Open Education platforms: Theoretical ideas, digital operations and the figure of the open learner

Abstract

Open Education (OE), a generic term for a collection of practices that seek to broaden the access to education through digital means, has gained increasing traction and popularity over the last years and from various corners, both globally and in European circles. Rather than taking the technologies OE makes use of at face value, this article analyzes the concrete operations that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms perform, and more specifically the sorts of open learning and the type of open learner that are being shaped by these platforms. Understanding such platforms as active, socio-technical devices, the article first provides an overview of the conceptual milieu out of which these MOOC platforms originated. In a second part, contemporary MOOC platforms that have concretized out of this milieu are analyzed. Different types of operations that enact a very specific figure of the open learner (and types of open learning) are advanced: The open learner is increasingly being lured and made flexible, controlled and molded, communalized and responsibilized, and finally trained and empowered. The article ends with some outlines for possible future concretizations of OE and its MOOC platforms.