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?

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.