Media treatment of MOOCs as digital innovation in education: analysis of the positioning of researchers, university administrations and MOOC administrators
Between 2012 and 2014, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) received considerable media coverage as a digital innovation in university pedagogy. Far from being a mere conveyor belt of information, this media treatment can be understood as a staging of different actors (political, administrative, scientific and educational) around an imaginary of the MOOC as an innovation. Some aspects of this imaginary have already been identified in a previous study (Collin & Saffari, 2015), along with three types of stakeholders typically quoted or interviewed by the media with regard to MOOCs: university administrations, MOOC administrators and researchers studying technologies in education. However, the way the media treatment of MOOCs has staged these three types of actors has not been analyzed. This article sets out to address just this subject, with the aim of better understanding how the media treatment of MOOC positions researchers, university administrations and MOOC administrators within the imaginary that they convey. To this end, we conducted a secondary analysis of the same body of journalistic articles used for a first study (see Collin & Saffari, 2015), focusing this time on the various stakeholders quoted or interviewed in the articles (e.g., researchers, MOOC administrators, university administrations). For each type of stakeholder, the results of the content analysis help identify complementary positions within the media treatment of MOOCs.