The Diversity of MOOCs and the Dangers of Over-Generalization

A lot of academic criticism of MOOCs derives from the fear that small, private online courses (SPOCs) open only to fee paying students, but based on MOOCs offered by “superstar” online professors, will replace local faculty, especially in lower tier institutions. Low-paid contingent faculty and teaching assistants (or worse, software programs and auto-graders) will then handle the heuristic teaching and grading, leaving fee paying students without expert human guidance. This is the "MOOCs will Destroy Higher Education as we Know It" argument. 

Here is prominent MOOC critic Jonathan Rees:

If you carry the hierarchical, every-student-for-themselves assumptions inherent in an xMOOC into the future you will never escape the reasons why so many caring educators oppose MOOCs in the first place. . . The problem with MOOCs isn’t the name. It’s not even the components of the acronym. The problem with MOOCs is that they’re being designed to create low-quality, hierarchical courses that can be championed by unscrupulous administrators to fire caring professors and leave unsuspecting students to fend entirely for themselves.

 Rees appears to be arguing here against SPOCs, not MOOCs. But let’s take up that part of his argument directed nominally against MOOCs. Rees says:

Cosmetic changes will not solve (MOOC quality) problems. Only re-thinking the entire xMOOC experience from the ground up will have even the slightest chance of creating something worthwhile.

The initial bother here is Rees’s false choice between merely “cosmetic” changes vs. “rethinking MOOCs from the ground up”. Rees’s dualism neglects that middle ground of actual or potential positive developments within the existing x-MOOC framework. Rees would almost certainly know about these if he took a break from general critique to explore particular MOOCs.  I’ll turn to this task below.

We can dismiss Rees’ unsupported claim about what MOOC designers intend.  Have x-MOOCs been “designed to create low quality courses”. On the contrary, their designers seek to create high quality courses, as they understand them, with instruction better than they perceive to be today’s norm. Indeed Anant Agarwal has made it the highest priority of edX to use the huge data sets available in computerized courses with tens or hundreds of thousands of students to improve instruction and learning. MOOCs may nonetheless be low quality courses, of course, but that is another question and would have to be addressed on the basis of relevant criteria of value.   

Have MOOCs been “designed to suit the needs of unscrupulous administrators?”  This ids another unsupported claim. Agarwal, Koller, Ng and the other platform executive have had quite different aims – to scale up instruction and make quality higher education globally available. While this may also result in substitution of technology for labor in the university, it hardly follows that that was the intended result, and in any case is not a critique of MOOC instruction itself. It is no critique of a hammer that an imbecile can use it to bash in someone’s head. It might nonetheless be a very good hammer.

Evaluating Particular MOOCs

So let’s consider the tasks of instruction in actual MOOCs. 

Instruction in courses typically involves three inter-acting dimensions: didactic, discursive and heuristic. The didactic dimension conveys knowledge through lectures and textbook readings; the discursive facilitates understanding through discussion and critical feedback; the heuristic shapes skills through drill and practice.  

In a geometry unit, for example, the didactic component may present basic concepts such as line, plane, axiom or proof; the discursive component may provide opportunities for discussion of e.g., proof strategies; the heuristic component may provide multiple opportunities to e.g., determine the area or perimeter of figures, to invent proofs, or to construct bi-sections of line segments.  In a literature unit, the didactic may convey background knowledge on the author, genre or period, the discursive may provide opportunities for guided interpretive and critical discussions of a selected story, and the heuristic may provide opportunities to use strategies of analysis, e.g., to locate the protagonist, the central conflict, and the dénouement.  

Good instruction, whether in a classroom or a MOOC, provides for the development and integration of knowledge, understanding and skill. It aims to engage students into worthwhile activities and practices by melding “I know,” and “I understand,” with “I can do.” When we think in general terms about the evaluation of particular MOOCs, we want to ask how well these instructional dimensions can be handled through computer software. 

Rees and other academic critics have condemned MOOCs as in effect using the best of 21^st century technology to deliver the worst of 19^th century instruction. The lectures, they claim, consist of videotaped talking heads. The discussion boards are useless and riddled with spam and flame wars. The problem sets are repetitive, trivial, and exhausting. In short, MOOCs are poor tools for didactic, discursive, and heuristic dimensions of instruction.

But is this critique justified? I will consider each of the three dimensions of instruction, with specific examples from well-known MOOCs.

(1) Didactic Instruction. While MOOC critics may wish to portray live classroom instruction as akin to Mark Hopkins dialoguing with a few students on a log, the reality is generally quite different: faculty members serving up uninspiring lectures to halls full of disengaged students. If talking heads are the problem, academic critics are in no position to pin the blame on MOOCs.

MOOC presentations, however, are not in general talking heads. On the contrary, MOOC presentations are an entirely new form of pedagogical experience. The large data sets and the rich data trails of computerized instruction have enabled researchers to explore new questions, such as the optimum length for lecture segments, and the most effective way of articulating them with readings and problem sets. Research suggests that 6 minutes is optimal. MOOCs now typically break up brief lecture segments with problem sets and free-response questions. Lecture segments are supplemented with interviews, clips from panels at research conferences, interviews with other scholars, research presentations by graduate students, and on-site videos of knowledge use in ‘real-world’ settings. While a single instructor inevitably gives his course subject matters a personal twist, MOOCs offer unique opportunities for presenting multiple points of view.

JonathanHaber, who constructed a complete college education in the humanities– in asingle year - from MOOCs, and thus knows as much about actual MOOCs as any commentator, states:  

MOOCs are often criticized for just transferring a “sage on stage” pedagogy from the lectern to the computer screen, scaling up the worst aspects of oversized lecture classes. But as my year of MOOCs went on, I saw a new visual language developing, as single talking heads were supplemented (or replaced entirely) with conversations among colleagues (the visual style of one of my favorite courses: HarvardX’s   "The Ancient Greek Hero") interviews with experts, on-location shots, and even on-screen performances. Such creativity helped to make lectures one of the most engaging and, ironically, intimate components of massive online courses, while also raising the bar for all other forms of online learning (most of it far duller than your average MOOC).

At their best, MOOC presentations are as engaging as the best television news magazine programs. And this is not surprising, as the universities providing the best MOOCs are investing in cutting-edge production studios and hiring media professionals. The best MOOC presentations are more like segments of “60 minutes” than talking heads.  We may question whether producing “edutainment” of this sort is the best use of scarce institutional funds, but that is another question entirely, and one that completely undercuts the “talking head” line of attack.

(2) Discussion and Feedback. Let’s acknowledge that the MOOC discussion boards are far from adequate substitutes for live discussion.  Even some of the most supportive MOOC commentators have found them to have little value. The good news is that the discursive segments of many MOOCs have moved well beyond the discussion boards to live conversations in physical or virtual spaces.  

Coursera has sponsored “meet-ups” – where students in their MOOCs can get together for course discussion - in dozens of cities. Coursera has also teamed up with the U. S. State Department to run MOOC camps for college age students in many countries. The city of Boston has teamed up with edX to initiate Boston-x, a project providing Internet computers and meeting places for MOOC learners. Other cities have emulated Boston-x, dedicating space in libraries and other public buildings for MOOC study. These efforts parallel those of the Library 2.0 movement; librarians around the world are now re-thinking optimal uses for their brick and mortar building spaces in the age of web 2.0 technologies and digital books, and one answer is meeting spaces for online learners.  C-MOOCs, and now many x-MOOCs well, make extensive use of video-conferencing – e.g., via Skype - to connect group members. MOOCs offering nothing more than discussion boards are simply behind the MOOC curve.

(3) Heuristic Instruction. Academic critics claim that the “can do” element of MOOCs is restricted to monitoring auto-or- peer graded problem sets.

Many actual MOOCs, however, have moved way beyond such mechanized problem sets, making project-based authentic learning central to the MOOC experience. Here are two examples:

(1) At the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Professor Michael Lenox has offered several iterations of his “Foundations of Business Strategy” MOOC on the Coursera platform. Lenox uses “Coursolve,” a crowdsourcing software program, to connect his course with partner organizations where students work to solve real-life challenges. He says:

 “Entrepreneurs don’t always have the resources to hire external support to address their needs, but we’ve seen firsthand that students are hungry for the chance to apply their knowledge to real-world problems,” Lenox says.  “By collaborating with organizations, students can strengthen their skills development while potentially providing businesses and nonprofits with valuable insights.”

                In the final course project, Lenox invited students to undertake complete a strategic analysis of one of the partner organizations. More than 400 students completed analyses in partnership with 100 different organizations, including established businesses, startups, resource-strapped nonprofits and social enterprises. 78% of those students ended up participating directly with senior managers in the strategic decision-making of their organizations. Reporting on the second iteration of the MOOC, Lenox added, “Hundreds of in-person study groups formed in over 50 countries. Students included young entrepreneurs and mature small business owners; non-profit organizers; a study group of Mongolia students led by a Peace Corps volunteer; a group of  unemployed women in Ohio looking to improve their job prospects; a group of students ijn Bolivia led under a program from the U.S. State Department; and a group of Arab and Israeli students participating through the YaLa Young Leaders program building détente through education.”

(2) Cathy Davidson of Duke University is now offering a Coursera MOOC on 'thehistory and future of higher education'. Davidson has been a national leader in pushing the x-MOOC format in creative directions. Because her MOOC has many thousands of students, the student group can take on projects not possible within a classroom context. In one project, her students are collectively creating a rich, multi-media trans-national timeline of higher education since 1800. Each student is contributing reports on significant historical events in higher education in their geographic locations - countries, states, municipalities. The students are learning historical research methods and skills in reporting historical events. Many higher education institutions previously neglected by historians of education, including those long closed, are in this way being entered for the first time in an accessible historical record. The student group is now collaborating on editing and coordinating the information and producing the final online product. [5]

One does not need to love either of these particular skill development efforts to recognize that they go way beyond auto-graded problem sets.

6. Conclusion

My point in the above remarks has been to show that academic critics of MOOCs have relied on a stick-figure caricature. Real MOOCs, even x-MOOCs, are diverse, and many MOOC leaders have addressed the didactic, discursive and heuristic dimensions of instruction in creative ways. The best MOOCs replace the ‘sage on the stage’ stalking head with presentations employing a “new visual language” of instruction; they build in group experiences, whether physical or virtual, with opportunities for interpersonal student dialogue; they make project-based learning the centerpiece of the educational experience.

Of course, not all MOOCs do this. Some do, some don’t. And that is precisely the point I am making. If we want to assess the pedagogical value of MOOCs, we will have to turn our attention to particular courses to see how they handle instructional tasks. The most important dimensions of instruction, the didactic, discursive and heuristic, provide useful pegs upon which to hang such particular evaluative judgments.  

University Course Credits for MOOC Certificates: One Likely Pathway

How will MOOC-based learning aid learners in entering and performing in the workplace?

We may imagine MOOC-based learning to serve as a qualification in two ways: let's call them the (1) certificate, (2) credit routes.

On the first, MOOC aggregations of certificates themselves are offered as significant job qualifications on a par with, or as an accepted substitute for, college and university degrees. I discussed this option in my last post. On the second, the certificates will be accepted for college and university credit, and thus become (like conventional courses) components of degree pathways where degrees serve as qualifications.

Certificates as Qualifications

The first route  - the use of MOOC certificates as qualifications - has been explored with mixed results..

In December 2012 Coursera announced the opening of its Career Services program, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Participating firms, which have included Yahoo and Twitter, contract with the MOOC provider for an undisclosed fee to get data on students' performance on Coursera's MOOCs. Both students and Coursera's participating University partners can opt out of the program. Udacity had already announced a similar program.

In 2013 the MOOC provider edX experimented with its own job service, attempting to place its top MOOC students in jobs with similar companies - the leading high-tech firms. Of the more than 800 top performers that edX placed before these firms, only three received interviews and not a single one was offered a job. Following this failed experiment, edX withdrew from the career services arena.

As I recently argued in this blog, this step may have been premature and ill-founded:

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.

 New online job placement services appear - almost daily - to link individuals with skills and firms hungry for demonstrated capabilities. How effective MOOC certificates will prove to be as demonstrations of skill remains to be seen.

Certificates as Transfer Credits 

In this post I want to consider whether MOOC certificates are likely to enter into degree pathways - that is, whether colleges and universities are likely, anytime soon, to accept MOOC certificates as transferable credits in their degree pathways.

It will be remembered that by the end of 2012 the American Council on Education, the body responsible for determining the credit-worthiness of college courses, had, as noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, begun to evaluate some MOOCs as credit-worthy. The Chronicle quite rightly proclaimed this as a major step - it signaled that colleges and universities failing to recognize MOOC-based learning could not base their rejection on grounds of academic quality.

But to date, few academic institutions have been willing to grant transfer credit for MOOC certificates. And it is not hard to see why! These organizations have become increasingly dependent on tuition dollars for their daily operations. They are naturally reluctant to accept MOOC-based credits into their degree pathways if in doing so they have to forego tuition revenues. If their degrees require, let us say, 120 credits,  at an average cost per credit of perhaps $700, plus fees, then transferring in a MOOC in lieu of a four-credit course would cost almost $3,000. Accepting up to four such transfer courses would cost up to $12,000 per student. If a significant fraction of their students were able to avoid these tuition costs, the organization would be financially strained if not bankrupted.

However, the combination of rising tuition and rising unemployment/underemployment for recent college grads, has radically decreased the private rate of return on the investment in college. The well-publicized trillion dollar student debt crisis has brought this economic fact to public awareness. Most families consider tuition costs as economic investments intended to increase future earnings. As the rate of return on this investment declines (or goes into minus territory) families are reconsidering the value of college education.

According to a Moody's Investment report on the credit-worthiness of colleges and universities released in November 2013, 40% faced stagnant or declining tuition revenues.

Anemic tuition revenue growth has spread to a larger share of the higher education industry, infecting public universities for the first time in decades. At this pace, tuition-dependent colleges and universities will be challenged to make necessary investments in personnel, programs, and facilities to remain competitive over the longer term," said Karen Kedem, a Moody's senior analyst and author of the report.

Moody's key findings include net tuition revenue declines at a projected 28% of public and 19% of private universities, with net tuition revenue growth below inflation projected for 44% of public and 42% of private universities and total enrollment declines at nearly half of public and private universities.

In addition, federal budget negotiations, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, and performance-based funding may result in further stress on colleges if student aid and loan programs are curtailed to any degree, given that a rising share of students are dependent on these funding sources, says Moody's.     

While many colleges and universities will continue to demand that their matriculated students earn - and pay for - their credits internally, others will now be hungry for any and all tuition dollars they can get. Some, faced with declining enrollments, will welcome students offering MOOC certificates - like other life experiences - for credit. Others will see the transfer of MOOC credits, paradoxically, as a profit opportunity.

Consider the recent decision by Ashford University to accept MOOC certificates for credit!

Ashford University is a for-profit academic organization owned by Bridgepoint Education, with a campus in Clinton Iowa and a large and profitable on-line degree operation. The university recently agreed, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, to accept certain ACE approved MOOCs from Coursera and Udacity, for transfer credit.

Ashford University depends for its tuition revenues largely on students with federally guaranteed student loans.Relatively few of its students complete their degree programs. According to Wikipedia, "as for-profit colleges have come under increasing scrutiny, a U.S. Senate report in 2011 listed Ashford's parent company, Bridgepoint, as having one of the highest withdrawal rates of any publicly traded school in the industry." Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has said of Ashford  "I think this is a scam, an absolute scam."   

Nonetheless, Ashford is on to something! According to its website, "The mission of Ashford University is to provide accessible, affordable, innovative, high-quality learning opportunities and degree programs." Let's first focus on "affordable". Ashford's website states prominently that students can transfer in up to 90 credits. That is a generous transfer policy. On the face of it, the policy implies that Ashford is willing to forego tuition revenues for these 90 credits. But consider that that leaves 30 or more credits in the degree pathway - credits for which Ashford can collect tuition revenues. That is very likely 30 credits worth of tuition that the university would not, without its generous transfer policy, otherwise hope to collect. 

Turning to "accessible," more than 95% of Ashford's students are enrolled in its anywhere/anytime on-line degree programs consisting of high margin, readily scalable on-line courses. Students will be paying tuition for courses  with low marginal costs per student. That generous transfer policy, with its embrace of MOOC certificates for credit, looks like a pretty good deal for the university. 

And it might also be an attractive deal for many students. Ashford is aggressively defending its policy of accepting ACE-approved MOOC certificates for credit as a boon to students, and its defense makes a lot of sense. "Requiring students to assume debt and repeat course content they have already mastered does not serve the individual student, the future employer, or the community," said Dr. Lori Williams, Ashford University provost. "Our job as an educational institution is to maximize learning and facilitate development for each student. In turn, students are more likely to complete their programs, have greater independence from debt, and ultimately get into the workforce more quickly."

Ashford and its students will hardly be the only ones to find this deal appealing. Remember those "total enrollment declines at nearly half of public and private universities." Why will those universities not follow in Ashford's footsteps and offer generous transfer policies, including transfer of MOOCs?

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.  

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.

Combining x-MOOCs and Connectivism

Over at the Harvard Business Review's blog network, a recent article "A New Use for MOOCs - Real World Problem Solving"  by Zafrin Nurmohamed, Nabeel Gillani, and Michael Lenox describes the course Foundations of Business Strategy offered on the Coursera platform from the Darden Biz School at the University of Virginia. The course combines lessons in business strategy with real-world problem solving. 

Using an application called Coursolve, the professors connected course students with small and large business organizations. The final project required students to work with their business partners to solve real world problems. 72 % of the businesses involved students in their currently most pressing and challenging problems.

The take-away from this example is that x-MOOCs, frequently critiqued for relying exclusively on the outdated broadcast model of instruction, can selectively use at least some elements of connectivist learning. The connections are not merely one-to-one connections between students and their business organizations. The MOOC itself, through Coursolve, locates business partners through something like a crowdsourcing app. Meanwhile, in their final reports the students will inevitably make use not merely of course materials but the universe of knowledge and expertise on the web.

One concern with this arrangement is that the businesses are making free use of student labor. However, unlike the predatory internships that have recently been uncovered, the project work in this course is a genuine learning experience in a quasi-academic setting.

MOOC Mania

William Hammond at Public Service Europe offers some reflections on MOOCs that are worth pondering. Here are his main points (in italics) followed by my comments:

1. MOOC platforms have now grown sufficiently in size and influence to have caught the attention of policy makers. 

This trend indicates that we may start to see some regulation or standardization of the use of MOOC certificates. Policy makers and administrative leaders hate uncertainty. They already feel the need to end MOOC mania. We may already be seeing the beginning of the end of wild experimentation and wild speculation about the place of MOOCs in the higher education landscape.

2. MOOCS are regressing to older and arguably outmoded structural designs. The first MOOCs were guided by connectivist and constructivist principles; experienced scholars provided overall structures but much of the course content was then generated by the learners themselves, using sophisticated digital tools and web 2.0 software applications. These so-called "c-MOOCs" were organized learning communities. But the new MOOCs that have gained so much attention have reverted to the broadcast model using materials - lectures, videos, texts - from existing courses to achieve pre-determined learning goals.

Despite the presumed values and habits and networking capabilities of the so-called net generation, these new so-called "x-MOOCs" still look like "real" courses from "real" colleges. The take-away is that the big MOOC platforms like edX and Coursera, despite their professed interest in improving educational methods, may actually be setting back the shift to an open connectivist and constructivist teaching-learning paradigm.

3. Many participants in large platform MOOCs are highly educated people including those possessing advanced degrees. The popularity of MOOCs may reflect the growing demand for low-cost/no-cost cutting edge learning in today's knowledge economies. 

This demographic fact may reflect an important shift from front-loaded higher education for standard professional 'qualification'  to on-going or life-long education for ever-shifting narrowly defined occupational niche identities.

4. Employers may now be starting to pay attention to MOOCs as qualifications. 

Employers may now find that a package of MOOCs in cutting edge areas of knowledge and skill tells them more about whether a job applicant can perform a narrowly defined work task than a diploma.  Diplomas represent a standard level of general professional knowledge but say nothing about specific cutting edge capabilities.

5. Prospects for the long term impact of MOOCs depend on whether universities will accept MOOC certificates for credit and thus reduce the overall cost of earning a degree. 

Here I must respectfully disagree. Regardless of how universities adjust, it is inevitable that organizations will emerge to aggregate MOOCs into packages that can stand as diploma equivalents or have some comparable meaning to employers. ACE, an organization that certifies courses as credit-worthy, has already certified several MOOCs as worthy of college credit, so the main problem will not be MOOC quality. MOOCs will be sustainable to the extent that employers recognize them as qualifications, and they will do so to the extent that using MOOCs as filters lowers their transaction (search, assessment and training) costs. College diplomas served this function in the age of slowly changing professional knowledge workers. MOOCs may play a similar or parallel role in the age of rapidly shifting tasks requiring rapidly up-graded capabilities.

How do you see these trends? Please add your comments below.

Slowing the Train to MOOCville

Over at Inside Higher Education, Ry Rivard reports that many hgher education leaders, and even MOOC founders, are having second thoughts about the spread of MOOCs.

He notes that Dan Greenstein at the Gates Foundation, which has generously funded MOOC development, now "wonders aloud whether MOOCs are a viable thing or just a passing fad." Greenstein adds that Higher Education is now suffering from "innovation exhaustion" and that MOOCs are part of the problem. He worries that we have skipped a step in the development process - providing a solution before defining the problem. He suggests that before going further we need to figure out where higher education is heading, and where we want it to be in 10 or 20 years.

I do not agree with Greenstein. The problem has been building for a couple of decades. (Greenstein must know this). There is a screaming need for low cost and constantly updated opportunities for learning and knowledge acquisition in today's global knowledge economy. Young people all over the world seek this access. Meanwhile, college education has priced itself out of the market, creating a nasty polarity between haves and have nots. And employers continue to use the college diploma as a filter, to lower their transaction costs in acquiring knowledge workers, forcing more and more young people to go deeply into debt to purchase diplomas which may "qualify" them for employment but do not provide the capabilities required for work success. So no-cost flexible up-to-date education with low-cost certificates of mastery - which inevitably will in one way or another be used as job filters - solves this pressing problem well. And that explains the hundreds of thousands of students from every nation on the globe registering for MOOCs.

In the rapidly changing and complex knowledge economy it is impossible to say what "we" want for higher education in 10 or 20 years, or what we should expect higher education arrangements to be. From the middle ages until the civil war, colleges and universities changed little. Despite the increasingly loud calls for practical education in agriculture, engineering and commerce, the colleges refused to sully themselves with such "trivial" matters. But then brand new institutions emerged: engineering colleges like MIT and RPI, graduate research institutions like Johns Hopkins, and the land grant colleges. In the twenty years following Charles Eliott's ascent to the presidency of Harvard in 1869,  American higher education changed beyond recognition. The entrenched insiders, the "we," talked about "innovation exhaustion" and got rolled over. If change had waited for them to figure out what they wanted for higher education ten or twenty years ahead, it would never have taken place. Instead new men for a new time (wasn't that what Creon announced at the beginning of Antigone) took the lead.

MOOC Developments in June 2013 - Globalization + NGO Partnerships

Welcome to Moocville Blog.

I will be offering periodic reports on major developments in the world of MOOCs. Today I want to talk about two such developments in June 2013.

 



 The first is the globalization of the MOOC phenomenon. MOOCS have been associated in the public mind with the large US platforms: edX, Coursera and Edacity in particular. Indeed, many commentators have claimed that MOOCs are an effort by US educational entrepreneurs to dominate the future of higher education globally. Well if that was ever the intent, no such luck!

MOOCs are growing in all regions of the world. Examples include Verduca in Latin America, iversity in (Europe) Germany, Schoo in Japan, WorldWideEd in Canada, and others in Australia and elsewhere.

 The MOOC phenomeonon is now entirely global and spreading. By the end of next year MOOCs will be as familiar to knowledge seekers as universities are today. Many millions of learners will have had some experience with MOOCs, and they will spread the world. The positives and negatives of the MOOC experience will become clear, and the MOOC platforms will respond with better MOOCs.

 The big question is where will higher education move from there. How will other institutions adjust to this change in education?

 One possible answer is found in my second story, the recent partnership of edX with the IMF. Like many NGOs, the IMF is a producer of high quality courseware for their employees and members. IMF courses on International Finance have been enjoyed by central bankers and policy makers in IMF member states.

Now many of these courses will be available free to the general public. In 2013 a few of these courses will be available on the edX platform. By next year, several of them will be available for free to anyone seeking training in International banking. If that floats your boat, these may be just the thing you were looking for.

 The importance of this development should be clear. The boundary between higher education organizations and NGOs is beginning to blur. Of course the IMF doesn't offer an MBA and their courses are not for university credit. Most members of their current audience are chuck full if university diplomas.

 But the IMF, like so many other NGOs, is a storehouse of information products which can be re-purposed as courseware. So when higher education aggregator organizations emerge, as they are certain to, they will without doubt be packaging these NGO courses along with MOOCs from University sponsors to create degree -equivalent qualifications.

 Why would employers pay any attention to these? Well, the diploma is used as a job filter to lower transaction costs. The degree equivalent qualification will serve the same purpose, and maybe better. Tell me, Mr. employer, would you prefer a qualification backed by 30 or 40 MOOC certificates from the world's leading universities, or a diploma from Pugwash State U? Which one will display more initiative, self-direction, and cutting edge knowledge?