In recent years, initiatives aiming at innovating and modernizing education and training have been deployed. Digital technologies are being integrated into educational institutions with the aim of bettering the education of skills needed in the 21st century. Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is part of the strategy to promote the continuous acquisition of skills. For instance, today’s demanded competences of digital literacy and entrepreneurial mindset are taught in MOOCs, which are framed as a neutral tool that is used (...) for connecting students and teachers. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate MOOCs beyond these neutral perspectives. The promises and debate around MOOCs are examined in order to understand how MOOCs shape people’s understanding of learning. The research question guiding the analysis is: What do we learn when we learn through educational technologies such as MOOCs? Drawing from concepts of Critical Pedagogy and Philosophy of Technology, the structure of learning through MOOCs is analyzed. The theoretical frameworks of Paulo Freire serve to problematize educational models that equate learning with transferring of information. The aim of education is not just to equip students with the skills and competences to function in a world that treat them as labour force. Education can serve as a vehicle for developing a critical consciousness and social awareness of the active role that people have in transforming their reality. This is what Freire conceptualized as a process of humanization. Education makes us human. However, there are structures in educational models that frame students as objects rather than active subjects. The approach of “banking model education” describes the dynamics of oppressive structures in classrooms. On examining the educational models in MOOCs through a Freirean analysis, oppressive structures are revealed. Therefore, in this thesis it is argued that educational technologies can become new forms of oppression that often are not acknowledged as such, perhaps because they are obscured by technological enthusiasm and innovation narratives discussed in the media Digital oppression is conceptualized as the technologically-mediated processes where oppressor-oppressed relationships take place. In order to further grasp how digital oppression can occur through educational technologies, the philosophy of technology perspectives of Byung-Chul Han and Nolen Gertz are discussed. These perspectives help to examine the role of MOOCs in shaping people’s understanding of learning. Achievement societies and techno-hypnotic effects of technologies illustrate why people might not acknowledge digital oppression. The main conclusion to be drawn from this thesis is that learning cannot be reduced to technological practices. Through MOOCs people do not learn the skills needed for the 21st century. Critical thinking, reflection, and the development of a social and political consciousness cannot be learned through MOOCs. MOOC platforms are instrumental in helping prepare students with skills that serve an ideology of market interests. The result of the analysis suggests that oppressive models should not be replicated in educational technologies. There is a need for continuous investigations about educational technologies through approaches that can lead to the development of transformative practices. Critical pedagogy and philosophy of technology invites us to reflect beyond the technological enthusiasm around technologies and reveal new perspectives that allow stakeholders to further reflect, inquire, and govern the learning environments of the future. (shrink)

The main idea behind this chapter is that a philosophical investigation of basic pedagogical practices, and more exactly the different ways in which children get the hang of elementary literacy at school, can offer a deeper understanding of what school education is all about. I follow here the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler (2010), who argues that this basic pedagogical form defines the school. For him, literacy training sets the model for the practices that make up schools, even if (...) schooling as a rule involves far more complicated practices such as teaching youngsters how to play a musical instrument, write an essay, solve a complex mathematical equation or understand the reasons why empires rise and fall. In all these cases, Stiegler would argue, what is at stake is an introduction into dominant cultural technologies (Cf. Siegert 2015) – which are moulded after the more simpler practice of literacy initiation: grasping how to play the flute also requires an understanding of the relation between the notes on the score sheet and the required manipulations one has to perform on the instrument (which is very much alike to what we do when we first learn how to read and write letters and words). Or take as another example, writing an essay involves a profound insight into the architecture of a text and how an argument should be developed in a logically stringent way, and a mastery over rhetoric and stylistic operations one might use (or not). In all these cases students need to learn to adopt a cultural technology, or grammar as Stiegler (2010) wants it, i.e. an operational logic which is specific to each school discipline (music, literature and history respectively). (shrink)