Free University Credits Given Away in MOOCville

Well, hello there. Good to see you again!

I've been away from MOOCville for a month, and you all know the old saying, "When the CAT is away the MOOCs will play." (Not sure what CAT stands for - maybe 'cagey ancient teacher' or 'covert anti-technocrat'??') So let's catch up. Today I'll focus on MOOCs for Credit.



More colleges are offering actual bankable credits for MOOCs.  The Baltimore Sun reports that the University of Maryland's University College will accept some MOOCs for college credit. This move is part of a broader study, funded by the Gates Foundation, to discover how students using MOOCs instead of conventional courses will do in further education.The courses will include those already approved by the American Council on Education (ACE) as equivalent to college courses. The students will earn their credits in two ways: (i) by earning verified certificates by taking proctored exams (trhe Coursera Signature Level concept), or (ii) by undergoing 'rigorous prior learning assessment' - essentially testing out - at the UMUC campus.  ACE is, not surprisingly, a partner in the study. UMUC has been offering college credits for life experience for forty years and this is a very natural - one might say inevitable - extension of that effort.

UMUC has been a leader in offering programs for adult and 'non-traditional students. If they can offer credit for diverse work experiences of undocumented relevance for academic growth, why not for actual courses certified by the appropriate body as equivalent to college courses. And if UMUC makes this move, what is to stop other colleges and universities from following? In fact, the acceptance of MOOCs for credit is certain to become a marketing move that other providers will find it difficult to resist. Students will demand to know why schools they are considering refuse to accept these courses, and instead force them to pay ever-increasing tuition fees for the same courses. And they won't belly up if they find good alternatives.

The take-away: the "MOOCs for Credit" trend is unstoppable.

MOOC-based credits as a marketing ploy. The University of Cincinnati has announced that it is offering 2 free credits for students participating in its MOOC, "Innovation and Design Thinking," - for students who gain the certificate of learning and then apply and are admitted to the University's Lindner College of Business. This goes one step further than a development announced by Temple University in Philadelphia (truth in advertising - Temple is my home base) last month to permit students taking its introductory level business MOOCs to test out of the parallel courses and qualify for more advanced standing. In the Temple move, the students do not save anything on their tuition payments but get to graduate with more advanced level courses for the same price. On the Cincinnati gambit the students instead get bankable credits and can thus graduate earlier and at less cost. It will be interesting to see which of these models (or both, or neither) catches on.

Takeaway: Universities will continue to invent and experiment with various alternatives in using MOOCs to make their programs appealing to cost-conscious students.   

EdX and the Convergence of MOOC Learning Management Systems (LMS).

The past week has witnessed an important development in the convergence of open course management systems for MOOCs. 

In September 2012 Stanford released Course2GO - built on top of Stanford Courseware  - as open source software.  

Jane Manning, Class2Go product manager, explained that the idea started with a six-member team in Stanford’s computer-science department. The team built Class2Go using code from Stanford’s Courseware course-hosting platform, a similar platform from the nonprofit Khan Academy, and software for integrated online classroom forums hosted by Piazza

At the same time, Google released its open source CourseBuilder system. Google explained that 

Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. . . . edX shares in the open source vision for online learning platforms, and Google and the edX team are in discussions about open standards and technology sharing for course platforms. 

In June 2013 edX released its own open source MOOC management system.  

At about the same time, Stanford announced that it would be closing Course2GO and partnering with edX for further development of open source MOOC management tools. 

According to Stanford's announcement, open source online learning platforms such as edX will allow universities to develop their own delivery methods, partner with other universities and institutions as they choose, collect data and control branding of their educational material.
While Stanford and its professors will continue to use several providers of online courses, including Coursera and Venture Lab, the university will stop developing its own platform, Class2Go. Instead, aspects of Class2Go will be incorporated into the program developed at edX, a nonprofit launched by Harvard and MIT last year. The resulting software code will become available, or open source, on June 1.

In Stanford's news release, edX president Anant Agarwal predicted that the edX platform will now become the "Linux of learning."  

Now edX has partnered with Google to form MOOC.org, a platform to enable all schools, organizations or individuals to author and manage their own MOOCs. 

As Steve Kolowich reports in the Chronicle, 

The new site, MOOC.org, will provide tools and a platform that “will allow any academic institution, business, and individual to create and host online courses,” says a blog post by Dan Clancy, a research director at Google. In an interview, Anant Agarwal, president of edX, referred to the site as a “YouTube for courses.” 

The resulting open source system will by 2014 enable anyone, anywhere, to develop MOOCs free from dependence upon commercial learning management systems like Blackboard.   

EdX won't be all things for all people, but it promises to be both the Linux and the YouTube for massive online courses.

Foundation Course Sequences - a new paradigm for MOOCville?

In my last post I noted that the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school is offering its first year courses, bundled into a package, on the Coursera platform.  This significant event suggests a new development in the MOOC space.

Phil Hill over at e-Literate notes today that MIT has joined Wharton in offering not just individual courses, but organized sequences of foundation courses in the MOOC format. 

The upshot is that learners can now gain access to organized courses of study, with certificates of completion, for free. Keep an eye on this development!   




MIT will offer the first of seven courses in its Foundations of Computer Science XSeries this fall on the edX platform.. Then one or more additional courses will be offered each semester. The entire sequence will be available by fall 2015. The three course sequence in Supply Chain Management will begin in the fall of 2014. 


For those concerned about security, MIT plans to implement an identity verification process starting in Spring 2014 that will prompt students to present government-issued identification before standing for exams.  

The concern with security - especially for course sequences - suggests that MOOC leaders anticipate the use of MOOC certificates in consequential decisions such as those by colleges accepting MOOCs for advanced standing, grad school admission committees, and employers.  

MOOC Certificates and Diploma Programs

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton College of Business has just announced that they will put their entire first year course program on line for free, on the Coursera MOOC platform.

This is another breakthrough in MOOCville; for the first time a university is bundling all of the courses in an entire year of its diploma program in MOOCs. Students from all over the world can now take the entire first year Wharton MBA program, from the same professors delivering the courses on campus, for free. And those completing the courses will earn certificates of learning.

This in one more step in the process whereby MOOC certificates will eventually be aggregated, by universities or third party aggregators, and recognized as diploma equivalents.

Let us consider this case: a recent graduate of a major engineering college - say Stanford, Purdue or Georgia Tech - applies for an entry level management job at a high-tech firm. An individual MOOC certificate may not help very much, but a bundled set of Wharton MBA MOOCs tells quite a different story - that this graduate has the background knowledge, motivation and self-management skills to acquire the MBA knowledge base on his (or her) own.

The college or grad school diploma has been used as a job filter because it lowers transaction costs for employers. But as more and more people pass through the filter, the filter has become inefficient - it lets in too many people without strong capabilities. The diploma doesn't sufficiently differentiate its holders from others. And especially now that product cycles are rapid and skills erode quickly, employers are inevitably more interested in specific capabilities than the general knowledge represented by diplomas.

A single MOOC might not be useful as a job filter - after all, what, exactly, does it represent? But a bundled package of certificates from a leading university, representing a full complement of cutting edge knowledge and skill, would be a more efficient filter than a mere diploma.

In my view this progression from individual MOOCs to packages of certificates accepted as diploma equivalents in the hiring process is inevitable. It is a win-win-lose proposition. The firms will win, the students will win - only the Higher Ed sector currently monopolizing job access will lose.

We will not have to wait very long for this process to come to completion: leading high tech firms have recently formed an alliance to explore weighting packages of MOOC certificates as diploma equivalents in their hiring practices.

MOOCs and the Two Cultures of Educational Reform

Stanley Fish writes in the New York Times of the "Two Cultures of Educational Reform." Citing Derek Bok,
former Harvard president, Fish identifies these as follows: 

The first “is an evidence-based approach to education … rooted in the belief that one can best advance teaching and learning by measuring student progress and testing experimental efforts to increase it.” The second “rests on a conviction that effective teaching is an art which one can improve over time through personal experience and intuition without any need for data-driven reforms imposed from above.”

Fish correctly notes that in the current conversation about educational reform the quantitative side of this debate is winning. And he associates the emergence of MOOCs with this trend. Certainly the pronouncements of edX's Agarwal and Udacity's Thrun support this association - they claim - with unmeasured arrogance - to be searching for - and even finding - the "magic formula" for education. Fish replies that no one really knows how to measure the educational values inherent in higher education - and thus that the quantitative side of this divide rests for now entirely on empty promises.

Fish closes with this meditation:

Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, argues . . . that with the help of the digital media, “we can release ourselves from the shackles that we have gotten used to in the context of in-class teaching.” This turns out to mean that we can be released from the distracting bother of interacting with actual people. 

What does all of this have to do with MOOCs?

Not very much. The allure of MOOCs does not derive from their demonstrably superior pedagogies - and their problems don't stem from their demonstrable pedagogical limits. Thus all of the discussion of what is gained and lost by learning from MOOCs as opposed to live teachers in largely irrelevant.

The problem that has brought MOOCs to the forefront is two-fold: (1) the use of the college degree as a job filter regardless of the actual knowledge and skill requirements of the job, and (2) college tuition outstripping middle class ability to pay.

The ultimate promise of MOOCs is a free equivalent to a college diploma. This will not require high quality education. And significantly, it will not even require credits and degrees for MOOCs. It requires no more than employers accepting aggregations of MOOC certificates - among other achievements -  in lieu of the diploma. 

The reason the diploma has been used as a filter is that it is a very cheap way for employers to reduce their transaction costs (search and assessment) in hiring. As we move in the direction of universal higher education the diploma is failing as a filter. As a simple matter of logic, as more students graduate from college the diploma becomes less differentiating. Employers will need new, more discriminating filters.

This brings us to the current situation. The new global network occupational system is gravitating from full time jobs with benefits to contingent work for even professional knowledge workers. These "free lance nation" types can get in there, do the job efficiently, and leave - without encumbering employers with benefit packages. Thus employers are more focused on finding specific capabilities than the general levels of knowledge associated with diplomas.

And with new search capabilities, they can find what they are looking for. Meanwhile, job candidates can develop searchable digital portfolios, demonstrate their capabilities, and be found through online search. MOOC certificates will fine tune their educational credentials for employers, and thus reduce employer transaction costs more than diplomas.

These are the emerging dynamics of the market for post-secondary education. The other strands in the MOOC conversation, about "poetry," "teaching as an art," "magic formulas," "measurable learning objectives" and Daphne Koller's Brave New World, are side shows.  

The Feminist Anti-MOOC - Something New in MOOCville?

Scott Jaschik in Inside Education, in "A Feminist Anti-MOOC," reports on a new MOOC-like course, Feminism and Technology, developed by a consortium of professors at 17 colleges and co-led by Anne Balsamo, dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School.

Unlike the now-standard x-MOOC, the course will feature a distributed model based on 'feminist pedagogical principles.' It will be labeled a DOCC - a distributed open collaborative course. The DOCC will be available for credit at each of the 17 schools and  anyone with Internet access can watch the videos and access the materials. 

The DOCC explicitly challenges the top-down, hierarchical, patriarchal model of xMOOCs. Facilitators assume that every participant brings expertise and unique capabilities, which can then be used collaboratively to study the place of women in technology - no more sage on the (virtual) stage.

The backbone of the course will consist of a series of videos - lectures and interviews created by participating faculty. But faculty in each college will build their own courses, and set their own grading standards, in accord with their own institutional expectations. Each of the 17 sites will involve between 15-30 for-credit students. Thus the total number of full participants will be limited to around 500 - the course is explicitly non-massive.  

Collaboration will be key to course learning - students will exchange their ideas and expertise and collaborate on the course project, 'Storming Wikipedia,' in which all students will research women in technology and then create or edit wikipedia articles on these women. The end result will thus be a rich, easily accessible information resource on the course topic.

This looks to be an attractive template for collaborative teaching and learning using the Internet. Especially interesting is use of what amounts to an 'invisible college' in the field of technology studies as a collaborative teaching faculty. Here are a few comments and questions for further discussion:

1. Full participation will require enrollment in the for-credit DOCC. The facilitators claim to be challenging the role of money in the development of the highly publicised MOOCs like Coursera, but this DOCC, like typical college courses, shifts the expenses primarily to tuition paying students. thus it doesn't address the pressing money challenge in the MOOC space - how to make quality higher education accessible for those now priced out. How can DOCCs help address this problem? 

2. The leaders of this DOCC claim that the distributive model differentiates it from xMOOCs. It doesn't. Cathy Davidson of Duke, as I noted in a MOOCville post a few weeks back, uses distributive learning principles in her Coursera course - her use of her massive learner base to create a highly-detailed database for the history of higher education throughout the world is very similar to the 'Storming Wikipedia' project. A course from the Darden Business school at Virginia that I described recently also uses connectivist principles within the xMOOC framework. 

As Stephen Downes noted in a comment to the IHE article, 'DOCC'  is just another term for cMOOC - the original MOOC framework that he and others developed in Canada some years ago:

 " This is a cMOOC. This is exactly what Siemens and I built, and have written about for years." 

So while this course is a welcome development, it is really not much of an innovation; its just another variant of a familiar MOOC design. One question is whether smaller, more circumscribed DOCC participant groups can add something special to online distributive learning? 

3. The distributive learning model, while quite central to feminist pedagogy, pre-dates it by many decades. It lies at the heart of John Dewey's Democracy and Education, where the interactions of individuals from distinct ethnic and religious communities in dealing with selected common subject materials ARE the curriculum. So a question is whether laying claim to distributive learning as a 'feminist' alternative to patriarchy advances either the understanding or uptake of distributive pedagogical principles?. 

4.  What lessons can we learn from this DOCC? 

A faculty of explicitly feminist teachers, engaging feminist students in a course on feminism, is likely to generate sustained conversation and collaboration, because the free-wheeling exploration will be bounded by shared understandings and constraints. 

But many students in mass online higher education do not engage in course discussions or chat at all; discussion boards frequently degenerate into bitching sessions and flame wars. Creating such a communicative environment in more typical college environments may prove difficult, without shared learning aims or pedagogical principles. Do the DOCC leaders plan to extend this experiment beyond their own favorable settings?    

A Serpentine Procession in MOOCville?

David Riesman, in Constraint and Variety in Higher Education (1956), once described the development of American Higher Education as a "serpentine procession" with Harvard at the head and all other colleges crawling behind Harvard's lead. 

So it goes with MOOCs. The Harvard MIT EdX partnership - along with Coursera, out of Stanford and partnered with Princeton and other elite universities - created the first wave of excitement. Now a host of other MOOC platforms are following in the procession - and a multitude of colleges at all levels are crawling into MOOCville.  

The newcomers will not be able to compete on reputation. And given that MOOCs are free and open, no one will be able to compete on price. As a result, the newcomers will have to find specific niches to gain attention.  

Here is a useful example. The Eco-Tech Institute of Aurora Colorado brands itself as the first and only college in the country entirely devoted to preparing graduates for careers in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The institute offers associates degrees in  such fields as solar technology, wind technology, green facilities management, and business administration/sustainability. 

This two-year school has just completed its first MOOC- on Sustainability - offered on Instructure's Canvas Network platform.   The course aims to develop critical thinking about environmental sustainability at all levels from the corporate and governmental to the personal. 

From an article in The Ground Report:

"Students came from “all walks of life and from around the globe,” according to Kyle Crider, Ecotech Institute’s Program Chair and Manager of Environmental Operations, who led the course. There was a diverse mix of men and women in the class, ranging in educational background from high school to Ph.D., about half of whom had never taken an online course before. Many participants were so engaged that they actually requested that the class continue beyond the ten weeks.”  

This is a good example of a niche school using a MOOC as a tool to spread awareness and brand itself as niche leader. The well-publicized MOOC is an attempt to capture the attention of Ph.D. scientists, industry leaders, and concerned publics. It will be interesting to see whether this marketing through MOOCs increases Eco-Tech's global recognition, student enrollment, and its own institutional sustainability.