The article “MOOC Professors' Agency in the Face of Disruption” was written by Andy Saltarelli, Amy Collier, and Chris Glass in 2015. This article introduced that Stanford University used MOOCs as an opportunity to create a supportive environment for faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. Following its early support for MOOCs, Stanford built a “soft infrastructure” to incubate good ideas and allow courses to evolve over time to include different formats, audiences, or goals based on the involved faculty members’ interests and motivations. Interviews with faculty revealed that soft infrastructure created a context where a wide diversity of faculty members’ values, motivations, and interests could flourish and creative ideas could be affirmed. The soft infrastructure helped more than 280 faculty and instructors across Stanford launch over 200 distinct online, blended, or flipped course offerings in a period of less than three years.
From this example, we can find that MOOCs can be a catalyst — instead of an all-consuming disruptive force — for faculty to engage in a wide variety of digital learning activities, but this process requires space for experimentation and exploration instead of prescription. Therefore, Stanford built a soft infrastructure, which allowed faculty to embrace the ambiguities and unknowns of new ideas and then build relationships to bring those ideas to life.
Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. A focus on soft infrastructure — the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning — has helped faculty create this context at Stanford. This research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at Stanford.
Source:
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/8/mooc-professors-agency-in-the-face-of-disruption
