This paper accounts for a small range of open online courses that helped to inform the early development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It laments the loss of meaning in the word open and its historic alignment to free and open source principles. It calls for more academic work to better represent the histories and range of critical perspectives on open online courses, and outlines how Wikipedia can be used as a central organising platform for such work. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Leighblackall/Open_Online_Courses_and_Massively_untold_stories

1. OPEN ONLINE COURSES
and massively untold stories
Participants at La Trobe University’s conference on open education. Wikimedia Commons

2. PROBLEM
The popular depiction of MOOCs has not acknowledged wider historical agents or critical perspectives. It is distracted by Establishment adoption of the practice and, if an inquiry is made into the sources, it stops at just a handful of individuals and does not enter into the wider movement and discourse of open online learning.

3. IN BRIEF
•
A history and a closure
•
The meaning of the word open
•
The need for more historical and critical work
•
Use Wikipedia to organise
Arduinome controller by Bitbutter on Wikimedia Commons

4. A HISTORY
•
FLNW 2006
•
Wiley Wikis
•
MOOCs (pre 2011)
(MIT Open Courseware; CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion; Learning4Content; Wikiversity and Wikieducator)
Scargill House 1901 by George Bertram Holdsworth. Wikimedia Commons

5. WILEY WIKIS
•
Facilitating Online & Flexible Learning Blackall and Hegarty 2007/08
•
Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources Leinonen 2007
•
Introduction to Open Education Wiley 2007

6. THE MEANING
OF OPEN
Give access and: invite collaboration; make development processes transparent and; ensure reusability.
LEARNER’S BILL OF RIGHTS
•
The right to access
•
The right to privacy
•
The right to create public knowledge
•
The right to own one’s personal data and intellectual property
•
The right to financial transparency
•
The right to pedagogical transparency
•
The right to quality and care
•
The right to have great teachers
•
The right to be teachers

7. SO WHAT?
•
Open is more than just access
•
The Conversation. 1000s of articles, no history
•
Wikipedia <> False history 2011-12
Ellen Gates Starr and Mrs. F. R. Lillie 1914 by Chicago Daily News.
Wikimedia Commons

8. A CLOSURE IS HAPPENING
•
Global universities compete to dominate online learning
•
Manufacturing further consent to the commodification of knowledge
•
And we’re confusing the freedom of people with the free-ness of content
La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Wikimedia Commons

9. “Moreover, their [open online courses] co-option by venture/finance capital operating inside private providers/using educational technology start-ups, restrict any meaningful discussion of open education as emancipatory. It is simply reduced to normative or deterministic ends, like employability or learning for work” (Richard Hall 2013).

10. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
1. A Wikipedia project space to coordinate efforts update and cleanup articles to do with open, online, learning and education
2. Stimulate and celebrate a wider range of academic and practitioner publication around open online teaching and learning is needed
3. Tabulate credible, reliable publications into related Wikipedia articles