Saturday, October 14, 2017

Searching for the next big thing


Just over the next hill we'll find Eldorado. Just one more reorganisation and we'll reach Nirvana. Waiting for the killer application. The problem with this is that once you get over that hill you find a new hill on the other side but we still cling to the idea that one day we'll get to the perfect solution to our problems. In education the quest is to find the ultimate teaching method and the corporate sector leads the race with a great deal of brave predictions and powerful marketing campaigns.

An article by John Warner in Inside Higher Ed, MOOCs Are "Dead." What's Next? Uh-oh, takes up this theme after Udacity's announcement that they are dropping MOOCs and instead focusing on online corporate training. Udacity and their founder Sebastian Thrun have been responsible for many of the most hyped statements about MOOCs over the past few years and have recently been promoting MOOC packages, nanodegrees, as new paths to employment. This move was soon echoed by other MOOC consortia in the form of micromasters and specializations. The article points out that Udacity's journey from MOOC evangelists to drop-outs has taken a mere five years (feels like at least double that time). Major changes in education simply don't happen as quickly as return on investment requirements demand and reveals that the whole idea was much more about launching a profitable product than finding a viable new form of education. It is all part of the eternal quest for a teaching machine (see Audrey Watters' excellent summary of this phenomenon) based on the belief that teaching and learning are predictable processes that can be effectivised and productified.

Maybe Udacity isn’t strictly a teaching “machine” except the mentality of its designers suggest they view their platform this way. They believed that the platform itself could deliver “education,” rather than recognizing that the education is not a product but a process, one that happens (or not) inside of those being educated. Udacity seems to view learning like a virus. As long as you’re in close enough proximity to an educational product, you will learn.

At the same time there is plenty evidence that MOOCs are far from dead but maybe they have turned a corner and are heading back to the higher education sphere from whence they came. A new European report by EADTU, MOOC strategies of European institutions, shows the diversity of MOOCs in Europe and in particular the fact that European institutions are increasingly developing open courses outside the framework of the main commercial consortia.

The survey shows that the majority of HEIs (66%) are not connected to one of the big MOOC platform providers (e.g., edX, Coursera, FutureLearn, Miriada X, etc.), but offer their MOOCs in their institutional platforms or in available regional/national platforms. That the uptake of MOOCs in Europe is maturing at a much higher level compared to the US, is also an achievement of the regional, partially language-bound platforms.

Maybe as the corporate sector becomes impatient of the low return on investment from MOOCs, the universities will begin to develop open education on their own terms in regional and national constellations. The MOOC is not a miracle cure for anything but is one of many forms of online education under development. The form came from within higher education, was briefly exploited by big business and seems now to be returning to the universities where there is (hopefully) more of a focus on learning than making a profit.

The corporate spotlight is now moving over to new potential "wonder cures" such as personalised learning and learning analytics. I don't mean that these innovations are not worthwhile; they all contribute to development, sometimes in unexpected ways. However, there are too many intangible factors involved in learning that cannot be encapsulated in any one technical solution. You learn because someone inspires you, because you have the internal motivation, because you have the right support from teachers and peers, because you have access to education, because ... Courses, tools, platforms, resources, games, simulations can all contribute but the intangibles of learning are so important that none of these factors can guarantee success. There is no magic solution to learning. It's very personal.

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