MOOCs on campus

"PC Tables, Saltire Centre, Glasgow Caled" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by jisc_infonet

Even if the concept of a MOOC is now so blurred and diverse that the acronym has become almost redundant, new twists to the story keep emerging. Instead of challenging the traditional education system as originally proclaimed, the main MOOC platforms are now becoming increasingly mainstream focusing on complementing the traditional system and gaining a foothold in the corporate training market. The news that Coursera are now offering a concept called Coursera for campus seems to represent the closing of the circle as MOOCs become part of the traditional campus set-up.

The idea is that a university can sign up and gain access to Coursera's library of over 3,600 courses and then integrate them into the curriculum. The MOOCs can be used as course modules or complementary material and they can be integrated into the institution's learning management system, allowing teachers to add their own assignments and course material to the MOOC. The institution can then add examination and award credits for the MOOC. The ability to use a MOOC as a kind of multimedia course book and then add on-site seminars, assignments and assessment is very attractive though of course it comes at a price and is far from the notion of MOOCs as examples of open educational resources. A Spotify for MOOCs basically.

The advantages to the institution are several. Courses and teachers from high profile universities can be integrated into the curriculum and then local support and adaptation to local circumstances can be included as added value. I like this idea and have previously posted about examples of this in more open varieties of MOOCs. The Coursera MOOCs can even be offered as lifelong learning options to a wider learner community, also with added local focus or even with support in the local language (I haven't seen examples of this yet but it would certainly be extremely useful). Institutions can also use the Coursera library to offer a wider choice of optional courses to their students. Customers have also access to Coursera's learning analytics tools to track student engagement and completion rates, though on the other hand this also gives Coursera access to your student data, thus increasing the already vast amount of student data they can process.

If this development means that universities and colleges can widen their curriculum and offer course material from high status universities but at the same time offering extra tuition in the local language, discussing how to apply the course topics to local circumstances, then I like the idea. It's a long way from the original concept of a MOOC and much more about a traditional content delivery concept but if there is the flexibility to add local relevance then it will be interesting to see how it develops. The main concern for me is who owns all the data and how will it be used.

Here's a publicity film from Coursera about their campus solution for Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India.