Page:The battle for open.pdf/125

 it was experimenting with a new approach, and if the cost of failure is too high then it becomes better not to attempt anything risky or innovative.


 * Fear of MOOC failure becomes a barrier to ­adoption – ­Public failure can lead to damage for an individual’s and an institution’s reputation, so many will consider the risk too great.

In a relatively short space of time, MOOCs would have moved from being a means that allow educators to experiment with technology and pedagogy to another form of broadcast controlled by a few.

This loss of experimentation may also arise as a result of there being a few dominant MOOC providers. Instead of discovering new models of open education, running a MOOC on the Coursera (or EdX or FutureLearn) platform becomes seen as the way to run a MOOC. Diversity in the market is undesirable for commercial providers; they want to become the Microsoft or Google of MOOCs, since that leads to the best revenue. Indeed, becoming the dominant provider may be the only route to high revenue returns in the MOOC field. In the opening chapter I argued that the tensions in open education could be deemed a battle, because there was real value associated with being a victor. A loss of experimentation and market dominance for open courses would be an example of one such outcome.

This perceived loss of control over the platform for open courses has led to a ‘Reclaim Open’ initiative from MIT and UC Irvine. The Reclaim Open (2013) site bemoans that ‘recent ­high-­profile forays into online learning for higher education seem to replicate a traditional l­ecture-​­based, c­ourse-​­based model of campus instruction, instead of embracing the peer-­​­to-​­peer connected nature of the web.’ The site promises that ‘Reclaim Open