Everyone from Silicon Valley corporations to neoliberal policymakers to digerati journalists to reform-minded university educators have asserted that for-profit MOOCs massive open online courses are fundamentally changing the face of North America and global education, and for the better. The promises of the MOOC are many: they are said to enable a few excellent professors to teach more students than ever before with high quality courses, relieve students of sitting through boring lectures by freeing up time for meaningful in-class dialogue and interactive debate, allow students to personalize their education with a mix of online and offline platforms, and give the world s poor access to free, high-quality education. This book offers a clear and systematic critique of the promotional hype surrounding for-profit MOOCs and, in its place, puts forward a grounded political-economic analysis of the material world that MOOCs exist within and the power relations that shape them. By doing so, it poses a rejoinder to the claims about the positive effects of for-profit MOOC companies and joins the current public debates surrounding the future of higher education and the role of information and communication technology in it."
