Last week marked five years since Stanford University introduced to the world the classes that would soon spark a frenzy over massive open online courses.
On August 16, 2011, Stanford unveiled three courses, taught by Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng, and Jennifer Widom, all computer scientists at the university. Their MOOCs borrowed key designs from Daphne Koller, another Stanford professor who led much of that institution’s early efforts in blended learning. By the following spring, Mr. Thrun had founded Udacity, Mr. Ng and Ms. Koller had founded Coursera, and MIT and Harvard University had founded edX, seeking to use MOOCs to transform higher education.
The age of the commercially oriented MOOCs, as driven by their most prominent supporters, had begun.
Fast forward to the present, and we have now witnessed the end of an era. While Mr. Ng, Ms. Koller, and Mr. Thrun remain on the boards of their respective companies, the biggest advocates of commercial MOOCs have moved on.
Mr. Ng left Coursera in 2014 for Baidu, focusing on deep learning research. Mr. Thrun stepped down as chief executive of Udacity in April of this year to reduce his day-to-day responsibilities. He is now president of Kitty Hawk, a company focused on the development of flying cars. And Ms. Koller recently left Coursera to become chief computing officer at Calico, a company that researches human aging.
These days, no one considers MOOCs to be the future of education or a threat to the modern university, as had been so frequently claimed when the courses were first attracting international media attention. Udacity has shifted its focus to job-skills training, and Coursera and edX are still searching for ways to bring in long-lasting revenue.
So will these changes in corporate vision and leadership change the long-term trajectory of MOOCs?
I would argue that there never was a viable vision for MOOCs in higher education in the first place. The big three MOOC providers’ trial-and-error efforts to find a viable business model are what led to their shifts in strategy and ultimately the departure of their founders for fields outside of education. It may be that making meaningful changes in higher ed is more difficult or at least more frustrating than designing flying cars or tackling the complexities of aging.
It would also be easy to argue that MOOCs themselves suffered from a lack of innovation, or to view them as classes thrown online with little more than a relaxation of enrollment constraints. The big MOOCs mostly employed smooth-functioning but basic video recording of lectures, multiple-choice quizzes, and unruly discussion forums. They were big, but they did not break new ground in pedagogy.
For all their flaws, MOOCs should not be dismissed completely for failing to deliver on the early hype. The nature of the MOOC movement established that online education is a legitimate option at even the most elite universities.
Online education for degree-granting universities has been around for more than two decades, in various forms, and MOOCs are but one version. Nevertheless, when the founding institutions — Stanford, MIT, and Harvard — justified their investment in MOOCs, they publicly called attention to the transformative potential of broader online education, including its ability to improve face-to-face courses using technology. This is likely to be the lasting impact of MOOCs.
Higher education is a tight, networked community with an established pecking order. How can a university brush off the importance of online education when three of their most revered peer institutions assert not only that it is good enough for them, but also that it will improve their traditional courses? Despite some grumbling and often-painful conversations, the result has been that institutions are now much more likely to have a strategic plan that includes the question of online education’s role.
Now that the initial hype has faded, we may even see a greater opportunity for institutions to experiment with the MOOC form and to go beyond the just-the-basics approach of Coursera, Udacity, and edX. With less pressure to capture eye-popping enrollment numbers and to meet unrealistic goals, faculty members might enjoy greater flexibility to adopt practices that could actually increase student engagement. One can hope.
In California, for example, there are already some lasting signs of how MOOCs fueled the development of online-education programs, even though the courses themselves did not survive. Early in 2013, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that sought to finance the introduction of MOOCs and other third-party courses into the state’s public higher-education system. By late 2013, however, the bill had stalled. In its place, funding emerged for each of the state’s three public-college systems to develop their own plans for advancing online education, in broad, non-MOOC terms.
All three systems are now rolling out their plans. They include an effort by the California Community Colleges that focuses on quality course design, peer review, professional development for faculty members, and a common course-management system. (Disclosure: I have advised the group that is leading this effort.) Innovation and design are now happening organically, driven by the colleges and their faculties, with small courses as the basis.
None of those efforts would have succeeded if they had been based on MOOCs. At the same time, none of those developments would have happened if MOOCs had not sparked the demand for change and opened the doors to more financing.
Phil Hill is a partner at MindWires Consulting, co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, and co-producer of e-Literate TV.
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