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.

"MOOC+": An ideal plan for MOOCville

After almost a year of reading about MOOCs I am starting to formulate an idea of how MOOCs should develop and become entrenched as institutions in society. I am calling my plan MOOC+. 

Some of the problems that need to be addressed: 

(1) Preparation. 'average' students do not have the best academic orientations or tradeskills to adjust well to online learning. I have been discussing this problem with Laura Joplin (who happens to be Janis's sister) - she has been working on a fix that involves a F2F intervention of perhaps a semester in length. Call this what you want;, "An Introduction to Academic Life, " or Practical Epistemology," or "Academic Tradeskill 101," the idea is to assist learners to figure out what they want out of further education, what they can expect from it, and how it all works.

(2) Cost. Tuitions have risen exponentially and students are paying for all of the wet dreams of administrators and donors for more, and more expensive, facilities, and thus taking on crippling debt. Meanwhile the ACE is certifying the academic quality of many MOOCs. This process needs to be accelerated. We need to identify a core of about 500 free courses or more that can pass muster as free academic course equivalents. 

(3) Accreditation. No mainstream university will offer all MOOC undergrad degrees along with their traditional programs, as this would introduce channel conflict (the cheaper channel will cut into the revenues from the more expensive one). But states, or consortia of states, will no doubt go this route, and seek (and obtain) alternative certifications, just as have University of Phoenix, Western Governors University, and others. 

(4) Mentoring and Tutoring. Students will need personalized assistance with learning, and with forging life plans and adjusting their educational programs to their occupational aims. They will also need personalized tutoring in completing MOOCs, as most MOOCs seem to have units or specific learning points along the way where the learning curve steepens and leaves many behind. The MOOC+ model will charge a small fee (perhaps $200 per course, paid by the learner or through a state subsidy) to cover the administrative and personnel costs associated with mentoring, tutoring, and associated book-keeping. 

(5) Facilities. Boston has partnered with edX to build out 'BostonX' - an institution to support MOOC learning. The city will provide some physical infrastructure - places to use computers, get help, meet and discuss with other MOOC learners. This is like an extension of the contemporary library, with its computers, reference materials, research librarians and meeting rooms. 

(6) Qualifications. Coursera is already operating an employment agency linking MOOC completers to work opportunities. Firms pay Coursera for access to the successful MOOC students. An association of firms in Silicon Valley is already working out arrangements to accept aggregations of MOOCs in lieu of diplomas in hiring and promotion. These efforts need to be somewhat more institutionalized, so that each firm doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. I would like to see the idea of diploma equivalence worked into state law, along with mandates preventing firms from discriminating against MOOC equivalency 'diplomas'. If states build out MOOC+ agencies, they can also facilitate the school to work transitions of MOOC 'graduates' through such legal and institutional means.  

Such programs would not offer everything a college education offers, but would be very affordable, and more than competitive in forging links to workplaces- which is what most students and families want. And with the rapid pace of MOOC innovation, compared to the snail's pace of university innovation, MOOC+ programs could be far more flexible and adaptive than traditional colleges and universities in adjusting learning opportunities to workplace needs. 

So in brief, MOOC+ =  An in-person preparatory program + ACE approved MOOCs + Mentoring and Tutoring + Credit for MOOCs + CityX dedicated meeting and studying spaces + MOOC to Work programs + Recognition of MOOC-based diploma equivalency. 

CAN MOOCS DEMOCRATISE HIGHER EDUCATION?

CAN MOOCS DEMOCRATISE HIGHER EDUCATION? 
Peter Sloep says "No". I find his argument unconvincing. 


Sloep argues that third world higher education will shift from their own native universities to MOOC Learning Centers conveying contents from the West, shaped by corporate, rather than individual or public, interests.

There are two problems with his argument. 

First, there is no evidence provided that universities in developing countries are closing down - the key to Sloep's argument. Instead, many international students are supplementing their native educations with MOOCs, while many others are using them for continuing professional education - and some without access to existing agencies of higher education are using them to educate themselves. So the leading premise of Sloep's case seems false.

Second, Sloep ignores the corporate capture of conventional institutions of higher education. There is a huge literature on the topic Sheila Slaughter introduced a couple of decades ago under the rubric "Academic Capitalism". The idea that universities, even state operated universities, are run in the interests of their individual students, the public interest or the interests of the liberal state, has been entirely debunked with data across many countries. Slaughter and her co-workers have shown that on many dimensions of education, and across all classes of participants in universities, corporate interests now dominate and universities as organizations are mimicking corporate behaviors. The Idea that MOOCs represent a shift from the professional and scholar- run agencies to those of corporations serving their own narrow interests is as a result a non-starter.

Besides, new MOOC platforms such as MOOC.org provide all individuals and groups with the technical means to mount any courses they wish. Aggregation sites like open culture  are making MOOCs on all platforms readily accessible globally. No one platform - indeed, no one MOOC format - will dominate.

MOOCs as an institutional innovation are in the earliest stages of their development, and no one can predict how they will play out - there are simply too many causal forces at work. The democratising force of MOOCs is yet unknown. 

But one possibility is the exact reverse of what Sloep predicts - groups of scholars joining to provide a 'counter-education' to the one shaped in corporate interests - that is, an education shaped by communities of scholars and not by universities operating in the academic capitalist mode. The costs of entry will be low, and certifying agencies like ACE will lose all credibility if they discriminate against these MOOCs in favor of the corporate-dominated ones.

Student Recruitment as MOOC Business Model

The University of London has recently declared its MOOC business model a success. Is it really?

The University has offered 4 MOOCs to an unlimited number of students, and attracted 210,000 people from 160 countries. 

Barney Grainger, acadaemic project manager for University of London International Programmes, says: ". . .  we have received, at this point, 45 expressions of interest in our degree courses from students who have taken one of our MOOCs."

He adds: "The fact that there is a conversion from MOOC learning to seeking full degrees would indicate that our outlay on these MOOCs has, in fact, been justified. Our learning journey has commenced, and the MOOC business model can work," Grainger says.

 Let's see: 45 out of 210,000 = .000214, or 2.1 per 10,000. And we are only talking about leads, not conversions. No magazine subscription or mail order catalog campaign would call that rate of response a success.

But what is a success in MOOCville?

Let's first consider the Georgia Tech model, where the all MOOC masters degree program in computer science costs $7,000. 45 actual students (not 'requests for information) would generate $315,000 in revenues. Not much, but the marginal cost of the next student = $0. So much depends on scale-up.

Suppose instead these prospective students enroll in costly F2F on-campus programs with fixed costs already sunk, thus adding little marginal cost per student. According to one source, the average cost of a masters degree ranges from $28K to $38K. Taking the mean, those 45 students would now generate almost $1.5M.

What about the costs?

The cost of funding a dedicated University MOOC production studio has run upwards of $1M. And schools are now hiring MOOC production managers. The new one at Boston University, Romy Ruukel, came direct from edX after a decade at Harvard's Project Zero, so she didn't come cheap.

But some schools have made do with their own personnel and available production equipment valued at less than $2,500.

And then, there are the dedicated course production costs to consider. Talking head MOOCs aren't going to generate many requests for information about degree opportunities. Production values will have to be high - and that is costly.

Whatever the costs, once invested by an institution its MOOC production can be scaled up. A studio and production team that produces 4 MOOCs could produce 40. Universities carefully selecting their 'flagship' programs and adding a lot of sizzle could improve the rate of response. (A successful consulting practice could be built on the mail-order marketing model to assist universities in managing their MOOC-based marketing campaigns).

We will need a lot more information on rates of response and conversions, and total revenue from conversions, before we can assess student recruitment as a MOOC business model. But as the MOOC space expands and competition heats up, such information will probably be very closely held.