The history of technology in education is repleted with unfulfilled promises of revolutions in learning, teaching and schools. The notion of education as a public good also has a long history. In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) quickly captured the interest of the media, academia, venture capitalists and policy-makers, generating discourses fulled with "openness" and renewed certainties of a revolution for higher education. Although pioneered by the Open Education (OE) movement, MOOCs soon became part of the mainstream, drifting from its initial purposes as envisioned by their promoters. The institutionalization and appropriation of MOOCs by the corporate world came along with the deployment of a currently trending model of distribution of video lessons and books coupled with automatic assessment systems through proprietary web-based platforms. In addition to being pedagogically conservative, these initiatives seem more suitable to serve as marketing and branding strategies, closer to a freemium model for the global education market, than to an approach designed to promote the sharing of knowledge and to curb the commodification of education. The Open Education movement is sustained by the belief that knowledge is a public good for which exclusion is neither desirable nor necessary as its consumption is non-rivalrous. In this view, exclusion from knowledge is a choice implemented through artificial barriers around the privileges of some at the expenses of human rights, the common good, solidarity and social progress. MOOCs are focused on removing cost exclusion but don't question control and property; grant access but still artificially impose scarcity (payed certification, digital rights management, copyright, etc.). While the redemption of education by the virtues of the "MOOCification" of higher education and the "Khanification" of K12 is announced by the mainstream media, Open Education values, concerns and beliefs flow elsewhere. The "Reclaim Open Learning" initiative, for example, is committed with the "truly open" learning. Other examples are non-proprietary decentralized systems of learning and skills certification; self-organized, experimental, peer-to-peer educational initiatives; and "edupunk" approaches. This contribution to the symposium focuses on Open Education values and purposes by confronting current MOOC models with alternative solutions framed by the Open Education movement. Through this analysis, we aim to raise awareness to those alternatives as well as discuss the common ownership as a requirement for social production and sharing of knowledge.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press. Downes, S. (2011). Free Learning - Essays on open educational resources and copyright. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/files/FreeLearning.pdf Peters, M. (2010). The Idea of Openness. In The Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, M. Peters, T. Besley, A. Gibbons, B. Žarnić, P. Ghiraldelli (eds.). Retrieved 1 January, 2015 from http://eepat.net/doku.php?id=the_idea_of_openness Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: Bloomsbury Academic. Weller, M. (2014). The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press.