“Be a Better Version of You!”: A corpus-driven critical discourse analysis of MOOC platforms' marketing communication

Date

2022-02-01

Author

Mısır, Hülya
Işık Güler, Hale

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This study examines the representation, reconstruction, and promotion of the 'ideal subject' of the job market in the promotional materials of the online/life-long learning platforms known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We take a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis to investigate the marketing language in the subscription e-mails and websites of six English-medium MOOC platforms. The analysis shows that the platforms use an array of promotional persuasion strategies, including advice-giving, autonomization and responsibilization of individuals and reinforce a self-betterment discourse to create marketable employees. Through the use of a distinct blend of higher education, marketing, and self-help discourses, the skills-oriented language explicitly references job insecurity and urges the individual to (re)build oneself tirelessly to remain demandable/marketable, neglecting an intellectual advancement angle. This ideology legitimizes the neoliberal demands for the enterprising-self and employability and feeds into one's fear of failure, ranking individuals in the society based on a value-adding/detracting practice.

Subject Keywords

Massive Open Online Courses, Enterprising-self, Higher education discourse, Job market discourse, Self-help discourse, Corpus-driven critical discourse analysis

URI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101021
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96176

Journal

LINGUISTICS AND EDUCATION

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101021

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article

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Citation Formats

H. Mısır and H. Işık Güler, ““Be a Better Version of You!”: A corpus-driven critical discourse analysis of MOOC platforms’ marketing communication,” LINGUISTICS AND EDUCATION, vol. 69, pp. 1–12, 2022, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101021.