MOOCs: Making Education Available for All

A growing trend in online education is the development of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.  Many prestigious institutions including MIT, Harvard and Stanford have lead the charge in this area. MIT started offering MOOCs through their MIT OpenCourseWare platform and later developed edX in partnership with Harvard.  Researchers at Stanford created Udacity and the University of Michigan was the first public university to offer courses through the Coursera MOOC platform.  OpenStudy is yet another provider of MOOCs.  The United States government is even jumping on the "open" education bandwagon and sponsored a video competition through the Why Open Education Matters initiative in 2012.  So what exactly is a MOOC?  Here are some basics.

• MOOCs are courses that are open and free to the public to take, although you can pay to enroll in some if you want to earn actual credit and are a registered student at the institution offering the course.
• People who take MOOCs for free generally don't receive actual college credit for the course.
• MOOCs, by nature, have very large enrollment numbers.  MIT ran a MOOC on electricity and circuits that had over 150,000 people enrolled!
• MOOCs rely on self assessment, peer assessment and automatic assessment to evaluate student learning.  Obviously, it isn't reasonable for a single instructor to grade assignments for 100,000 students.  
• MOOCs are intended to give people access to classes, content and institutions that they may not otherwise be able to attend for any number of reasons.

You can read a Quick Guide to the History of MOOCs (Links to an external site.) to learn more about this phenomenon.  You can also watch the short video below to learn about MOOCs.
 

MOOCs don't run quite like a regular online class that might have a more traditional enrollment of 20-30 students.  You simply can't have the same level of interaction between instructor and student when you have thousands of students in a class.  Therefore, instruction in MOOCs is often provided by capturing lectures or demonstrations on video for the students to watch.  Students are usually broken into smaller groups for discussions and these discussions depend largely on the students for facilitation.  You have to be even more of an independent learner in a MOOC then you would in a traditional online class and the feeling of being "self-taught" or learning through social engagement is prevalent in these types of classes.

The MOOC movement has grown largely from the philosophy that course content should be available to everyone and not just those who can afford it.  It wasn't put forth initially as a way to help people earn degrees or gain certification of one kind or another.  But now that the interest in MOOCs is growing, it presents some interesting questions for consideration.  Let's first consider that course at MIT on electricity and circuits that was referenced previously.  Here are some statistics from that class.

1. 155,000 students registered for the course
2. 23,000 students tried the first problem
3. 9,000 students passed the midterm
4. 7,157 students actually passed the course (this represents about 4.6% of those that registered)

One of the complaints against MOOCs is the low completion rate of the courses.  If you look at the example above, you can see that only 4.6% of the students completed and passed the class at MIT.  If we had that kind of completion rate at UM-Dearborn we wouldn't be in business for very long.  However, the 4.6% (or 7,157 students) who passed the course represent roughly 40 years of “normal” enrollment in this particular course.  When you think of it that way, it's rather impressive.  So it might be necessary to use a different set of metrics to assess "success" with regards to course completion in MOOCs.

Another issue that MOOCs raise is the potential role they could play in diploma, degree or certification completion for students.  You might envision a situation where a student takes a few classes at Harvard, a couple at Stanford, three more at Michigan and several others at a handful of other institutions.  If the student successfully completes all of those courses should he or she be allowed to cobble them together and earn a degree even though the classes were free and the student never had to meet any admission requirements in order to enroll?  If the answer is yes, which institution grants the degree?  If the answer is no, why not?

Of course, you can't talk for very long about MOOCs before you get to the issue of the funding model.  No one stays in business for long by giving things away for free.  But by the same token, why would students want to pay for a class that they knew they could take at the same institution for free?  What is the value added when you pay for the course?

It isn't inconceivable that the students we teach, even at the high school or middle school level, could decide to take a MOOC rather than enroll in a course, class or training we are teaching.  This makes it imperative that we think about our role in this space and how MOOCs will impact what we do and how education is provided to future learners.  Some potential future directions of MOOCs are highlighted in this Edudemic blog posting.  There are many other possible scenarios we might envision.  It certainly will change the way we think about education.