“Are the Instructors Going to Teach Us Anything?”: Conceptualizing Student and Teacher Roles in the “Rhetorical Composing” MOOC

This project investigates expressed student and instructor roles within the second iteration of the “Writing II: Rhetorical Composing” MOOC. We utilize cluster criticism and curricular analysis to explore the ways in which MOOC participants slide along a spectrum of roles between student and expert. Our analysis of two primary sites, the course discussion boards and peer review platform (the Writers Exchange), complicates existing MOOC literature, which configures students as either passive recipients of knowledge or active agents who generate knowledge in these massive open online environments. Instead of conforming to the roles of either passive learner or expert teacher, participants in “Rhetorical Composing” shift between these roles frequently and depend upon role switching to both consume and produce knowledge in the MOOC environment. Our findings suggest that we should move beyond traditional, binary ways of understanding performed roles of student and instructor so that we can better understand how learning takes place in these online writing environments.