in digital environments.

Date:
Speakers:
Jade Davis
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill