Well, the quote and my use of it is aimed more at a designed course experience for registered students, where we structure the experience more.

Yes, what it means varies, but to me, it’s a continuum we’d like to see people move across, whatever their starting point is. But frankly, for an open course, there is much more on the learner to make those moves rather than the course providing the motivation. We can try and help others, model behavior, but there is a different set of responsibilities in play there.

The flip side is the risk is and should be low. In many open connected course, people are there on their own interest, not necessarily to earn a grade credit (well they may really really want that shiny badge)- there is no failure (although we tend to fill that space with equally meaningless terms in open courses like “dropout”)