Sense-making Innovative Systems: Prestigious MOOCs

Making sense of the chaos that may be caused by the emergence of innovative systems is, for many, a necessary yet demanding task. Sense‐making theory offers a pragmatic explanation of how to think about these dynamic and complex socio‐technical systems. It is linguistic reflective analysis, intent on structuring alternative response actions. This paper uses sense‐making theory to structure how to think about the threats and opportunities created by the example of the emergence of a new system in education, that of low‐cost prestigious massive, open, online courses, like Coursera and FutureLearn. It demonstrates how to construct a sense‐making framework to think about these innovative systems from the perspective of formulating government policy. Stakeholders' concerns were networked and clusters identified. This resulted in the four organizing principles. This system of principles can be used to think about, structure or make sense of innovative systems like prestigious massive, open, online courses