MOOC Majors: An Alternative Route to the Workforce

What is the MOOC Business Model?? That was one of the burning question about MOOCs in 2013. In 2014 we may learn that no one business model will prevail, but MOOC Platform firms will develop a number of promising and complementary revenue streams. 

MOOC Sequences and Specializations

One of these revenue streams will be the Sequence Certificate or MOOC-Mini-Major. Last year several MOOC platforms introduced course sequences. The most heralded is the Georgia Tech Udacity masters degree in Computer Science, sponsored by AT&T. 

But the MOOC firms also introduced several notable mini-courses-of-study that did not carry university credit or connect to a degree pathway. One notable example is the sequence of foundation MBA courses from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, announced by Wharton and Coursera last September. These courses, like others from Coursera, were offered free of charge. In January 2014 Laurie Pickard, a master's degree graduate of my university, Temple, was featured in Fortune magazine for patching together an entire MBA-type program from such MOOCs. 

In January 2014 Coursera announced their Specializations Certificate Programs. These programs package a number of distinct MOOCs - from 3 to 9 - offered by the same institution, plus a final capstone project and exam. Students pay for each course in the sequence, complete the capstone project and exam, and earn a certificate not just for each course but for the entire sequence. The sequences are thus MOOC-based near equivalents of college majors, at least in the sense that the courses are designed by a single institution's faculty to fit together in a sequence and to generate capabilities currently demanded in the economy. 

Two good examples of the new Specializations programs are the four-course sequence in cybersecurity, a hot field with a bright future, offered by the University of Maryland with a certificate available to those who pass all four, complete a capstone project and pay $245 and the sequence of nine MOOCs in data science offered by Johns Hopkins, with certificates available to those who pass all nine, complete a capstone project and pay $490.  

MOOC Mini-Majors

It is not difficult to imagine students in the near future offering up two, three or four of these Specialization certificates in lieu of a university "major". But obstacles remain.

EdX recently experimented with matching more than 800 top-performing MOOC learners with top-tier technology companies. The results, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, were not merely disappointing but disastrous. Despite the sponsorship of edX, only three received interviews, and not one was hired. Subsequently edX has withdrawn from the 'employment agency' business.

That step may have been premature. The top-tier firms get thousands of applicants from the best university programs in computer science and information systems for every opening. Why would they be interested in experimenting with MOOC learners when they can take their pick of numerous Stanford, MIT and Purdue grads, who have shown the persistence to earn four year degrees, rubbed shoulders with top professors, and networked with other top students who will soon enter the workforce and connect up with hundreds of other hot prospects?

Meanwhile,  new business start-ups in Silicon Valley, on Massachusetts Route 128, in New York's Silicon Alley and throughout the country hunger for talent. Most organizations will not be able to compete for the top grads of the top-tier university programs. Is it not possible that edX, which is hardly an expert in the employment agency business, simply directed their efforts at the wrong job market.

One is reminded of Prof. Michael Lenox's Coursera MOOC on Business Strategy offered in February and March 2013. Lenox, a Professor at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, used crowdsourcing techniques to locate business firms and non-profit organizations willing to involve his MOOC students in their strategic planning. As Lenox said at the time:

"The concept can be applied in any number of domains, Imagine a course on graphic design where students prepare solutions for real nonprofits or a computer program course where students develop code for small startups with limited budgets. The potential is enormous."

As it turned out, the potential was enormous -  more than 100 small firms and non-profits participated in Lenox's MOOC, and close to 80% of the active student participants contributed to these organizations' strategic planning.

Now imagine a large scale effort by one of the big MOOC Platform firms to source similar organizations to provide short-term internships or apprenticeships for top performing MOOC students who have earned one or more Specialization Certificates?   My guess is that, unlike the failed edX effort with Google, Intuit, Yahoo, and other top tier firms, a crowdsourced effort to connect top MOOC learners and hungry organizations would place many learners with MOOC majors in the workforce.

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In my next post I will consider the new promise of MOOCs in providing near equivalents of course credit that some universities, faced with declining enrollment and loss of tuition dollars, can accept as transfer credit to forge efficient and affordable 'mixed-mode' degree pathways. 

The Big 2014 MOOC Re-Boot

The big MOOCPlatforms are undergoing a large scale re-boot at the beginning of this new year. If 2012 was "the year of the MOOC" and 2013 the "Year of the Deflation of MOOC Hype," then 2014 may well be the "Year of MOOC's Second Chance." Here I focus on new efforts at Udacity and Coursera that are designed both to improve the learning experience and generate revenues.

Udacity

Udacity, which performed its famous "pivot" in mid 2013, and labeled its first efforts a "a lousy product" turned to revenues from corporate training. Since that time, Sebastian Thrun has continued to offer Udacity MOOCs free to the general public, but has emphasized the need - and availability for a price - of auxiliary services including mentoring and tutoring. The new, re-booted Udacity website puts these coaching services front and center:

Learning is a collaborative process, and we're here to provide you with guidance every step of the way. We'll help you select the right class, navigate challenging content, and improve your projects and code.

Given the major emphasis on mentoring and tutoring in my account of online learning in Education 2.0, this is hardly a surprise. Most learners, at least those with little prior academic experience and success, and lacking well developed self-directed learning habits, are unable to get much value from MOOC-based learning unless aided by mentors and tutors.

The mentors help them focus down on why they are learning, and what they need to be learning to move forward with their lives and achieve their aims - and even how to formulate some basic life goals.

The tutors then help them focus down own on how to learn, on how to overcome misunderstandings, on how to motivate themselves to get through those course segments when the learning curve steepens - in addition to how to solve this or that problem or remember how to define this or that concept.

Both are necessary for most learners - not just those from disadvantaged communities. Kids who take to academic work and thrive without some of this hand holding are out-liers. It will be very interesting to see how the new MOOC on "Preparing for Uni" on the FutureLearn" platform will fare. Can we bootstrap MOOC-based Learning through MOOC-Based Learning? Or will we require some personal interventions with real humans?

A question for another post: Can MOOC platforms - or at least the non-profit ones - figure out a way of providing personal mentoring and coaching through some combination of crowd-sourcing and what Clay Shirky calls the Cognitive Surplus. If Yahoo Answers can elicit dozens of answers to each of thousands of questions daily, and Wikipedia can elicit encyclopedia articles, edits and additions on every conceivable topic, and open source enterprises can call out the collective talent of software engineers, then why can't either the MOOC Platforms or some auxiliary enterprise (like all those wonderful add-ons to Twitter) figure out how to source online (or even offline) mentoring and tutoring for MOOC learners?

Coursera

Coursera's new front-line product is its Specializations Program. The Platform organizes course sequences which collectively build a skill with current workplace demand. The Specializations Page showcases ten of these programs. Coursera and edX - and other MOOC platforms, have already offered course sequences - most dramatically, entire foundation year MBA course sequences from top business schools like Wharton. What is new with the Specializations is (1) the specific skill- with-workplace-demand promise, and (2) the price tag per each course in the sequence. Specialization courses can still be taken for free, but only those enrolled in the signature verification tracks can complete the final projects and get the certificate for the Specialization.

So for now, Coursera, like Udacity, continues to offer its MOOCs in a cost-free version, but pins its hopes for revenue generation on add-ons.

Like all disruptive technologies, MOOCs start with one set of core images and expectations forged by founders, and gravitate to other images and expectations in the inevitable back and forth of 'social construction'. It took the telephone a few decades to become what we have long since been familiar with. Some of the early adopters thought it would be a device for listening to classical music! The MOOCs will settle in, and as always, public uses and private ventures and their revenue streams will be the key determinate of what they ultimately become for us.

MOOCs and the Manufactured Crisis of Higher Education

Over at Slate, authors Christian and Calvin Exoo argue that MOOCs represent the entry of large, dominant corporations into the Education space. They paint Coursera, edX and Udacity as emerging giants - controlling education as Big Pharma and Big Oil now dominate their industries. 

The big MOOC firms claim to be responding to the problem of restricted access to higher education. But, the authors claim, the U.S. has no such problem - the MOOC firms are 'manufacturing' the problem through their press releases to blind us from reality. A huge percentage of kids, the authors counter, gain access to some form of higher education. The real problem, the authors state, lies in retention: kids drop out because they are unprepared for college and can't afford tuition. The solution they propose is adding lots of remedial services and extra financial aid around the margins for disadvantaged kids. These two steps could get a huge percentage through college. MOOCs provide neither financial aid or remediation, and hence offer nothing for the "real" crisis. 

Leaving beside edX's non-profit status and its decisive move to open source, and Udacity's apparent exit from the education market to concentrate on corporate training - which leaves only Coursera still standing as a large corporate entity in the MOOC education space, this analysis still seems wrong-headed.  

My response is that it is the authors, and not the MOOC firms, who are manufacturing a crisis.

The real crisis is not that too many kids fail to complete college - but rather that too many kids get forced into college because no other pathways to dignified work exist in our society. If we didn't make college a more or less compulsory job qualification - even for jobs that make no use of college related knowledge or skills - we wouldn't need to push these kids through college in the first place. Then they would not need all of these extra-ordinary measures to graduate.

Suppose we do get these kids through college. They will still be facing both a poor and contracting job market - especially for that fragment that needed even more remedial services and extra tuition help. And those kids would also still be burdened with huge debts, which will cripple them financially for life. These are the real crises, and the authors' solutions completely ignore them.

The real challenge is to envision and implement alternative pathways to the workplace. The promise of MOOCs lies in their providing one element in the educational mix aligned with these new pathways. The authors propose to push these kids through a college education. But the kids and their families only seek college education because it has been made into a compulsory qualification. The kids and their families, however, are being sold a bill of goods. There will be no college-level jobs waiting at the end of the compulsory college education. And the kids will end up deep in debt.

The alternative I envision gets these young people more rapidly into workplaces - as apprentices, interns, or small entrepreneurs - and provides the educational backup they need to progress in their work paths without taking on debt. In such arrangements, MOOCs will find one of their most important educational roles. 

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.

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.

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.

Can it Be Real -- A Free All-MOOC University Offering Credits and Degrees?

The New Indian Express reports on World Education University (WEU) a non-profit that opened earlier this year and promises to offer free MOOC-based degree programs in many fields. The university was incorporated in March 2012 and according to Curtis Pickering, the founder and CEO of WEU, students will be able to  enroll for both for-credit and non-credit courses, undergraduate and graduate degrees and certificate programs. Schools will include Colleges of Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering and Computer Sciences, Health Sciences, Hospitality, Tourism and Retail Management, Legal Studies and Psychology.

One unique feature of WEU, Pickering states, will be a social justice theme running across all courses and degree programs. Pickering added that "WEU will revolutionize education by changing the financial structure of the industry. Free education will be made available to anyone, at any time, and any place." 

The non-profit firm seeks to raise revenue through ads, and by selling student information to its sponsors. It plans to lease courses from an accredited university, but so far has not released any further information about either its courses or the university behind them. 

Steve Kolowich, reporting in Inside Higher Education, notes that WEU has alarmed both high-tech and traditional educators. Ellen Wagner of  the Cooperative for Educational Technologies - a non-profit that  promotes the effective use of technology in education, says 
“I don't know that I would call it ‘snake oil’ exactly, but it is certainly naïve . . . And opportunistic.”

Meanwhile, WEU will have to jump the accreditation hurdle or it's courses and degrees won't be recognized in the current system.  Only when accredited can they call themselves a "university," according to Alan Contreras, a former watchdog for Oregon’s Office of Degree Authorization. Until then, says Contreras, WEU is merely the sum of its marketing rhetoric. “If they are not issuing degrees or academic credits, they are not a degree mill.” At the same time, “they are not a university, either . . . They are a sack of vapor until they get authorized,” Contreras stated in an email to Kolowich. 

Meanwhile, WEU continues to 'enroll' students - 50,000 have signed on so far - and gather their data, presumably for re-sale. 

There are two questions that must be considered in evaluating WEU's chances for success.
The first is whether they can get accredited? 

Skeptics may declare that WEU is a fraud that will disappear without a trace. I am not so sure. John Sperling faced both skepticism and endless setbacks in his effort to get his degree programs for working professionals established at traditional universities - because the accrediting agencies threatened to withdraw accreditation - and then at the University of Phoenix. But eventually The University of Phoenix gained accreditation and for-profit convenience universities immediately had a profound effect - for better or worse - on higher education. For now I share the skeptics uneasiness, but i wouldn't be too quick to count Pickering out of the accreditation process even before he gets started. 

The deeper question is whether Contreras is correct to think that the current accreditation system is the only game in town.  I think not. With firms seeking highly specific capabilities to meet well-defined short term needs, and able to locate these through online search at low cost, the university degree no longer has a monopoly as job filter. Learners can build digital portfolio resumes, complete with MOOC certificates and videos demonstrating capabilities, and compete against those able to demonstrate only a standard, general level of knowledge through a diploma. Meanwhile, those learners uneasy about the lack of a university degree on their resumes, may be enabled to fill in that 'line' with a 'degree' from an unaccredited university and pass through the personnel department's filter.