Serendipity35

A member of my Academia and the MOOC group on LinkedIn contacted me last month by email to further the discussion of MOOCs and "reforming higher education." He has been reading my posts for a few years and generally agrees with my thoughts, but he's coming from a very different background, which is what I found most interesting.

Muvaffak Gozaydin wrote that he is Turkish, but lived for a time in the U.S. While here, he did research at Caltech in the early 1960s and received an MSME in 1964 from Stanford, an MSIE in 1965 from Stanford and a MSEE in 1968 from Stanford. He did the latter while working for HP in Palo Alto, CA. That education got him a good life as a manager and CEO in Turkey.

He feels indebted to the U.S. and follows higher education here and abroad. What he observes is not any good will from the providers of online education to the larger educational world.

He was excited back in 2011 when Stanford made an online course into a MOOC and 160.000 signed up. 12.000 or so finished, which some see as disappointing, but I see as amazing. Has your school offered an online course and had 12,000 learners finish it?

His concern now is providing courses and degrees that fit the needs of 18 -22 years olds. He said that "The problem is there. Quality is low, price is high in the USA for Higher Ed."

Georgia Tech offered a $7000 masters degree. MIT offered a supply chain management  masters degree that was 50 % online with a 50 % reduction in tuition. But it has been 4 years since MOOCs peaked in media attention and further development has been very slow.

I had posted several articles on LinkedIn about corporate and MOOC use outside use the United States, including an effort by the French government. But how, he asks, can we convince America's top 200 schools to provide online degrees at lower cost?

Here is one idea he suggests. Students take as many courses as they want online and each online course causes a reduction in tuition of about 10 %. If they take 5 courses, online cost would be reduced 50 %.

That is quite a new idea, and not one most schools would easily sign on to try.

I have long believed with MOOCs it is more of evolution rather than revolution.

As I replied to Muvaffak, while universities here in the U.S. are non-profit, they are very concerned with money/profit. The MOOC was seen early on as a threat to the tuition and degree model that provides a good percentage of operating costs. 

People thought Stanford, MIT, Harvard et al were first involved in MOOC experiments because they more innovative or more open. The top universities were quicker to jump into MOOCs because they have large endowment monies and tuition is less of a factor.? 

It's encouraging that some schools like Georgia Tech are offering a few degrees fully online at lower cost. The rise of the mini-masters may help with this too.  

It is ironic that many schools - including my own NJIT - were once charging more for online courses at one time (tech fees, development costs). That has largely ended, but schools don't see that the numbers (massive or less) in a MOOC (or MOC) offer the opportunity to maintain "profits" even with much lower costs.

Many educators think the MOOC revolution failed and they no longer have to worry about it.

Still, I try to promote and educate others about the MOOC approach - though at this point, I wish we had another name for them. Too much baggage.

 

A recent article titled "What Do Forbes, NYT, And Sotheby’s Have In Common? They Make Online Courses" states that "There are now a number of non-education-focused organizations and individuals offering MOOCs on the major platforms." They use as examples World Bank, PwC, and Fundação Lemann offerings on Coursera, and Microsoft, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and the Inter-American Development Bank courses on edX. Google offers an Android Basics Nanodegree on Udacity. These are massive online courses, but are they MOOCs?

With a few exceptions, many of these courses are more MOC than MOOC. It is accidentally appropriate that the former can be pronounced "mock" as in "not authentic or real, but without the intention to deceive." 

The "O" that is missing is OPEN.

Clearly those corporate offerings are "Courses" and are "Online." The definition of "Massive" varies. Certainly we mean much larger than a face-to-face class (which could have several hundred in a lecture hall) or a traditional online course. I would probably say 1000 to 100,000 students is massive (and there are examples that exceed 100K). 

For me, the "Open" part of the MOOC is the most important part. I guess I am a purist and having taught and taken MOOCs even before the acronym came in common usage, I cling to that original vision. 

I was a learner and facilitator (student and teacher seem inaccurate) in courses offered by Peer to Peer University p2pu.org   which began in 2009 as a community-centered project. It uses a volunteer network and governance model. 

They champion openness which enables participation, replication, and accountability. We strive to use openly-licensed learning materials and always share our methodology and resources openly, so that as many people as possible can take leverage our work.

Openness in a MOOC means four things to me. It is open to everyone - no prerequisites - and access to the resources (videos, notes, documents, images etc.) should be free of cost (but other things, like being able to ask direct questions to the teacher, the correction of the activities, or obtaining a certificate, grade or credit at the end of the course may have an economic cost). Open also often means that it does not make use of a closed learning platform (LMS). The resources might be hosted, as they were in the earliest MOOCs, in different places like websites, blogs, wikis, or multimedia repositories. Open should also mean that the course tries as much as possible to use open content, and it is offered with the intent that it can be reused by others.

These qualities of openness are certainly not true of the vast majority of things offered today as a MOOC . What I will call a MOC is what the most successful companies, such as Coursera or Udacity, are offering.

Profit is not always an ugly word. Let them make a profit if they can. And, yes, they do still offer some course free of cost, but let us not call them "open."

Things have evolved quite a ways from the "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" course created by educators Stephen Downes and George Siemens. When they offered free access to their for-credit course at the University of Manitoba, Canada, it got tagged a the first MOOC. Their course is still there, but a lot has changed.

Google has been getting deeper into education, particularly into higher education. For example, their interest in creating a technically skilled, innovative and diverse workforce has moved them into computer science (CS) education.

That is a logical path for the company and they are interested in developing programs, resources, tools and community partnerships which make CS engaging and accessible for all students.

In STEM generally, women and minorities are historically underrepresented and that's true for computer science at the post-secondary level. In the U.S., women and ethnic minorities each represent just 18% of computer science graduates.professional experience.

You would expect Google to have sophisticated analytics, and analytics in online education software is a key feature in an LMS today as a way to understand how students are doing in greater detail than is possible by trying to do it manually. Course Builder offers several built-in analytics that require little set-up and also options for creating custom analytics using Google Analytics and Google BigQuery. They do note that not everything is free - running either type of custom analytics counts against your App Engine quota and can incur costs.

Course Builder is part of their overall education strategy. Check these links for more information:

Open Line Education https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/  

Course Builder Features https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html

One feature is accessibility https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#accessibility 

Peer Review https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#peer-review

 

Coursera announced a shift in its business model this month that many people view as making their offerings less open and less like courses.

New courses in their Specializations category will require learners to either to pay up front for the first course in the Specialization or prepay for the entire program. In the past, you had the option to take it free with access to all the course materials but no certificate upon completion, or you could opt to pay ($49 at one time) for an identity-verified course certificate provided upon completion.

In the new model, the courses that charge up front (and that is not all of the courses they offer) still allow you to choose not to pay, but then you then are in the “explore” mode and have access to course materials (lectures, discussions, practice quizzes) but you are in a "read-only" mode for graded assignments. 

I don't see this as the end of the MOOC. A viable business model for companies to pay the bills of creating courses and maintaining the infrastructure has been inevitable since 2012 was named the "Year of the Mooc." For many learners, having access to the materials is all they really wanted anyway. As long as that option continues, I think these are still important educational options, even if the the open and course parts of MOOC may have been demoted to lower case o and c.

Udacity has gone farther and earlier down the path to paying for courses and developed a clear business model to work with companies and not function as an alternative university. Working with Google , their "Responsive Web Design Fundamentals" course (see video intro below) is an example of that approach. You can jump into that course and explore, but it is also part of Udacity's "Nanodegrees" which is comparable to Coursera's "specializations."