Serendipity35

“We’re discovering that there are a huge number of willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved” by higher education. We’re getting to the point where we’ll be profitable as a company.”  - Sebastian Thrun. Udacity 

Are those words frightening to higher education? The quote comes from an article with a frightening title: "Meet the New, Self-Appointed MOOC Accreditors: Google and Instagram."

One issue that has been wrapped around the MOOC since they were the big story in 2012, and more so since they they became seen as an alternate route for educating employees, is whether employers will take them seriously as credentials.

Though academia has shown some interest in this, partially out of fear of lost tuition, the big MOOC producers and providers have been more interested.

Now, some of them say that they have found a way to "jump-start employer buy-in" by getting major companies to help design the course and the sequence of course that would lead to a specialization or certificate.

Coursera is an example of a MOOC platforms that has now teamed up with more than half a dozen companies to create "capstone" projects for its courses. The companies include Google, Instagram and Shazam. they are not only big tech player, but ones that carry cachet with students.

Colleges are not totally out of the game. Coursera has 19 colleges that work with them on a kind of "microdegrees." (Coursera calls them "Course Specializations.")  In these, students first take a designed series of short MOOCs, but finish with a hands-on capstone project. It's a model that colleges are used to offering in their own regular degrees.

Coursera has been running a pilot of this since summer 2014. It is a Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University that also involved the company SwiftKey that builds keyboard apps for smartphones.

Then there is profit. This particular approach provides revenue to support the free courses. For students to get the certificate proving they passed the courses and the capstone, they pay around $500 in fees.

Rather than a university seal-of-approval, these MOOC/certificate programs have approval from these companies which may be more appealing to the job-seeking graduate or the employee looking to upgrade skills for job advancement.

We are talking education and profit here. Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, clearly knows and talks about that. She said that these partnerships “really drive home the value proposition that these courses are giving you a skill that is valuable in the workplace.”

Colleges may not appreciate that she also feels that Coursera is helping in “bridging the gap” between higher education and industry. But other MOOC providers would probably agree.

Udacity has already gotten a lot of attention for its project with the Georgia Institute of Technology that has backing and input from AT&T for a $7,000 master’s degree in computer science. Udacity calls their approach "nanodegrees" and has ties to Google and other companies.

The MOOC provider edX (started by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has also had Google support some course development.

And, looking ahead, I still believe that we will hear about Google offering its own free Learning Management System in the near future and that will be a huge disruptor in an arena that is a very profitable enterprise platform for schools and companies.