To some people in higher education, “MOOC” has become a punch line. The initial hype around so-called massive open online courses was so intense — promising a “tsunami” of change, according to one New York Times columnist, and a shuttering of most traditional colleges, according to one of the trend’s pioneers — that the reality was doomed to fall short.
“In some ways MOOCs have become the love child of a relationship that we regret,” says George Siemens, an academic-technology expert at the University of Texas at Arlington who coined the term while teaching an experimental online course seven years ago. “You don’t even say it without someone rolling their eyes.”
Despite the eye rolls, MOOCs haven’t gone away. A growing number of colleges offer them — more than 400 institutions, including 22 of the top 25 most selective universities, according to Class Central, a blog that tracks MOOCs. Venture-capital firms have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into companies making or supporting the free courses.
So what are the lasting effects of MOOCs, according to those who help spark this revolution?
Perhaps the biggest legacy of free online courses is unintended: increased pressure on colleges to spend more money on teaching. Colleges spend $39,000 to $325,000 for each MOOC they make, according to an analysis last week in eCampus News. And many colleges are building new infrastructure to help produce the courses, hiring instructional designers or putting up studio facilities.
A commitment to creating MOOCs also can have consequences for overall enrollment. Prospective students now sometimes peek at MOOCs as they shop for colleges, and they can see the difference between a good course and a lackluster one. In that way, the courses function like Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature, which lets customers read free samples of books before they buy.
Viewed in a certain light, MOOCs may end up raising the cost of higher education, as colleges enter a new arms race to improve their support systems for teaching.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Many higher-education experts argue that such spending on improving teaching is long overdue, and that today’s digital-native students demand new styles of instruction. “Universities ignored the early wave of innovation in education — at least the larger ones did,” says Mr. Siemens.
He also argues that focusing on cost and efficiency is the wrong way for nonprofit colleges to evaluate their efforts to improve teaching. Teaching, after all, is full of intangibles, and it’s linked to academe’s mission to turn out responsible citizens. “The experiment will have failed if we talk in terms of management, in terms of efficiency, instead of advancing the ability of everyone to learn,” he argues.
In talking with a handful of MOOC pioneers like Mr. Siemens, here are some other key lessons from the first few years of experimentation.
MOOCs Can Serve a New — and Growing — Demographic of Students
Sebastian Thrun is the MOOC pioneer who once predicted that many colleges would soon go out of business. Since then he has recanted, and shifted his company, Udacity, to serve working adults in highly technical fields that change faster than traditional colleges can spin out new programs. “We’re discovering that there are a huge number of willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved,” he says.
He calls what those students need “upskilling,” and Udacity now offers several short online programs, called “nanodegrees,” to offer those skills. He sees the goal of Udacity’s courses as very different from the goals of the courses he used to teach at Stanford University. “We don’t need to make people’s IQ go from 100 to 200,” he says. “We don’t help develop values, we don’t form character. We just give you the tools to form skills.”
Coursera, another company that produces MOOCs, has recently added a series of short “microdegree” programs that seem to emulate that approach — though the company offers liberal-arts courses as well. “Over 50 percent of our learners are people who are working adults and are looking to get a step up in their career,” says Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. “The skills that they need today didn’t even exist 15 years ago.”
Seen in that way, MOOCs are an update of traditional colleges’ extension programs.
MOOCs Are Driving Better Research Into Teaching
Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider that was created by Harvard and MIT, is fond of repeating key catchphrases to promote MOOCs. These days he often calls the technology platform his team is building to offer the free courses “a particle accelerator for learning.”
The metaphor attempts to cast colleges’ investment in MOOCs as an investment in infrastructure rather than simply throwing money into a smattering of teaching experiments. His rhetorical gesture also highlights the size of the effort; he points out that edX has taught more than three and a half million students.
Each of those students is essentially a subject in a grand research experiment because edX is continually analyzing data and seeing which of its teaching methods works better than others. One of the biggest findings so far: Shorter video lectures work far better than longer ones. Mr. Agarwal says they have concluded that the ideal length of each segment is six minutes.
All the attention to MOOCs seems to have brought attention to the need for better teaching methods. In The Chronicle’s Trends Report, published this week, Josipa Roksa, a co-author of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, says that faculty members no longer dismiss concerns about teaching.
MOOCs Can Be Powerful Marketing Tools for Traditional Programs
Ms. Koller, of Coursera, says one of the biggest challenges for colleges is figuring out how to pay for MOOC development. But she has a solution that essentially involves an accounting trick. Rather than pay to produce MOOCs out of a teaching budget, she argues for moving it to marketing.
“If you view this as a marketing cost” and measure success in terms of drawing new students to existing programs, she says, “it actually more than pays for itself.”
She cites a new effort by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to offer a microdegree in business fundamentals. One thrust of the program is to find top students and encourage them to apply: The application fee to the bricks-and-mortar business school will be waived for the program’s best 50 students, and up to five top students will be awarded a scholarship if admitted.
If that argument sounds familiar, you may have heard Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, make it back in 2012. And he meant it as an insult, noting that colleges were mainly in the MOOC game to attract attention and build their brands.
As he said, producing MOOCs “buys some time while the whole thing shakes out. Facebook page? Check. Twitter account? Check. Coursera courses? Check.”
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads a team exploring new story formats. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
