MOOCs

David Kernohan,    Jisc

This chapter considers MOOCs, their value and possible futures.

Keywords

MOOCs; higher education; government; policy

As the MOOC snowball - it was never an avalanche, for all the feverous hope of former Blairite aides - crumbles and melts across the stinging and red-raw face of UK higher education, what should be our reaction? The icy water of the postulated disruption trickles down the collective institutional neck as we wonder if we should join the jeering young upstarts in their game, or maintain our distance and dignity.

Or are we too late? The painful brilliant ice thrown back in 2012 has become a greying slush, a dampening rather than a disruption. As the shining crystals decompose, should we be preparing for a brilliant new season of online education?

1.1 The Melting of the MOOC

It can be argued that you need just one graph to rebut the hyperbole. Katy Jordan's (2014) interactive chart of MOOC retention rates is continually updated to reflect new data concerning the percentage of students who sign up for a free online course who complete it. Most MOOCs (though there are outliers, particularly where the initial cohort is smaller) have a completion rate of less than 13%.

And this is what it should come down to. If you offer the proverbial free lunch, you'd hope that lot more than 13% of those who accept it would eat it. The promise of the MOOC was - initially - one of a more engaging and personalised educational experience. 'Inspiring and rich learning' ran the promise around the launch of FutureLearn's first course in 2013, though in reality people have been less inspired by video lectures and multiple-choice quizzes than one might hope. Pedagogic innovation in MOOCs has, so far, been limited.

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig's 'first MOOC', the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) course they offered out of Stanford in late 2011, heralded much of the early excitement about the use of AI in massive online education. Throughout 2012 (though less so latterly), we saw a range of claims concerning the insights that massive learner data could offer to course design and delivery.

For example, during her 2012 TED talk Coursera founder Daphne Koller (2012) said:

You can collect every click, every homework submission, and every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not?

Very little of note regarding learning has been yet been discovered via this methodology (for an overview see Reich, 2015), though the need to collect user data permeates much commercial MOOC course design. 'Content that talks back' must sit on a suitable platform that is able to return reliable data about every aspect of learner activity. All of which adds to overheads and mitigates against the wider (open) exposure of materials that have been produced, often at great expense, by institutions keen to promote themselves and their work.

This data gathering also prompts enormous ethical issues. The data trails are so personal that they are very difficult to anonymise, and there is no 'opt-out' for people who wish to use the resources but not have their data collected. For serious education research, as MOOC data mining often claims to be, this is essential practice.

The former minister of state for Higher Education, (David Willets 2013), had a particular fondness for the MOOC movement, though he did tend to conflate it with the wider issues of online delivery and learner analytics. He saw the MOOC as a tool that could 'revolutionise conventional models of formal education' and 'sources close to the minister' claimed 'In ten years' time there may be just one university or platform offering online courses and it may have become the dominant player worldwide'. However, he remained less bombastic concerning the precise method by which this would happen. Like many he used Bower (1995) language of 'disruption' as a way to encapsulate this promise; broadly the idea that a lower cost, lower quality, alternative to a monopoly (in this case, traditional higher education (HE)) would attract new customers and destabilise the market.

The trouble with this, and as Christensen et al. (2013) acknowledged in their revised thoughts on disruption for education, is that a low-quality education is not just a less 'premium' product, but a product without a purpose. This is Sebastian Thrun's (2013) 'lousy product', one with a low-to-zero value to customers other than as a digital distraction.

A recent report from Which Higher Education (2014) suggests that only three in ten current undergraduate students would be interested in replacing some aspects of a traditional degree course with online delivery if it lowered costs. So there is - perhaps - a market for lower cost, equivalent quality, education, but it addresses a particular subsection of learner needs and aspiration. This is perhaps behind a shift in key platform offers.

1.2 From Education to Training

In talking about MOOC platforms, the tendency is to imply Coursera, Udacity, EdX and maybe FutureLearn. But there are more than 40 platforms, ranging from government-funded collaborations, to for-profit enterprises, to charities, to offerings from learning management system vendors. And this doesn't include the independent MOOCs that are more likely to use the highly extensible WordPress blogging platform than anything else.

So to talk meaningfully about trends in MOOCs is close to impossible. But certainly across the big three or four platforms, the movement has been in two directions: charging students for certificates and additional services, and building links with employers. Gone are the early statements about education for all, this is a clear attempt to build both a value case for learners to complete MOOCs and a viable business model.

Let us start with the latter. Coursera, Udacity and EdX are all primarily supported by venture capital investment. Though all are starting to generate their own income streams from learners and employers, these are dwarfed by their obligation to provide a return to investors and - indeed - their running costs. Audrey Watters' (2014) 'Hack Education' weekly news has a 'MOOCs and UnMOOCs' section which details the often humorous attempts by platforms to raise money from increasingly unlikely partnerships. (The UK's FutureLearn, being entirely owned and funded by the Open University, feels similar pressures but to a lesser extent.) To give a few examples, Coursera has entered a partnership with budget airline JetBlue to provide in-air video content, Coursera and EdX are attempting to gain US Federal funding to provide certificates to in-service teachers and military veterans, and Udacity - now no longer offering free courses - work with a range of employers including Facebook and the Bank of America.

Working with employers is presented as a way to add value to the student experience - allowing a 'certificate' to be awarded that is recognised by the employer in question. And this extra value is charged for, ranging from £26 for a FutureLearn certificate to $200 per month for a Udacity 'Nanodegree'. From the perspective of the employers and the platform, this looks like it is offering the student a cheaper way to access jobs that demand specific skills. However, such an approach means that the student would lose out on having a transferable accreditation that they could use with a range of employers.

1.3 Fight or Flight

But back to our snowball - how big is it (realistically) going to get? What are the risks of not being involved, and - conversely what are the risks of being involved? To read much of the invective, from Martin Bean (2012), about 'getting on board the MOOC train' you may think that this should be a foregone conclusion. 'MOOC or die', as I once heard a very senior academic (who should, quite frankly, have known better) tell a conference.

Look at the UK institutions that have yet to experiment with MOOCs: Oxford, Imperial, Durham, St Andrews and (barring a targeted maths GCSE offer) Cambridge. Most of these domestic and global league table dominating institutions have yet to enter the world of MOOCs. As we know FutureLearn are focused at the top of the league tables - and Coursera invite the top five institutions in any given country - it is clear that many institutions must be saying no to the big platforms. Why?

As indicated above, it could be because they offer institutions and learners so little benefit compared to alternative investments. Oxford University, for instance, has focused on offering 'open education resources' (OER), drawing together activity from across the institution to offer materials that can be freely reused. The LSE, to give another example, have invested in working at the boundaries of academia and journalism via a successful series of blogs, many of which are openly licensed for reuse only latterly supporting (not leading) a World Bank-led MOOC on the...