Who are MOOCs really for?

CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by catspyjamasnz

I've written before about the irrelevance of looking deeply into completion rates of MOOCs. Due to the fact that MOOCs are free and (relatively) open they should not be compared to regular university courses. The typical completion rates of around 10% obviously alarm those who view MOOCs as alternatives to for-credit courses. However, given the fact that such a completion rate for a course with 50,000 students would still give more successful students than several years of campus courses, they maybe don't do so badly after all. What so many articles seem to miss is the fact that the target group for MOOCs is not traditional university students at all. I would like to see some studies on the demography of MOOCs to see who's really using them and I suspect that the traditional student group of 19-25 year olds is not as well represented as you might expect. MOOCs do not really compete with higher education, they make higher education material accessible to people who would never otherwise have access to it.

This is the theme of an excellent article by Oscar Becerra, The One Laptop Per Child Correlation With Massive Open Online Courses. He starts by stating that "MOOC Target Audience are Currently “Non-consumers” of Education", meaning that MOOCs should be seen as an exciting extension of higher education allowing millions of people to explore new fields that were previously closed off to them. Whether these people complete their courses or not is not really very interesting, it's what they feel they have learnt from the experience.

"What we need to bear in mind is that the MOOCs are trying to make better quality education available to a great mass of people who are currently “non-consumers” of education and such quality is currently superior by far to whatever they may be getting right now. The MOOCs are not aimed to people who are willing to cheat but to those willing to learn ...
... we may say the MOOCs and online education offerings available today are “good enough educational offerings” helping ordinary people who are willing to learn to reach goals that had been out of their possibilities so far."

MOOCs are not regular university courses and we shouldn't compare the two. You do not get the same levels of tuition and guidance and you need to be highly self-sufficient and digitally literate to be able to benefit from them. But you can learn a lot from them if you apply yourself and that in itself is a justification. At the moment I suspect the majority of MOOC students are graduates and professionals who are trying out the new arena out of curiosity. People like myself basically. We are often only interested in looking at methods and content and seldom stay for the whole course (I'm guilty as charged here). This group is highly self-sufficient and many are educators themselves with little interest in credits even if they were available. I'd be interested in seeing how the demographics change as the hype dies down. I suspect that the curious academic category will fall off and the group of new learners, people outside higher education, will increase. They are the real target group of MOOCs but they are not in focus at present due to the vast numbers of "curious academics" so maybe we should reserve our judgement on the MOOC phenomenon till the dust settles.

Great expectations

  by Beaulawrence

I'm following Open University's MOOC, #H817open, and one recommended article gave us a chance to get a flavour of how the whole OER movement began. An article from 2001 by Stephen Downes, Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide (IRRODL Vol 2 no 1, July 2001) explained the logic behind sharing educational resources (in those days referred to as learning objects) and gave a clear financial incentive for schools and universities to start sharing. Why should hundreds/thousands of teachers all over the world spend valuable (and expensive) hours producing very similar resources when one excellent resource could be produced and then shared?

"The economics are relentless. It makes no financial sense to spend millions of dollars producing multiple versions of similar learning objects when single versions of the same objects could be shared at a much lower cost per institution. There will be sharing, because no institution producing its own materials on its own could compete with institutions sharing learning materials."

The financial incentives for sharing instead of producing expensive digital resources seem so clear in this article. So here we are twelve years later and sharing of open resources has still not become mainstream practice despite Downes' convincing financial incentives. Masses of resources have been created and are easily accessible but still most teachers prefer to create their own resources or use the prescribed textbooks from major publishers. Given the potential financial incentive to share resources why has OER not become more widespread?

• There is no real culture of sharing in education. Many teachers still feel obliged to design, manage and have full control of their courses. Many colleges base teachers' salaries on lecture hours thus perpetuating that particular form of teaching. Using other people's resources is not fully accepted and content is still closely guarded rather than shared. The key to establishing a culture of sharing is clear leadership and support to teachers.
• Too many shades of openness. There's a nice short presentation by Derek Keats called How most Open Educational Resources fail to meet the UNESCO definition of OER that demonstrates how the majority of "open" resources are actually restricted. Material from the major universities, including iTunes U and most MOOC material, is of course available and accessible but most of it is still copyright and cannot be reused or adapted. Even some Creative Commons material is restricted by the No derivatives and Non-commercial conditions. Truly open resources must be free to reuse and adapt.
• Lack of trust. Resources from credible institutions like major universities tend to be restricted whereas the truly open resources do not have a stamp of trustworthiness, often produced by individuals rather than institutions. Quality assurance needs to be developed to give credibility to OER.
• Convenience. Standard textbooks and prescribed literature are designed to fit into national curricula and are linked to learning outcomes. The same goes for online material supplied by major publishers. Putting all this together finding appropriate resources from the vast pool of OER is simply more work than many teachers can afford to take on, especially given teachers' overload of administrative duties.
• Lack of incentives. Teachers who produce good resources can win praise from other teachers in the OER community but it doesn't increase academic reputation. Careers are dependent on getting articles published in academic journals and running courses with high pass rates and good evaluations. Creating OER does not lead to any career rewards.

For more on this theme read an article by Gerd Kortemeyer in Educause Review: Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care.

Is it a course? Is it a textbook? No, it's a MOOC!

  by Flicktone

It's hard enough trying to evaluate regular education because learning is not easily measured; if indeed we can even hope to do so. We can of course test to see what people have remembered or whether they can explain concepts in a clear and logical manner but how do we know what they have actually learnt? So if evaluating traditional education is tough how hard is it to evaluate a MOOC? A bit like nailing jelly to the wall as a colleague once said, though I can't remember when.

MOOC providers may believe that they are offering a university course and duly organise it as such but do the participants share that belief? If you sign up for a regular university course you make a commitment, invest money and time and expect a reward for your efforts. You buy into the course concept, accept the university's terms and step into line. Everyone understands what they're involved in and accepts the rules. When you sign up for a MOOC, however, you don't buy into the concept in the same way. You join the course for your own reasons, have your own objectives and preferences and are often uninterested in the certification that may or may not be available at the end. Many have no intention of completing the "course" at all, they're simply curious to see what the fuss is all about. When there is no consensus as to what the MOOC is, an evaluation becomes extremely difficult.

Stephen Downes' post, Evaluating a MOOC, claims that we can't evaluate MOOCs with the same criteria as traditional courses since they aren't actually courses. They are many things to many people.

"I think the best way to understand success in a MOOC is by analogy with, say a book, or a game, or a trip to the city.
The person taking the MOOC is like a person reading a book, playing a game, or taking a trip to the city. It is impossible to talk about 'the objective' of such an activity - some people want to learn something (and others something else), others are doing it for leisure (and others as part of their job), others to make friends (and others to get away from their friends for a while), etc."

A successful MOOC creates enough momentum to continue after the "course" is complete. Since the motivations of each participant are so different it is more relevant to evaluate the MOOC as an entity and look at what the community has achieved and how vibrant and self-sufficient that community has become. MOOCs will develop into new forms and new terminology will emerge to differentiate between them. Some will be traditional courses with a syllabus and learning outcomes and will expect students to accept the rules of engagement whereas others will be more fluid and become learning communities with learners coming and going, some staying for months and others simply dropping in for inspiration.

"MOOC success, in other words, is not individual success. We each have our own motivations for participating in a MOOC, and our own rewards, which may be more or less satisfied. But MOOC success emerges as a consequence of individual experiences. It is not a combination or a sum of those experiences - taking a poll won't tell us about them - but rather a result of how those experiences combined or meshed together."

The important point is that evaluation is only possible when we know what it is we are evaluating and that all participants are aware of what they are engaged in. Confused? I still am but I'm trying to work it all out.

OER - from resources to mainstream practice

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

There is a vast range of open educational resources to choose from if you know where to look and how to search. For most teachers however the main barrier to using OER is the difficulty in finding the right material and assessing its quality and appropriacy. Institutions are reluctant to fully embrace OER since there are few established policies and quality guidelines and inventing these from scratch is simply too time-consuming. The move from a structured world of published textbooks based on a national or regional curriculum to an unstructured ocean of free resources of uncertain quality and with little or no pre-packaging is simply too daunting for most academic leaders to face.

For OER to really make an impact on mainstream education the resources need to be packaged together in related groups of resources or forming a learning path towards a particular learning outcome. This linkage and packaging could be achieved by classifying and tagging resources so that teachers can search for a package of related resources around a common specific theme.

Something along these lines is what newly founded Lumen Learning is offering schools and universities. Founded by open learning pioneer David Wiley of Brigham Young University and education technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning offer to help replace expensive textbooks with open content that is specifically tailored to the learning outcomes of the school's curriculum. The new company's services are described as:

• Finding quality content and mapping it to course learning outcomes. 
• Incorporating OER into academic strategy and curriculum decisions. 
• Training and supporting faculty. 
• Improving student outcomes. 

The challenge they face is proving that OER can be trustworthy and of high quality, that they can actually replace traditional textbooks and also save the institution and its students a significant amount of money. Institutions are highly unlikely to be able to carry out the above tasks on their own and the niche for Lumen and similar companies would seem clear. If this process works out cheaper than today's textbook-based regime then all the better.

Lumen will earn money from offering these services but they promise to publish the results of their work openly and thus benefit the whole open education community. If this is the opening for OER to gain mainstream acceptance then it will be a welcome development.

Read more about Lumen in an article in Inside Higher Ed: Company Sees Opening for OER

Another MOOC model

Most MOOCs are being developed and run on universities' regular budgets with a very uncertain return on investment. But what if someone offers you funding to develop an open course? Suddenly the risk factor is reduced and maybe more reluctant universities can be helped into the open arena as well as possibly stimulating higher quality. That's the reasoning behind the latest installment in the MOOC saga.

This week the open learning platform iversity and the German Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft have launched the MOOC Production Fellowship. This initiative offers ten fellowships of €25,000 to institutions or teachers who wish to develop innovative new MOOCs. It's a competition to find the ten most innovative and sustainable MOOCs and the reward should inspire many universities to develop something really worthwhile. The aim is to have at least five new MOOCs online during the autumn of 2013 with the rest following in spring 2014. The MOOCs can be offered in any language but the applications must be either in English or German. The lucky winners will be able to offer their courses on the iversity platform but the university retains the rights to the material and the option to commercialize the course if they feel so inclined after it has been offered as a free MOOC in 2013-2014.

The applicants will present their ideas for public scrutiny and the fellowships will be awarded through a combination of crowdsourcing and the views of an expert panel. Full details of how to apply and some general guidelines of what the MOOCs should include are available in the details page. There's also a publicity video included below. Unfortunately it makes the common mistake of attributing the discover of MOOCs to the Stanford AI course of autumn 2011 rather than the original concept started by Siemens, Downes and Cormier back in 2008.

If the injection of some start capital that places clear demands on quality and pedagogic innovation then this sort of initiative may well stimulate more creative variations on the MOOC theme. It will hopefully also appeal to European universities who are interested in the concept but need a push to get started.

Your first degree course is a MOOC

The quest for a sustainable business model for xMOOCs (those open courses offered by major universities) continues with a variety of possible solutions such as offering examination (and a chance to earn credits) or extra tuition for a fee as well as selling student contacts to headhunting companies. However the latest model to emerge would seem to be highly attractive to mainstream universities.

MOOC2degree is a new initiative that offers the first course of a degree program as a MOOC in the hope of recruiting students on to the full program. A consortium of seven US universities under the coordination of Academic Partnerships are already on board and intend to use MOOCs as a shop window for their regular programs. The MOOCs will be free, open to all and will actually give you credits if you sign up for the full degree program. Whether students who do not register to continue will be able to keep their credits is not clear to me but the business case here is perfectly clear and justified if it can help the university recruit more students.

"With MOOC2Degree, Academic Partnerships has collaborated with public universities to offer credit-bearing MOOCs as a first step and a free start toward earning a degree. Through this new initiative, the initial course in select online degree programs will be converted into a MOOC. Each MOOC will be the same course with the same academic content, taught by the same instructors, as currently offered degree programs at participating universities. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by participating universities."

Have a look at the introduction video from MOOC2degree.



This is very mainstream and is simply a way of recruiting to regular university degree programs and that's exactly why I think it will appeal to many universities. It's not really new either because universities like the UK's Open University have offered their courses openly through OpenLearn for several years and many students have been inspired by those free courses to sign up for the fee-paying versions. Many students on MOOC2degree will also decide to sign up for the full degree but at the same time those who simply wanted to learn without needing the credits can also benefit from the experience. It's not very disruptive (oops that word again!) and but it doesn't pretend to be. However by embracing the principle of massive online courses the participating universities will be forced to thoroughly revise their online strategy and look carefully at the pedagogy of online courses to make sure that the MOOC experience is dynamic and stimulating enough to make students willing to pay for more.

Read more in an article in eCampus News (March 2013), A new business model for MOOCs

Beyond the hype

  by elizaIO

MOOCs are at the top of the hype cycle at the moment and the rhetoric is often rather exaggerated to say the least. Almost every day there are eye-catching headlines about how this is going to revolutionize/disrupt/replace higher education and how this trend is a major game-changer or paradigm shift. I admit those phrases have passed my lips as well but maybe it's time to tone down the hype and start look at the more practical implications.

Martin Weller gives us an excellent reminder to avoid unnecessary exaggeration in the education debate in a short post called Disrupting Disruption.

"Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides practical."

Another danger in the hype is that instead of inspiring traditionalists to take notice of new approaches to education, the exaggerations make them even more convinced that MOOCs or whatever else is being hyped are simply a passing fad and should not be taken very seriously. Let's calm the rhetoric and see MOOCs or whatever they will be called in the future as interesting experiments to widen the scope of education. They may add new dimensions to the existing forms of education rather than replacing or disrupting. Let's see it as part of a development rather than a revolution.

Organizing freedom

  by kevin dooley

One of my favourite songs by Björk has a great line: "I thought I could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of me." Although massive open online courses are not very Scandinavian the folly of trying to organize freedom comes to mind when considering the criticism that MOOCs are facing from many quarters.

If MOOCs are really going to change education they have to break away from traditional course structure and find a new model.  The original MOOC concept (cMOOC) developed by Siemens, Downes, Cormier and others is based on students forming networks, creating content, collaborating, discussing and basically taking charge of their own learning. The course leaders provide a basic framework and a common meeting place but otherwise students work things out themselves. The model is learner centred and there is no clear linear progression through pre-planned course modules as you would find on a traditional campus course or on a traditional e-learning course.

However the MOOC model made famous by Coursera and edX, often named as xMOOC, is rather traditional and resembles a regular campus or online course with a clear syllabus and organised group work. The traditional universities running these courses don't seem to fully realize that you simply can't organize 50,000 students the way you can organize 50. Teachers are trying to run a regular course and even trying to organize students into study groups using tools that simply aren't scaleable to that level. That's what happened to the Coursera course, Fundamentals of Online Education, that was suspended recently when it got too chaotic. A case of trying to organize freedom.

This is well expressed in an article by Debbie Morrison called How Does Collaborative Learning Work in Closed Online Courses vs. MOOCs?. She describes the differences between cMOOCs, xMOOCs and COLCs (closed, online, for-credit learning, course). COLCs are the regular online for-credit courses that universities all over the world have been offering for over 15 years. Organized group work is an essential element to these courses and group assignments are designed and monitored by the teacher. Teacher guidance is a key element since students are often unused to collaborating online. The mistake made by some xMOOC designers is to try to offer the same level of guidance and control. The sheer numbers of students makes this task impossible and we need to realize that MOOCs must be allowed to be rather chaotic and where outcomes are on an individual level rather than expecting everyone to follow the same path all the way.

"What we do know is that instructors involved with massive courses, with thousands of students can’t control the outcomes of course, can’t direct the learning in a given direction, and can’t use an instructional strategy and methods that work for traditional courses. But the concept of the Web as a classroom that can bring learning to thousands that want to learn about a given topic is There is great potential in reaching students all over the world, and many of these MOOCs have already changed and improved lives of thousands."

Massive online courses need a new model and need to be clearly differentiated from traditional university courses. They are not competing but providing new paths to learning. Exactly which methods work and which do not is still being worked out.