It was five years ago last month that Stanford set up the first MOOC. MOOCs were supposed to change the world: Udacity, Coursera and EdX were going to utterly transform education, putting many universities out of business. Time to see how that’s going.
(Ok, ok: the actual use of the term MOOC was applied to a 2008 University of Manitoba course led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Technically, using Downes’ taxonomy, the 2008 MOOC was a “cMOOC” – the “c” standing for connectivist, if I am not mistaken – while the versions that became popular through Coursera, Udacity and EdX, etc. are “xMOOCs”, the difference being essentially that learning in the former is more participative and collaborative while the latter has more in common with textbooks, only with video. But the Stanford MOOC is what usually gets the attention, so I’m going to date it from there).
In the interests of schadenfreude if nothing else, allow me to take you back to 2012/3 to look at some of the ludicrous things people said about the likely effects of MOOCs.
- “In 50 years there will only be 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education” (Sebastian Thrun, former CEO of Udacity)
- “Higher Education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity” – Clay Shirky.
- “Higher education is just on the edge of a crevisse (sic)…five years from now these enterprises (i.e. universities) are going to be in real trouble” Clayton Christensen
And of course who can forget that breathless cliché-ridden gem of an op-ed from Don Tapscott, about the week that higher education changed forever in January 2013 (i.e. the week he sat in on a couple of seminars on the subject in Davos). Classic.
So, five years on, where are the MOOC pioneers now? Well, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity got out of the disrupting-higher-education business early after coming to the realization that his company “didn’t have a good product”; the company pivoted to providing corporate training. Over at Coursera, the most hyped of the early pioneers, founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller have both left the company (Ng left two years ago for Baidu, Koller left last month for one of Alphabet’s biotech enterprises). Shortly after Koller’s departure, Coursera released this announcement which was widely interpreted as the company throwing in the towel on the higher education market and following Udacity down the corporate training route.
EdX, the platform owned jointly by MIT and Harvard thus seems to be the last MOOC provider standing. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also the one which has (arguably) been most successful in helping students translate MOOC work into actual credits. It has partnered with Arizona State University in its “Global Freshman Academy” and even allows conversion of some credits towards a specific MIT MBA (conditional on actually spending a semester on campus and paying normal fees to finish the program). These “micro-MBAs” seem to catching on, but precisely because they are “micro”, they haven’t made a big impact on EdX’s overall numbers: their user base is still less than half Coursera’s.
So what’s gone wrong? It isn’t a lack of sign-ups. The numbers of people taking MOOCs continues to grow at a healthy clip, with Global enrolments to date now over 35 million. The problem is there’s no revenue model here. Depending on whose numbers you’re using, the number of users paying for some kind of certification (a fee which is usually priced in double digits) is at best around 3%. So, work that out: 35 million users, with a 3% conversion rate, at $50 per user, and you’ve got a grand total of $52.5 million in total revenue. Over five years. Using content existing institutions are giving them essentially for free at a cost of anywhere between $50,000 and $250,000 per course.
This is not sustainable and never was. Whatever valid points MOOC boosters had about the current state of education (and I think they had more than a few), the proposed solution wasn’t one that met the market test. The basic problem is (and always has been) that higher education is fundamentally a prestige market. Distance education is low prestige; distance education which doesn’t give out actual course credit doubly so. You can disguise this by making delivery the domain of top universities, as EdX and to a lesser extent Coursera did – but top institutions don’t want to diminish their prestige by handing out actual credit to the hoi polloi over the internet. So what you get is this unsatisfying compromise which in the end not enough people want to pay for.
Some of us said this five years ago (here, here and here) when MOOC-mania was in full flow and critical faculties were widely suspended. Which just goes to show: higher education is the world’s most conservative industry and the rate of successful innovation is tiny. Your best bet for imagining what higher education looks like in the future is what it looks like today, only more expensive.
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I cannot prevent me from reading your blog. Always inspiring. Thanks. But how comes that higher education is so conservative, while researchers in Educational Sciences are so (too much) creative, and research are abundant and fruitful? Could it be because teacihng is in fact a simple process, when someone wants to give, and someone else wante to recieve?
Correspondence courses are pretty old, and buying or borrowing a textbook even older. I suspect that the companies filming a course’s worth of lectures and selling them grew explosively as soon as DVD drives became common. But we all know that when a startup does it on the internet, something becomes magic!
Outside of academic disciplines and professional qualification, some people make a living posting educational videos on YouTube or similar and selling ads and teeshirts. But travelling lecturers are even older than textbooks.
The problem isn’t that universities are expensive, but that most “innovation” participates in some sort of category error: it confuses “content distribution” for teaching, or “credentials” for education, or “work-force participation” for success.
Hopefully, the example of MOOCs will help us to stop being distracted by bright, shiny things, and get back to trying to provide broad, solid educations.
FutureLearn is going great guns, as an extension of UK Polytechnics and Second-Tier Unis, though the courses offered are becoming more like OpenU courses, and I would say somewhat dumbed-down.
Iversity in Germany is still sending me notices.
And mooc.es is still listing huge amounts of courses in languages such as Inglés, Español, Francés, Portugués, Alemán, Italiano, Turco, Spanish, Holandés, Checo, Hebreo. And there is Class-Central.com
But I agree with you, the Idea of profitable MOOCs while in the air, was not feasible.
Still it gave millions an idea of what to learn next and to dip their toes in lecture halls without the fees.
As the youth segment of Unis lessens, the continuing ed part might grow, partly through Moocs.
Hello,
Thanks for this nice summary of the state of MOOCs. I think the big contribution of MOOCs is providing a platform for experimentation in online learning so that good practices can be honed and refined, and will maybe make it into regular college online courses, although that seems to be a tough hill to climb.
It seems to me that the distinguishing characteristic of a cMOOC is that the participants select and provided the content. I’ve not taken a cMOOC so may be off base. I’ve participated in several xMOOCs that are very participatory, although the basic content has been selected by the instructor, in contrast to the cMOOC. The ModPo MOOC repeated every year on Coursera is the outstanding example, but there are several humanities courses on edX, FutureLearn, and OpenLearning MOOC platforms that are also extremely participatory. These are the exception, but they have been very popular with participants.
The statement that MOOCs are not sustainable is based on the assumption that they are very expensive to build. For a lecturer who intends to “flip” their classroom using cheaply recorded videos, simple quizzes and challenging exercises or assignments, the marginal cost of production is almost zero. Prestigious institutions may avoid this as they wish to use production values to signal exclusivity but many more regular institutions and individuals may consider it worth doing (We are carrying out an EU project along these lines – see moocs4all.eu)