Keywords

MOOCs; higher education; government; policy

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:

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 Coursera platform.

St Andrews was named as an initial FutureLearn partner, but appeared to pull out before the beta platform was launched. It has since focused on promoting the quality of its research via a dedicated hub and has developed an OER offer around Maths and Statistics.

There is a cost attached to developing a free course, conservatively estimated at around £30,000–40,000 but likely in reality (including overheads) to be substantially higher. It’s an expensive club to join, and as with so much else in modern higher education, it is an expense that is being looked at critically. With the MOOC ‘first mover advantage’ now a fading dream, and with around 105 free courses starting globally in November 2014 alone, institutions no longer develop MOOCs to stand out but to fit in. The days of gushing press coverage simply for launching a free online course, a ‘year of the MOOC’ staple in 2012, have long since passed.

But the ubiquitous acronym (first coined by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island back in 2008) shows no sign of disappearing. Amongst senior managers and faculty, ‘MOOC’ has become a shorthand for any kind of online learning, and in a sector seeking to consolidate income online instruction has once again become a huge area of interest. Jisc’s ‘Scaling Up Online Learning’ activity has demonstrated a huge UK-wide appetite for peer support and advice in this area.

In Further Education, the much-discussed FELTAG requirements around blended learning, with an emphasis on tuition without direct teacher interaction, have a clear basis in MOOC pedagogy. Despite concerns about engagement and learning quality, it seems that online content delivery in isolation from educator interaction will be a recognisable facet of the experience of many students.

What is less clear is whether the MOOC experience can prepare institutions for the wider challenges they now face. At worst, what we are seeing is simply a retread of enterprises like ‘Fathom’ and ‘AllCourses’ in the early 00s – enterprises that made a huge deal of noise about how the Internet was changing education, spent a great deal of money that they didn’t earn and crashed quietly, alone and unloved, in the darker corners of the post dot-com crash Internet.

And, as the explosion of new platforms has proven, we have learnt very little from that experience. Sustaining a viable online offer requires real investment in academic and technical staff, and still remains at least as expensive to offer as a similar quality on-campus course. And open publication can greatly increase the visibility of academic activity, but to maximise this benefit it should be genuinely open to reuse.

No one could criticise the nobler aims of the MOOC, to bring education and opportunity to the world. But there may be more effective ways to reach that goal.