The Digital University

This chapter describes two different practices which attempted to enact a digital university: MOOCs and videoconferencing apps used for lecturing. I show how regular MOOCs show little potential for mediatic displacement, since there is only one source of sensory input which tends to capture and overwhelm the students’ attention, hence very little potential for study gestures. However, I also describe a new and experimental MOOC format, the bMOOC, that showed a possibility to stirr occasions for thought by disrupt the linearity of the classical MOOCs, by disorienting the student and by refusing to deliver some ‘content’ to be learned. Meanwhile, using videoconferencing apps to enact an online lecture cannot yet be an instance of a digital university since the collective experiences of attention-making were subverted by the individualising logic of the screen. The promise of the digital university seems to remain aspirational until we figure out how to enact the techniques of mediatic displacement currently flourishing at the physical university.