Before and After MOOCs, Before and After Institutions

Digital learning practice using ubiquitous personal technologies can lead to teachers using their craft professionalism to create artfully-crafted, student-centered, learning experiences. Supportive and progressive organisational architectures of participation reveal adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks. The question now is what might adaptive institutions look like if they have been subjected to transformational processes, rather than just “e-enabling” the traditional practice of content delivery within the existing classical subject taxonomies? MOOCs seem to be a continuation of a learning catered for content through delivery; they are not a new paradigm, despite their promotion in this way by universities and the technology companies selling their platforms. In order to look at what transformation rather than e-enabling might look like, the authors review their framing ideas with long-run historical views of education, learning, knowledge, and institutions with a process called “before and after.”