At the 29th annual Computers & Writing Conference, I was impressed by Virginia Kuhn’s comments about MOOCs. Kuhn was unable to attend the conference but shared her thoughts via a pre-recorded video that I’ve embedded below.

Kuhn points out that there were 290 articles about MOOCs in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the last year, and notes that the architecture of computer networks (specifically, the ability to stream video en masse) has only recently made MOOCs possible. Beyond the hype, though, Kuhn argues that there is little evidence that the private companies developing the MOOCs are employing the theories of connectedness they promise. Instead, she sees MOOCs as libraries that house video texts.