I don’t think there’s any doubt that the current proliferation of MOOCs is meeting an enormous demand for access to informal learning opportunities. Millions of people are signing up for courses which interest them, picking a few bits they wish to consume, and, in a few cases, even completing them – all at the low, low, price (to the user) of zero. Undoubtedly a great development.
But for MOOCs to be sustainable they have to eventually generate some revenue, and things aren’t going so well on that score. Coursera made a fuss last week about the $220,000 they earned last quarter by issuing certificates of completion; but given that they’re on $22 million of VC money, that’s still pretty anemic. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for this stuff. This is why some ed tech types seem to be pinning their hopes on governments changing the rules and, in effect, forcing universities to accept MOOCs and other not-necessarily-accredited courses – as is currently taking place in California and Florida.
There’s an important realization here: quite apart from faculty resistance, there are real regulatory barriers to institutions joining the techno-fetishist higher education revolution. And therefore, the debate about MOOCs is heading quite quickly from being casual banter within universities, to being an outright political fight. But on whose side should students fight?
Conceivably, students in places where colleges have been so ravaged by cuts that they are turning away large numbers, might actually be supportive of MOOCs for credit. But what about in Canada, where that’s not the case? We noted a little while ago that students didn’t seem to be banging down the doors to take MOOCs, but that’s not proof they’d actually oppose it.
We decided to test this proposition by asking our MyCanEd student panel members if they would feel moved to participate in public protests should their province or institution announce a plan requiring students to take half their courses in an online format. To calibrate the response, we also asked them a question we were pretty sure would elicit a strong response; namely, whether they would protest if their province or university announced a plan to raise tuition by $1000 every year, for five years. The results were… intriguing.
How Likely Would you be to Participate in a Protest in the Event of:
The short of it is that forcing students to take courses online is only slightly less unpopular than a $5000 tuition hike. This is something governments need to consider before they get too excited about the cost-saving potential of MOOCs. And it should be cold water in the face of anyone who thinks that there’s a demand among current students for this particular form of “disruption”.
Tweet this post
Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like. If courses you want are offered online, then that’s where you take them. I just took my whole degree online and it was a great experience.
I highly doubt that students would actually take to the streets if they had to take online courses in the same way they would if tuition went up that much. They may object, but actually protesting is another step entirely.
I don’t know if MOOCs are really the way to go, but I was in Psych 100 at U of T in 1990, and there were over 2000 people. It was, at the time, the largest regular academic gathering in Canada. I don’t see how a MOOC could be any less personalized, or somehow less effective because of the numbers.