In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford, began teaching a class.  Part of it was in person.  Part of it was online.  The online portion had over 160,000 students.  Some of them did better than the students who took the class in person.  Out of this single data point, a legend was born.

What grew up in the twelve or so months after this even was a sight to behold.  Thrun left Stanford to create a company called Udacity, which designed and delivered its own MOOCs (a term invented by a Canadian, Dave Cormier, to describe an earlier and quite dissimilar open online course developed by two other Canadians, George Siemens and Stephen Downes, run at Extended Education at University of Manitoba).  Two other Stanford computer scientists, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, created a company called Coursera, a company that did not develop its own MOOCs, but acted as a platform for others to do so.  And then Harvard and MIT got into the game and created their own brand, which came to be known as EdX.

It is hard now, at this distance, to remember exactly how wild everyone went over MOOCs and how they were going to “disrupt”, revolutionize, or kill existing models of higher education.  Thrun claimed that by 2060 there would only be 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udactiy might be one of them.  Clay Shirky, a somewhat wild-eyed internet evangelist of the 90s and 00s, claimed that “Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education start up” (Shirky rode that ludicrous prediction to his current position as New York university’s Vice-Provost of Educational Technologies).  Canada’s own Don Tapscott breathlessly claimed that the third week of January in 2013 was the week university “as we know it” ended.  (Why that week?  Basically, because that was the week he sat in on a seminar about MOOCs at Davos.  The solipsism fairly oozes.) And finally, the late business guru Clayton Christensen made a variety of predictions about the widespread demise in different venues about the fate of universities, the best documented one being that in the bottom quarter or so of every “tier” of higher education, institutions would fold or merge by 2023 (one gets the impression that “tier” means something like Carnegie classification or US News & World Report Ranking Categories, but it’s not entirely clear).

Obviously, none of that happened.

Still, an amazing number of Very Serious People took this Very Seriously.  For those inclined to understand the nature of higher education, not utterly beholden to the tech-bro worldview of “if a future is technically possible then it must occur, regardless of consumer/societal preferences”, it was always a ridiculous idea.  Regardless of whether courses carry actual credit from an institution, and whether such courses are practically transferable from one degree-granting institution to another (significant regulatory hurdles waved away by the Silicon Valley types, basically because they didn’t understand them), a set of random courses on a website with essentially no student support, almost no quality control in terms of marking – this was never going to be serious competition with universities.  Competition with documentaries, maybe.  With outfits like “The Great Courses”, definitely.  But not with universities.  But Very Serious People – who were simultaneously talking about driverless cars by 2020 like that was possible, (and how’s that going?) – simply didn’t want to know. 

(Also, any business strategy which involves losing money on every customer and trying to make it up on volume is doomed from the get-go.  This is well understood outside Silicon Valley, less so within it).

It’s easy to list off the many promises made on behalf of MOOCs.  Using these courses to “spot talent” and use them as a pipeline to prestigious jobs (this was seriously touted as a potential revenue source) – didn’t happen.  The creation of huge databases that would allow us to “understand how people learn” – didn’t happen.  And while there were some small success in MOOC world – the Georgia Tech/AT&T MOOC in computer science being the most notable – it quickly became apparent that the massive interest in signing up for courses did not translate into people finishing them (globally, MOOC completion rates seem to be about 5% or so) and that those who did complete courses weren’t that interested in turning them into actual credits.  Thrun, frustrated, acknowledged he had a bad product and left the field.  Coursera switched tack from pushing individual courses to promoting paid bundles of courses, thereby turning itself effectively into an online platform for competing universities (and in so doing went from benefitting from universities’ free labour in providing courses, to becoming a financial intermediary for institutions).  And EdX, got sold to Ed-Tech giant 2U this summer after sustaining years in operating losses.

The fate of Coursera and EdX tell us a lot about what MOOCs did accomplish and what they will be remembered for.  Without a doubt, they helped to create a mass audience for online education.  But they also helped universities realise that there was a lot to be said for outsourcing at least some aspects of online program delivery.  Economies of scale meant MOOCs could outperform most institutions in terms of user experience, and they made advertising programs to a wide, multinational audience a whole lot easier. 

And so now what we are seeing is a slow erasure of the boundaries between MOOCs and online program managers (OPMs).  Look at the way Coursera has been focusing its attention on high-value master’s programs, just like OPMs do.  Or look – perhaps more obviously – at EdX’s acquisition by 2U, which is itself an OPM.  Phil Hill (one of the smartest guys working in this space) calls this combined product space simply the “Education Platform Market” (and provides a good overview of it here). 

One day, this market may have the same kind of relationship to higher education as does the textbook market or the scientific journal market.  And certainly, in that portion of the higher education system related to professional education, that would make it an important niche in the overall higher ed ecosystem.

But boy it’s still a long way from what the hyperventilators were predicting a decade ago.