Much to the chagrin of naysayers, critics, and traditionalists, MOOCs are definitely not dead...they're not perfect...they are no longer mostly or totally free...many lack interactivity...there is much controversy and discussion about them in terms of assessment, cost containment, completion rates, quality, and so on...but they are not dead.
In the middle of this interesting article from yesterday (MOOC Platform' New Model Draws Big Bet From Investors) by Doug Lederman in Inside Higher Education, some of the benefits of MOOCs are mentioned. I do not envision any of these benefits subsiding in the near future. As a result, the article by Lederman announces a huge equity investment of $165 million by SEEK (an Australian investment company) in Coursera and FutureLearn. Wow! According to this article, MOOCs now help universities with
three things. In this blog post, I label them "The 3M Benefits of MOOCs: Marketing, Master's/MasterTrack Cost Reduction, and Modularization and Certification."
- Marketing: Help market master’s degrees to the millions of
students in their database (“mining the
millions of learners who have enrolled in open online courses on their
platforms, they'll be able to drive down the cost of acquiring students
for their university partners' credentialed programs…”).
- Master's/MasterTrack Cost Reduction: Lower the cost of master’s degrees by having the first
few courses via a MOOC ("Coursera's degree programs are priced
significantly lower than their on-ground counterparts (and many other online
programs), although FutureLearn's, so far, are not"). My place, Indiana University IU), has a Top 10 ranked master's in accounting with edX for just $21,000. See a low cost MOOC master's degree listing from Class Central.
- Modularization and Certification: Offer “MasterTrack certificates” and nanodegrees…in
effect, MOOCs help to “slowly
disaggregate their degrees into smaller, less expensive units, a trend
that could prepare their university partners for the "unbundled"
world that some analysts believe is coming.” e.g., my former student, Dr. Eunjung (Grace) Oh (her bio on Coursera), is teaching in the Instructional Design MasterTrack at the University of
Illinois.
MOOCs are here to stay it seems. In writing for Forbes back in October 2018, Josh Moody writes of the transformative nature of such low cost certificate and master's degree options. It is exciting to see the sudden growth of possibilities and options.
As my long-time colleague Tom
Reynolds at National University noted to me a couple of weeks ago, there has been much change related to MOOCs since our "MOOCs and Open Education Around the World" book with Routledge came out in 2015. Back in 2015, people were projecting what to do and hoping that new initiatives by their governments and institutions would make a difference, whereas today they are actually doing it and much impact is happening. Along with Tom Reynolds and I, Mimi Lee and Tom Reeves were co-editors of that initial MOOCs and Open Ed book.
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., Reeves, T. C., &
Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.). (2015). MOOCs and
open education around the world. NY: Routledge. Book homepage (Routledge book homepage). Amazon.
The follow-up with Routledge, "MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South: Challenges, Successes, Opportunities" will come out around November 2019 and likely be dated 2020. We have 68 contributors writing about 47 or so countries in this book, mostly in the developing world. It was wonderful to meet and work with people from so many places including Nepal, Sri Lanka,
Fiji, Brazil, the UAE (includes info on Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc.), The
Philippines, the Bahamas, Turkey, India, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt,
Kenya, Thailand, South Africa, and even North Korea is covered. As that book details, there are much more MOOC changes to come.
Zhang,
K., Bonk, C. J., Reeves, T. C., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.). (in process for 2020). MOOCs and Open Education in
Emerging Economies: Challenges, Successes, Opportunities. NY: Routledge. Same MOOCsbook.com homepage.
Ke Zhang from Wayne State University led the charge this time. I can't wait for it to come out. It was a ton of work. The front matter of the book will be free to read (i.e., the Foreword from Mimi Lee as well as the Preface and Chapter 1 from the editing team--Ke, me, Tom Reeves, and Tom Reynolds. I will post that are the MOOCsbook.com homepage shortly along with the table of contents and book chapter abstracts. Please send me an email if you want to read the front matter sooner.
Labels: Coursera, Future Learn, massive open online course, MasterTrack, MOOCs |
