MOOCs: A Historical and Critical Dialogue

Institutions of higher education play a vital role in mentoring learners to be involved in constructive engagement and building critical consciousness for creating and disseminating knowledge that contributes to healthy nation-building. The roles of these institutions, however, changed after the enforcement of neoliberal policies and reforms, by drifting their priorities towards privatization, and profit-making. As a result, the knowledge created by these institutions has begun to be driven by market-oriented demands, leading to a rise in the cost of higher education and a widening of educational disparities. Provision of higher education of good quality has hence become more restricted and less accessible to the masses. In defiance of such restrictions, the open-access movement rose to re-emphasize ‘knowledge was a public good’ and MOOCs emerged as one of the derivatives of the open-access movement, promising to enhance educational access, quality, and equality in higher education. As MOOCs originated from the West, they embedded themselves with western-centric epistemologies that were hardly being questioned for their relevance in diverse and complex learner settings, chiefly prevalent in developing and underdeveloped countries. With this background, the current chapter endeavours to revisit some of the epistemological and pedagogical dimensions of MOOCs in order to draw its significance and relevance to the Indian context.