MOOCs and Foucault’s Heterotopia: On Community and Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) present challenges for individual student self-efficacy and relational communities of learners. Faucault’s concept of the “heterotopia” is examined as a lens of the no-place place by which barriers between the individual and the community are called into question as seemingly disparate concepts. Contextually mitigated with Freire’s “problem-posing” and Siemens’ “connectivism,” it is further argued that self-efficacy and relational community are congruous and dependent entities which provide insight to the future of digital architecture.