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 nonsense that’s been talked and written about them. At a personal level, it was as if 45 years of work was for nothing.’ Why should this be so? What is it about MOOCs that causes despair and excitement in equal measure? This will be the subject of the next two chapters, concentrating first on MOOCs themselves, and then on the media interest around them in the Chapter 6. MOOCs can stand as a microcosm of the issues in open education, because it is with open courses that they are brought into sharpest relief.

This rapid growth of MOOCs can be demonstrated by comparing their internet interest with that of OERs. A simple use of Google Trends reveals how interest in MOOCs has grown, comparative to OERs (see Figure 4).

While OERs have had steady growth since 2009, indicating an increased awareness, MOOCs arrive seemingly from nowhere in late 2012 and rapidly overtake OERs. This plot emphasises the point made at the end of the previous chapter regarding the sudden media interest in MOOCs. However, to put it in perspective, we can also plot MOOCs against a subject that has wider public awareness. Zuckerman (2012) jokingly suggests using the US celebrity Kim Kardashian to act as an indicative measure of internet attention. Figure 5 shows this comparison, and because Google Trends normalises the ­Y-​­scale so that it is showing relative interest rather than absolute number of searches, the rather sobering evidence is that in this plot, MOOCs don’t even register.

There are two interesting aspects of MOOCs from the perspective of the battle for open. The first is what they are, the opportunities and threats they pose and the type of openness they afford. The second is the media interest in them and why they find resonance with a certain type of narrative. This chapter will deal with the first of these, looking at the history, benefits,