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5.5.1 Why the fuss about MOOCs?

It can be seen from the previous section that the pros and cons of MOOCs are finely balanced. Given though the obvious questions about the value of MOOCs, and the fact that before MOOCs arrived there had been substantial but quiet progress for over ten years in the use of online learning for undergraduate and graduate programs, you might be wondering why MOOCs have commanded so much media interest, and especially why a large number of government policymakers, economists, and computer scientists have become so ardently supportive of MOOCs, and why there has been such a strong, negative reaction, not only from many university and college instructors, who understandably feel threatened by the implications of MOOCs, but also from many professionals in online learning (see, for instance, Hill, 2012; Bates, 2012; Daniel, 2012; Watters, 2012), who might be expected to be more supportive of MOOCs.

It needs to be recognized that the discourse around MOOCs is not usually based on a cool, rational, evidence-based analysis of the pros and cons of MOOCs, but is more likely to be driven by emotion, self-interest, fear, or ignorance of what education is actually about. Thus, it is important to explore the political, social, and economic factors that have driven MOOC mania.

5.5.2 Massive, free, and Made in America!

This is what I will call the intrinsic reason for MOOC mania. It is not surprising that since the first MOOC from Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng, and Daphne Koller each attracted over 200,000 sign-ups from around the world, since the courses were free, and since it came from professors at one of the most prestigious private universities in the USA, the American media were all over it. It was big news in its own right, however you look at it.

5.5.3 It’s the Ivy Leagues!

Until MOOCs came along, the major Ivy League universities in the USA, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, as well as many of the most prestigious universities in Canada, such as the University of Toronto and McGill, and elsewhere, had largely ignored online learning in any form (the exception was MIT, which made much of its teaching material available for free via the OpenCourseWare project.).

However, by 2011, online learning, in the form of for-credit undergraduate and graduate courses, was making big inroads at many other, very respectable universities, such as Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, and the University of Maryland in the USA, and also in many of the top tier public universities in Canada and elsewhere, to the extent that one in three students in the USA were taking online courses (Allen and Seaman, 2014). Furthermore, at least in Canada, the online courses were often getting good completion rates and matching on-campus courses for quality (Ontario, 2011).

The Ivy League and other highly prestigious universities that had ignored online learning were beginning to look increasingly out of touch by 2011. By launching into MOOCs, these prestigious universities could jump to the head of the queue in terms of technology innovation, while at the same time protecting their selective, highly personal and high-cost campus programs from direct contact with online learning. In other words, MOOCs gave these prestigious universities a safe sandbox in which to explore online learning. At the same time, the involvement of the Ivy League universities in online learning for the first time gave credibility to MOOCs, and, inadvertently, online learning as a whole.

5.5.4 It’s disruptive!

For years before 2011, various economists, philosophers, and industrial gurus had been predicting that education was the next big area for disruptive change due to the march of new technologies (see for instance Lyotard, 1979; Tapscott (undated); Christensen, 2016).

However, although online learning in credit courses had been quietly absorbed into the mainstream of university teaching, without any signs of major disruption, MOOCs were a potentially massive change, evidence at long last for the theory of disruption in the education sector.

5.5.5 It’s Silicon Valley!

It is no coincidence that the first MOOCs were all developed by entrepreneurial computer scientists. Ng and Koller very quickly went on to create Coursera as a private, commercial company, followed shortly by Thrun, who created Udacity. Anant Agarwal, a computer scientist at MIT, went on to head up edX.

The first MOOCs were very typical of Silicon Valley start-ups: a bright idea (massive, open online courses with cloud-based, relatively simple software to handle the numbers), thrown out into the market to see how it might work, supported by more technology and ideas (in this case, learning analytics, automated marking, peer assessment) to deal with any snags or problems. Building a sustainable business model would come later when some of the dust had settled.

As a result, it is not surprising that almost all the early MOOCs completely ignored any pedagogical theory about best practices in teaching online or any prior research on factors associated with success or failure in online learning. It is also not surprising as a result that a very low percentage of participants actually successfully completed MOOCs.

5.5.6 It’s the economy, stupid!

Of all the reasons for MOOC mania, Bill Clinton’s famous election slogan resonates the most. It should be remembered that by 2011, the consequences of the disastrous financial collapse of 2008 were working their way through the economy, and particularly were impacting the finances of state governments in the USA.

The recession meant that states were suddenly desperately short of tax revenues and were unable to meet the financial demands of state higher education systems. For instance, California’s community college system, the nation’s largest, suffered about $809 million in state funding cuts between 2008-2012, resulting in a shortfall of 500,000 places in its campus-based colleges (Rivera, 2012). Free MOOCs were seen as manna from heaven by the state governor, Jerry Brown (see for instance, To, 2014).

One consequence of rapid cuts to government funding was a sharp spike in tuition fees, bringing the real cost of higher education sharply into focus. Tuition fees in the USA have increased by 7 percent per annum over the last 10 years, compared with an inflation rate of 4 percent per annum. Here at last was a possible way to rein in the high cost of higher education. By 2015 though, the economy in the USA had picked up and revenues were flowing back into state coffers, and so the immediate pressure for more radical solutions to the cost of higher education began to ease.

5.5.7 The future of MOOCs

It will be interesting to see if MOOC mania continues as the economy grows.  Class Central provides ongoing monitoring of developments in MOOCs around the world. The overall numbers up to 2019 are impressive but the number of learners added in 2018 was just 20 million, which was less than 23 million for the previous two years (Shah, 2019). So the rate at which new users are coming into the MOOC space is decreasing.

However, MOOCs continue to evolve. For a start, there has been slow growth in complete degrees that can be offered through MOOCs. In 2018 there were 45 degrees on offer. While this is a significant development, though, the numbers are still quite small, given the number of conventional degrees available worldwide. The other main market is corporate training. Business models are also evolving with revenues continuing to increase into 2018, with Coursera alone recording $140 million in revenues. However, although the number of MOOC courses offered continues to increase, the average number of students is decreasing as more choices become available. 

The rate of adoption also varies considerably by country. For instance, in 2017 only 18% of Canadian post-secondary institutions were offering MOOCs, compared with 82% that were offering fully online courses for credit (Donovan et al., 2018). However, the growth of MOOCs in China, India, and Europe continues apace. What is not clear is whether the institutions providing MOOCs are getting any direct financial returns for their investments as distinct from the platform providers.

5.5.8 Don’t panic!

These are all very powerful drivers of MOOC mania, which makes it all the more important to try to be clear and cool-headed about the strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs. The real test is whether MOOCs can help develop the knowledge and skills that learners need in a knowledge-based society. The answer of course is yes and no.

As a low-cost supplement to formal education, they can be quite valuable, but not as a complete replacement. They can at present teach basic conceptual learning, comprehension, and in a narrow range of activities, application of knowledge. They can be useful for building communities of practice, where already well-educated people or people with a deep, shared passion for a topic can learn from one another, another form of continuing education.

However, certainly to date, MOOCs have not been able to demonstrate that they can lead to transformative learning, deep intellectual understanding, evaluation of complex alternatives, and evidence-based decision-making, and without greater emphasis on expert-based learner support and more qualitative forms of assessment, they probably never will, at least without substantial increases in their costs.

At the end of the day, there is a choice for institutions between throwing more resources into MOOCs and hoping that some of their fundamental flaws can be overcome without too dramatic an increase in costs, or investing in other forms of online learning and educational technology that could lead to more cost-effective learning outcomes in terms of the needs of learners in a digital age.

References

Allen, I. and Seaman, J. (2014)  Grade Change: Tracking Online learning in the United States Babson Survey Research Group/Pearson/Sloan

Bates, T. (2012) What’s right and what’s wrong with Coursera-style MOOCs Online Learning and Distance Education Resources, August 5

Christensen, C. (2016) Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns: Expanded Edition New York: McGraw-Hill

Daniel, J. (2012) Making sense of MOOCs: Musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility Journal of Interactive Media, No. 18

Donovan, T. et al. (2018) Tracking Online and Distance Education in Canadian Universities and Colleges: 2018 Halifax NS: Canadian Digital Learning Research Association

Hill, P. (2012) Four Barriers that MOOCs Must Overcome to Build a Sustainable Model e-Literate, July 24

Lyotard, J-J. (1979) La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir: Paris: Minuit

Ontario (2011) Fact Sheet: Summary of Ontario eLearning Surveys of Publicly Assisted PSE Institutions, Toronto: Government of Ontario

Rivera, C. (2012) Survey offers dire picture of California’s two-year colleges Los Angeles Times, 29 August

Tapscott, D. (undated) The transformation of education dontapscott.com

To, K. (2014) UC Regents announce online course expansion, The Guardian, UC San Diego, undated, but probably February 5

Shah, D. (2019) Year of MOOC-based degrees: A Review of MOOC Stats and Trends in 2018 Class Central, 6 January

Watters, A. (2012) Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOCs Inside Higher Education, 18 December

For a more light-hearted look at MOOC mania see:

North Korea Launches Two MOOCs

“What should we do about MOOCs?” – the Board of Governors discusses

NOTE: Both the two blog posts above are satirical: they are fictional!