This year was supposed to be the Year of the MOOC. With summer coming, it’s worth asking the question: how have they done and where are they headed? To me, the answer comes down to developments in three areas: Demand. This year, MOOCs have proved that i) there is lots of interest in free, continuing education out there – mostly from people who already have degrees – and ii) there are an awful lot of universities who think that catering
Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t. Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead. We’ve been heading
The Minerva Project, an intriguing concept which bills itself as the world’s “first online Ivy League University”, has been making some news lately. The idea, in a nutshell, is this: the Minerva will all be taught online, with curricula designed by “the world’s top professors” (yawn), but classes taught by some of America’s many talented, but underemployed (and hence cheap) sessionals. We aren’t talking MOOCs here – these classes will be limited to 25 students each, so as to maximize
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
I wasn’t going to write about the ludicrous new higher education paper, released last month by the UK Institute for Public Policy Research, entitled, An Avalanche is Coming; I didn’t think it had enough exposure to warrant it. But, since the Globe has now seen fit to publish an extract, I can go whole hog. It starts off with bog-standard, “sky-is-falling” stuff: the global economy is a mess (true, but presumably temporary), the cost of higher education is increasing faster than inflation (true since
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