2012 - The year of the MOOCs?

MOOC platforms

Stanford computer science professors who developed the technology to host the online classes, started the recent trend in January 2012, with the launch of Udacity. The platform currently offers 14 courses, reaching 80,000 learners. Stanford University soon followed its staff initiative with the founding of Coursera in April 2012. Since its launch, major and distinguished (US and non-US) institutions joined, bringing the total of Coursera partner institutions at 33.

In May 2012, the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) and Harvard University followed by jointly launching edX. After 7 months, edX includes 6 (US) institutions.

And now, it is reported that in early 2013 UK based institutions will launch free online courses, through a new initiative called Futurelearn, led by the Open University UK.

A new phenomenon, or not?

The phenomenon of open online courses is not new, however. Eleven years ago, MIT already started to offer OpenCourseWare. And in the 1990s, some high-profile universities set up online learning ventures (such as AllLearn, a joint venture of Yale, Stanford and Oxford Universities) offering non-credit bearing courses online – even though several of these ventures proved to be unsustainable by the mid-2000s.

An interesting massive initiative that did survive, but is not offered by a higher education institution, is the Khan Academy, once started because Salman Khan – who studied both at MIT and Harvard - had to explain math to his niece. The difference is that Khan is a democratic initiative, not stemming from already established universities.

What is new about the recent MOOCs development is the large size of the students taking these courses, with an individual course reaching 40,000 or even 160,000 students in some cases. Also new is that MOOCs are courses running over specific periods with cohorts of students who are taught by instructors and who receive feedback (see a recent THE article for more information).

The pro’s and con’s of MOOCs

The pro’s and con’s of free education offered by institutions were discussed elaborately over the last year. The advantages are plenty. With MOOCs, institutions can share their courses on a much wider scale, thereby expanding access to good quality higher education courses to all areas of the globe, opening up access to education for all interested. They can help institutions market their brand name more widely and attract students from other countries. They can also help institutions to improve their online teaching technology.

Disadvantages exist, too. Students receive a free education, for which they often do not receive credits. On completion of their course, students may receive a certificate, for which they may be charged. So can a MOOC degree be worth the same as a degree from Princeton, Brown or John Hopkins University? Can credits gained for a completed MOOC be counted towards a traditional degree in the same field? No.

Commenting on 80,000 students’ feedback in discussion fora also takes a huge amount of time for lecturers, even when students comment on each other’s suggestions. Without dedicated teaching staff, this may be difficult to realise. How are institutions going to guarantee a good-quality course?

Dutch institutions

Dutch institutions – while not involved in MOOCs – have experience with OpenCourseWare (OCW). Delft University of Technology in particular, has invested in the development of TU Delft OpenCourseWare. A recent article in Dutch magazine the Europa Expresse set out the university’s reasons for developing OCW, with the main reasons being:

1. the university’s high quality open courses have a good international marketing value,
2. within the university, OCW provides incentives to improve the quality of the traditional, class-based courses,
3. as a semi-publicly-funded organisation, the university considers it its task to make educational material freely available – based on the idea that what is funded by public sources must be publicly available.

What’s next?

Will the MOOCs really be the revolution in education in the years to come, as is being claimed by the press and the institutions too? Will every university eventually be part of an online learning community? Do the abovementioned benefits apply to all institutions, or will some benefit more than others?

And who will benefit most, the students or institutions? For students, it seems important that they are able to gain academic credits for the courses, while institutions have other interests. Are these interests equally balanced and compatible, or is compatibility of interests a non-issue?

Secondly, MOOCs offer online, good quality courses for free. How can the free MOOCs be financially self-sustainable, especially for non-profit institutions (such as edX)? And for the for-profit providers (such as Coursera), MOOCs may make it difficult to charge high tuition fees for their online courses. Will only the well-known, established for-profits survive?

And there are other questions. Will hereto many more online consortia be founded, or will other (likely high-profile) universities connect, since not all institutions will have capacity to offer MOOCs on their own? Who will be the leaders? Will MOOC consortia be mainly cross-borders or more national, or remain mixed? We are now seeing the co-existence of some national and some transnational MOOC consortia – and national presented answers (the new UK initiative) to international consortia. It seems likely that transnational consortia will be dominating in the future.

Perhaps 2013 will shed some light on this. The year of the MOOC is yet to come.