What can the media and cultural studies scholar contribute to the flurry of dialogue accumulating discursive authority as “The Year of the MOOC“?

MOOCs – massive open online courses – are loosely modeled on traditional college courses. The immediate differences are clear in the name – massive (high enrollment, dispersed geographically), open (articulated to free and accessible), and online (web-based facilitation, although for many online also signifies non-human and non-residential). MOOCs are mostly non-credit granting and mostly free. Weekly video lectures anchor courses, around which crowd-sourced homework and Blackboard-like forums orbit. Social media serves as digital TA. Most MOOCs are taught by faculty or instructors at traditional four-year universities worldwide. Three organizations – Coursera, Udacity, and edX – currently dominate the field. For an overview, The Chronicle of Higher Education offers “MOOC Madness,” while visual learners may prefer this mini-MOOC.

MOOCs are a hot button issue for educators, policy makers, technorati, and anyone invested in the state of formal education. Although histories of technology remind us that flux moments are always accompanied by “the discursive polarities of utopia and dystopia,” the future is a high stakes game. For some, the MOOC’s maximum visibility means that the democratization of education is within reach. For others, the MOOC undermines the deeply rooted epistemologies of the traditional university and forces higher ed administrators to address outdated teaching models. Still for others, the MOOC reflects disordered priorities that ignore inequality.

As Siva Vaidhyanathan warns, declaring the MOOC the deus ex machina of the ills of education or the ultimate threat to the university is an effort that obscures the more productive strategies of critical observation. The MOOC is a fruitful object of study if we ask the right questions. Continuing the long road, then, that stretches back to the Birmingham School’s commitment to non-traditional students and has drawn continuously from an ever-shifting circuit of culture model, let’s approach “MOOC Madness” through the relational lenses of text, audience, and industry. What’s at stake in the consciousness of this moment, what are its historical precedents, and how is it inscribed with power?

We must begin by thinking of the MOOC as a medium and a mediated text. What are the defining properties of something being positioned as educational, massive, and open, and how are these properties re-presented in an online environment? What is the structured center (lecture model? network? visuality?) and its textual surround? What are the aesthetics of the MOOC’s online presence – entertaining? informative? What are the legitimating discourses of the MOOC – what is being offered to the enrollee and how is it staged as exceptional? How (and why) is the definition of massive, open, and online learning constricted? These are questions that can only be addressed through attention to the text itself.

At present, the best way to reach the MOOC audience is to return to the text. That is, how are potential enrollees being hailed by the MOOC and its paratexts – Coursera’s “About Us” page, for instance, or email notices from instructors? Traces of reception are emergent. Duke University’s summary report on its first MOOC suggests that people enroll “for fun,” while this blog chronicling a retired academic’s enrollment offers experiential insight. Meanwhile, CourseTalk.org has begun to aggregate student reviews of MOOC courses.

What is being offered, then, to whom and how is this offering received? Does someone taking “Introduction to Computational Finance” expect a different outcome than someone taking “The Ancient Greeks”? Do MOOC participants see themselves as students? How does the meaning of student change when enrollees know classmates from “tweet ups” and “virtual office hours,” when the line between crowd-sourced homework and plagiarism is unclear, and when time-shifting means one is less likely to cut out of a video lecture for a round of beer pong (perhaps one streams “Computational Finance” while playing beer pong)? What is the everyday reception of the MOOC and how is that everyday-ness altered by the structure, content and presentation of massive, open, online learning opportunities and a firmer sense of what motivates participation?

Attention to industry and production further complicates the meaning and materiality of the MOOC. Media are produced, with money, by people, through technology. On a more micro level, what is the industry that makes the MOOC visible? Who films the video lecture and alters instructional design? When media workers are asked what technological affordances facilitate learning objectives, they advise on the mediation of knowledge and become pedagogical theorists. How do these “best practices” of web-based facilitation become inscribed in the content of the MOOC and change the model and meaning of reception? From a produsage perspective, how do communities of interest alter the structure of a course?

The lens of production may also offer a nuanced corrective to the suggestion that once we get past the “big misunderstanding” of MOOCs – that is, once we understand that the MOOC isn’t the message – we can rest easy that this campus tsunami is non-threatening. This naive separation of technology-as-transmission from technology-as-meaning sounds familiar. The point is, the MOOC is presented to us fully formed. These questions of industrial practice, technological form, and media work muddle the definition of a massive, open, online learning experience through deconstruction and a focus on the processual.

Reviewing these questions, the messiness of my attempt to delineate text, audience, and industry reveals the value of integration as well as the value of research inquiries that cut across and in between: questions of address, mediation, and exclusion. What does the MOOC expose about the socio-cultural expectations of the Internet as a medium? What is the productive power, in a Foulcauldian sense, of delimiting definitions of massive, open online learning? And how might things like networked, casual audiences or media production decisions adjust the structured center of the MOOC? Indeed, what in the world is a MOOC? When we bend the MOOC to the questions we ask best, its significance as an artifact of media and cultural studies comes more clearly into focus.

In April 2011, ABC announced that its veteran soap opera All My Children would be replaced by The Chew, an all-food talk show buoyed by the open banter of a cast of culinary experts. ABC Daytime Group President Brian Frons positioned the show as ABC’s response to audience desire for “different types of programming these days.”

The Chew debuted on September 26th to 2.5 million viewers. The audience share helped ABC to continue as Daytime’s #1 Network, but ratings aggregates like TV by the Numbers were quick to point out that even with premiere week inflation, The Chew finished at an overall lower rating with women 18-49 than All My Children managed a year ago. Apparently, even a premiere episode Dr. Oz cameo was not enough to catalyze increased viewership.

Commercial network daytime television is one of the last arenas to incorporate food-related programming into its regular scheduling. Now that The Chew has arrived, I want to consider briefly how the show brings to light cultural and industrial anxieties about both daytime television and food, and how that translates to uncertainty about the status of the daytime audience.

The Chew invites much discussion that will be left untouched here, including the biting snark and boycott discourse surrounding the launch (e.g., “The Spew,” “Screw the Chew”) and the economics of transferring soap fans to a show about food. I will also bypass the formal conventions of The Chew, mainly because the show’s format is just not that interesting. The Chew is the indoctrination of talk television onto the classic cooking show, imbued with the characteristics of a decade’s worth of lifestyle TV and sealed with something more or less pleasant than an infomercial. The segments are short, the giveaways frequent, and the daytime royalty (Dr. Oz, Whoopi, Joy Behar) are quite literally ready and waiting behind ABC’s promotional door #2.

Media have increasingly taken up food, riding the wave of foodie culture that sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue exists at the borders of democracy and distinction. Johnston and Baumann delineate a contemporary cultural milieu of food that allows for the democratic tendencies of mass production, instant access, and affordability, as well as the more distinct measures of singularity, obscurity, and authenticity. Interestingly, this bears striking resemblance to daytime television. One could argue that daytime TV, like food, carries paradoxical class-laden (and race, age, and gender-laden) associations. These muddy waters between popular-accessible and the privilege of discrimination serve as an excellent (if somewhat amorphous) frame for considering a text like The Chew.

Allowing leniency for first week jitters, The Chew nevertheless seems hyper aware of its indistinct brand and is subsequently shifty-eyed in its attempt to connect with an audience. This is immediately apparent in its dizzying pace. While Michael Symon (Iron Chef) fries pork at the demo stove, Mario Batali runs to the fridge to retrieve ingredients, Carla Hall (Top Chef) ducks under Symon’s arm to help stir, Clinton Kelly (What Not To Wear) chuckles at his own food puns, and Daphne Oz lists the nutritional benefits of kale. This frenetic environment does serve the function of the show’s goal to “every day host a party in our kitchen, the heart of every home!” However, the madness of five overenthusiastic hosts talking at once and clambering at the stove unintentionally speaks volumes about who and what should be prioritized in the construction of The Chew identity and how this should be relayed to anyone tuning in. Should we focus on the healthiness of the kale, the fancy ingredients flavoring the pork, or the intertextuality of Batali sprinting to the fridge?

Dialogue and themed segments further elucidate The Chew’s uncomfortable straddling of the everyday and the elite. The stress on food costs, for example, is a running theme. A segment entitled “Five Minutes, Five Ingredients, $5 per serving,” leads beautifully into the daily news bit, where Kelly casually picks up the New York Times to reference Mark Bittman’s recent article asserting that home-cooked meals are cheaper than fast food. The attempt to get folks to gather round the table for “food, family, and fun,” then, is undermined by food costs that are really quite expensive ($5 per serving?!) and a subtle foodie back-scratching that, thanks to an applauding audience, glosses over the divided response Bittman’s article actually elicited.

Led by the tagline, “Don’t forget, in our kitchen it’s always okay to talk with your mouth full,” the show oozes with populist discourse–football tailgating tips! Cool Ranch Doritos as guilty pleasure! Oz family anecdotes! Running parallel are recipes for “savory” steel cut oats with tofu Canadian bacon and a tour of Batali’s Manhattan-based emporium of fine sausage and cheese.

As Kelly encourages viewers to “cook alongside us” every afternoon, Oz offers stress-busting foods for those in the workforce. And Hall mentions that the expected inflation of peanut butter is going to “affect my bottom line” because her attorney husband loves peanut butter. All of which leaves one wondering who, exactly, The Chew’s audience might be.

Ultimately, implying that The Chew is a litmus test for any future of daytime programming is likely an overstatement. Indeed, the uncertain hegemony of distinction mixed with the ever-presence of the everyday is a tale as old as television and cooked food. However, what The Chew does with some certainty is expose anxieties about a conceivable disconnect between daytime television and its audience, as well as anxiety about how to position food on [daytime network] television for optimum cultural and financial success.