Serendipity35

Though it is still early in the history of MOOCs, many variations in that original model have emerged since 2008. I am not foolish enough to predict any specific evolutionary path for MOOCs, but I do see trends developing.

This is the final week of the "Academia and the MOOC" course I have been teaching in the Canvas Network and our focus is on the future of MOOCs.

A  post on the StratEDgy blog talks about how MOOCs are evolving into MOCCs (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses). Just this past week, I heard 2 more additions to the acronym soup: MOOO (second 0 = Offering) and SPOC (Small Private Online Course). 

Why all these variations? Part of it is simply the evolution of a new way of offering learning. Part of it is universities and companies trying to create, license and own some of these online courses which they could use in a smaller, closed environment.

Does this mean the MOOC will become a thing of the past soon? I don't think so, because there is definitely a place for the massive and the open aspects of offering content. But attempts to get a handle on how to assess students and give some type of recognition or credit for working in a MOOC will create variations of the MOOC. Lowering the number of participants is one thing that will need to be done if you want any evaluation by instructors/facilitators to occur rather than the peer-to-peer evaluations and standardized tests.

When I took a class from Peer To Peer University in 2009, I had never heard the term MOOC mentioned. Many of those courses are taught by non-academics. Several platforms encourage people to create courses in areas of their interest and expertise. A course in copyright that I took there was taught by a lawyer who had not taught on or offline before, but it was very well done.

Coursera, Canvas and other providers have much more stringent requirements and vetting for teachers and the online courses than many colleges I have observed. They realize each course is an advertisement for their platform.

InsideHigherEd has reported that StraighterLine is launching “Professor Direct” which would initially offer 15 professor-taught online courses. They say that "In this direct-to-student model, a self-described 'eBay for professors,' the individual professor sets the course price, office hours and class size. Tutors will be available to help students, and some universities will offer credit for these courses." Is that a MOOC?

If a MOOC has a fee/tuition, then it seem to me to be more of a variation on the MOCC. Some people have said that Udemy’s courses are examples of offerings that are not really pure MOOCs.

When universities get into licensing course content and start dealing with unions about what to pay a professor who has 500 or 50,000 students in her class, you know we are no longer in the MOOCland of a few years ago. Antioch University is a school that seems to be headed in this direction already with courses it is doing with Coursera. And add into the mix publishers who already have content and who also have their own learning and content management systems. Pearson College is an example of this variation.

I believe that true MOOCs will continue to exist as online courses that are both open and massive in their enrollments. But we will see more variations being created and In the article "Why Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOC Deals, at Least for Now" the implication is that the hidden costs of free MOOCs is why some faculty members (here, it's at Amherst) are voting NO on MOOCs. 

I think fear(s) is a much greater factor. Fear of change; loss of control; fear that education is moving away from the institution that pays them; fear that the system of credits and degrees that has existed for 500 years will be devalued.

On the other side, you have the Senate Bill 520 in California that calls for establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by third-party providers outside the state's higher-education system.

It seems that state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in MOOCs. This will certainly bring these courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted and is a first wave that will probably impact other state systems such as NY's SUNY/CUNY.

A participant in my course pointed us to a video and slides titled "MOOCs are Great! What's Next?" from Chuck Severance at U Michigan. He taught a MOOC on  “Internet History, Technology, and Security” using the Coursera teaching platform. His talk discusses first some data on the course and then he discusses what it was like teaching in a MOOC. It's an interesting mix that Severance also works for Blackboard as the open source Sakai Chief Strategist. 

What I particularly like are his thoughts on openness and questioning why already 3 people at the 3 big providers are controlling who gets to teach a MOOC. Is "open" falling away from MOOCs already? I find it a bit depressing that Christopher Sessuns' talk on the future of MOOCs' actual section on the future was about "the ways MOOCs are being monetized to cover their costs."   Is that the future - money?

And in a Chronicle commentary, Kevin Carey also focuses on the issue of money:

"The cost of administering an exam to the 100,000th student in a secure testing center, by contrast, isn't zero, so students will end up paying for that. One-on-one access to an expert or teaching assistant also costs money, so students who need those services will pay for them as well.

Meanwhile, the dominant higher-education pricing model, in which different students pay a single price for a huge package of services they may or may not need, will come under increasing stress. Colleges of all kinds will need to re-examine exactly what value they provide to students, what it costs, and what price the market will bear."

On the other non-profit side of this is this view from Ryan Tracey:

"MOOCs get a bad rap. Dismissed as prescriptive, or teacher-centric, or unsocial, or something else, it’s like a badge of honour to espouse why you dislike MOOCs.

Despite their pedagogical flaws, however, MOOCs provide unprecedented access to quality content for millions of learners.

It’s all very well for Apple-owning, organic-buying professionals to cast aspersions, but consider the girl in Pakistan who’s too scared to set foot in a classroom. Consider the teenager in central Australia whose school has only one teacher. Consider the young woman in Indonesia who can’t afford college. Consider the boy in San Francisco whose maths teacher simply doesn't teach very well.

Don’t all these people deserve a better education? And isn't content sourced from some of the world’s best providers a giant leap in that direction?

Sure, the pedagogy may not be perfect, but the alternative is much worse."

The rejection of a MOOC from a Harvard philosophy professor (via EdX) by faculty at San Jose State U recently is one of a few early unified backlashes to MOOCs.

I think its unfortunate that their rejection of the course is not because they felt the materials or the course was not of good quality but because it is a threat to their department.

"Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education," the letter said.

Earlier, at Duke University, a faculty council voted down a push by the provost's office to offer small online courses for credit (from 2U) saying that students "watch recorded lectures and participate in sections via Web cam—enjoying neither the advantages of self-paced learning nor the responsiveness of a professor who teaches to the passions and curiosities of students."

Although maintaining the status quo and fear of lost teaching positions are probably the strongest reasons to reject MOOCs, all three groups were careful not to sound like they were rejecting online teaching and focused on rejecting collaboration with an outside vendor.

I wish I would hear a similar rejection of curriculum design by publishers.