When World's Collide is a University of Leeds MOOC on environmental policy. Even if you are not interested in the topic, check out the format:
In previous posts, I've said universities and university systems (like mine) could host open source MOOC platforms from Google and MIT edX, allowing faculty and others to experiment with innovative educational technology -- to develop focused instructional modules to supplement their own courses or complete MOOCs.
Better yet, I've suggested that Google could offer a hosted service where individuals could do the same without support of their university -- a "YouTube" for MOOCs and modular teaching material.
It looks like we are moving in the direction of the second suggestion. Google and edX announce today that they will be collaborating on MOOC.org.
Google blog post
We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. (I hope they support individual teachers, students and non-academics who want to develop teaching material in addition to supporting educational institutions).
Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. (It sounds as though the edX and Google platforms will be combined. Some time ago, Stanford also rolled their MOOC effort into edX. Perhaps competition from Udacity and Coursera has been a factor in driving this consolidation.)
edX press release:
In collaboration with Google, edX will build out and operate MOOC.org, a new site for non-xConsortium universities, institutions, businesses, governments and teachers to build and host their courses for a global audience. (This sounds like "EdX for the rest of us" -- those who cannot afford edX fees and are not at elite universities).
Google shares our mission to improve learning both on-campus and online. Working with Google's world-class engineers and technology will enable us to advance online, on-campus and blended learning experiences faster and more effectively than ever before ... This new site for online learning will provide a platform for colleges, universities, businesses and individuals around the world to produce high-quality online and blended courses. MOOC.org will be built on Google infrastructure. (It sounds like Google is bringing their Hangout, Live Stream, YouTube, Plus, etc. infrastructure to the party).
There has been recent news and controversy surrounding the relationship of San Jose State University and MOOC providers Udacity and edX. I was at a conference the week before last and met Catheryn Cheal, Associate Vice President and Senior Academic Technology Officer at SJSU, who is administering the MOOC experiments at San Jose State.
She confirmed a positive result -- students taking a circuits and electronics class did better in a section that used edX material as a supplementary "text" than those in other sections. Based on that experience, they plan to offer more blended classes and will establish a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning.
That sounds reasonable to me. A professor had students subscribe to a MOOC in the same way as he or she would ask them to buy a book or read some articles. The results were encouraging, so the university established a center for research and training on that as a pedagogical technique.
But, SJSU has taken a second step that is less conventional. Ms. Cheal confirmed that they are now offering some classes -- elementary statistics for example -- that will substitute for on-campus classes. Students will get credit at San Jose State and the credits will be "transferable to most colleges and universities nationwide." (In a FAQ, they admonish the student to check with their school).
I am not anti-MOOC. I was at the conference I mentioned above to give a talk on the innovation in pedagogy, technology and school and social systems that I expect to come from MOOCs and modular courseware, but SJSU seems to be moving very fast.
The elementary statistics course mentioned above will be a general education course. On my campus, a faculty committee has to approve general education courses. Based on the course description, it seems to be a typical introduction to descriptive statistics and simple inference, but many majors offer such courses -- education, nursing, business, psychology, etc. Again, department and school curriculum committees traditionally specify curriculum.
I understand the desire to eliminate "bottlenecks" in student progress through the university and, as I mentioned, I expect far reaching innovation from MOOCs and modular courseware, but I am curious to know the decision to accept these particular courses for credit was made. (That is not to say it may not have been the correct decision).
We can contrast San Jose State with Amherst, which recently decided not to offer courses through edX, but to experiment on their own. That strikes me as a prudent middle ground. The university will learn and will become self-sufficient. For example, they might install an open source MOOC platform from Google or from Stanford/edX and let their faculty experiment by developing full courses or modules to supplement their current courses or they might decide to wait until hosted versions of those platforms become available. Amherst will learn and remain in control of its destiny.
Organizations often outsource peripheral functions in order to focus on their core mission. Outsourcing fast food service to Taco Bell might make sense, but teaching is one of the core missions of a university, and we should not rush to outsource it -- to a MOOC provider, a textbook publisher or anyone else.
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Update 5/12/2013
Google tells me the following universities are offering MOOCs using their open source platform, Course Builder: North Carolina State, Indiana, Cornell University, Universitat Politècnica de València, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
They also say we can expect Course Builder to become increasingly easy for non-technical faculty to use, but will not comment on the possibility of offering it as a hosted service -- we will have to wait and see about Google MOOCs.
Update 5/13/2013
Robert McGuire provides more details on the blended circuits class mentioned above in this post.
Update 5/14/2013
San Jose State is not the first university to give credit for taking a MOOC. Six European universities gave credit to students who took Stanford's AI course online last year. Students had to go to the University of Freiburg in Germany to take a proctored final exam. San Jose State exams will be proctored using a web cam and screen capture by ProctorU.
Do you know of other cases in which college or university credit was awarded for successful completion of a MOOC?
The Amherst College faculty voted 70 to 36 with five abstentions against joining edX, MIT's MOOC consortium, but they did not dismiss the idea of MOOCs. They passed a motion proposing that Amherst explore online teaching technology outside the context of the major MOOC groups.
The major MOOC platforms in the US -- edX, Udacity and Coursera -- are trying to build their brands by offering courses from "elite" universities. Most faculty senates will not have to consider the question of partnering with these organizations because they will not be invited in.
Furthermore, few universities have Amherst's $1.64 billion endowment, -- they could not afford edX even if they were invited to become a partner. EdX charges $250,000 to initiate a course and $50,000 each additional time the course is offered. They also take a cut of any revenue the course generates.
Does that mean that all but rich, elite universities are shut out of the MOOC game?
No.
A university can develop and experiment with MOOCs or using a MOOC platform for smaller online classes or to supplement or flip face-to-face classes using open source software. Stanford and edX have combined their MOOC platform software in an open source project and Google also has an open source MOOC platform, Course Builder.
Amherst, or any other university, can explore online teaching by becoming familiar with these open source programs and providing a MOOC platform for use by their faculty. Many professors would ignore the resource, but others would begin using it. The university would gain experience with MOOCs and the way a MOOC platform can be used in a smaller class.
Even better, a university or university system could host a MOOC platform and offer accounts to faculty on multiple campuses. From there it is a small step to a public MOOC platform.
But, a public MOOC service would involve significant expense for servers, bandwidth and staff. How might it be funded? One could argue that such a platform should be funded by government as part of its education mission. Failing that, the usual advertising-based or "freemium" business models might support an open MOOC service.
How about Google? Google is fond of "moonshots" like self-driving cars, and any Internet use benefits their advertising business. For example, they may (or may not) be planning to expand their Google Fiber project and become nationwide Internet service providers. If the ISP venture broke even, Google would still make money by increasing the good-will value of their brand, improving their advertising quality and increasing advertising revenue.
Does that apply to MOOCs as well? Google has their own MOOC software, which they have field tested in running their own MOOC. They also have experience running very large services like Gmail and Google Docs, which are free for individuals and generate revenue from organizations.
How about adding Google MOOCs to the list?
Blaise Pascal argued that a rational person should believe in God because the cost of not doing so and being wrong was infinite while the cost of doing so and being wrong was small. The same goes for MOOCs. If MOOCs are the Next Big Thing, Amherst will be ready. If not, they will not have lost much. They may not even have to invest in their own MOOC platform -- their faculty might just open free accounts at Google MOOCs. Think of it as YouTube for classes.
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Update 5/1/2013
Inside Higher Ed ran an article on the edX discussion within the Amherst faculty (http://bit.ly/10s3Z4R). It gives the pros and cons as seen by a number of faculty members. It's based on an internal Amherst report that is not publicly available. Also has quite a few comments.
My daughter teaches an upper division finance course, in which spreadsheets are an important tool. In order to take her class, the students must have passed two classes -- an introductory information systems course, which includes learning to use Excel, and a prerequisite finance class.
She tells me that a number of her students do not understand that you can enter a formula into a spreadsheet cell. Others may understand that they can enter formulas, but lack basic arithmetic skills like understanding percents and rates or converting from one unit of measure to another.
It turns out that they do gain rudimentary skill with Word and PowerPoint in the introductory course (or before they get to college), but we are doing a bad job of teaching rudimentary spreadsheet skills.
What can we do? One approach is to put off the introduction to spreadsheets until they are needed in an accounting or finance class, and present them there, but that would lead to curricular redundancy.
How about a short course on spreadsheets that focused on just the features needed for subsequent classes? That sounds like a good idea to me, but it is less than a typical college course -- perhaps one unit. That would be administratively awkward and, more important, we do not seem to be capable of teaching spreadsheet skills to a significant number of our students.
How about a spreadsheet MOOC? That would pay off in terms of economy of scale, and we should be able to spend the resources on it to become really good spreadsheet teachers. We could even make the course modular so a given school could elect just the spreadsheet features they wanted their students to master.
Cool, let's do a MOOC, but who should teach it? Today's MOOCs are offered by university professors, but would it make more sense to turn to an organization with expertise in training?
I Googled around and found two organizations with Excel training online, Udemy and Lynda.com. Would they be better candidates for teaching a spreadsheet MOOC than a university? Would they be willing to sell wholesale to a university -- giving us reduced prices for, say, 100 students and tailoring the course to the features we want covered?
Udemey charges $99 for unlimited lifetime access to their 16-section Excel course. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who had access to only 8 of the sections for one semester?
Lynda.com charges $25 per month for access to all of their training material. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who only had access to their Excel course for three months?
Universities around the world are beginning to offer MOOCs and we are thinking about giving credit for completion of MOOCs offered at other universities. Perhaps we should also think about giving credit for or requiring completion of courses taught by training companies.
We've heard suggestions that MOOCs might enable us to take courses offered by all-star professors at elite universities. Why take a course from a professor at a local state university when you could take a course from a renowned Harvard scholar?
But, would that be a good use of resources? Albert Einstein was too busy to teach a physics MOOC.
Government subsidizes education for the benefit to the society and economy. If we assume that MOOCs work well for some courses and some students, government should be willing to foot part of the bill.
In an earlier post, I did a back-of-the envelope calculation speculating that a MOOC might generate annual revenue of, say $200,000. In my estimate, most of that revenue would come from students seeking entertainment and enrichment, not certification.
What if the government would match that, allocating another $200,000 for a MOOC. At that level of funding, could we cover the overhead -- management and administration, production, software refinement, community facilitation, hosting, bandwidth, etc. -- and have enough surplus to hire an outstanding, motivated teacher and perhaps a TA to spend full time presenting and improving a single course?
If you are a good teacher at a state university, community college or high school, think of how well you could teach a course you were interested in if that one course were your full time job and you had support staff.
The high cost of education has been one of the drivers of interest in MOOCs, and nearly all MOOCs have been free up to this point. We are in the "invest to get users" stage.
I've heard speculation on ways to monetize MOOCs, and would like suggest one I've not encountered -- the free sample model.
We are starting to get some data on MOOCs. For example, Katy Jordan pulled together completion rate data on 26 of the MOOCs that have been offered by Coursera, EDx and Udacity:
MOOC critics point to these low completion rates as evidence that MOOCs are a Bad Idea, but those large enrollment numbers are still encouraging, so let's look further. Here is a plot of the number of views of the first and last videos each week in the Bioelectricity course at Duke University:
As you see, it is long-tail, y=1/x type graph. One way to look at the long tail is to conclude that the majority of enrollees were dissatisfied and the course was a failure. But an alternative explanation is that the folks were not really enrollees, they were browsers, and, like shoppers in any situation, most decide not to buy.
We can also think of their motivation. Maybe some were not interested in "completing" the course and getting "credit" -- they wanted something less complete, less formal. We have data on that from the Duke course as well. As shown here, fun and enjoyment was the strongest motivator.
Similar motivation was reported by students in a programming class. Sixty four percent of the students said they were interested in the course out of personal interest and curiosity, 33% for professional advancement and only 3 percent for university studies.
These three studies are small and limited, but perhaps we should be thinking about MOOCs as entertainment and lifelong learning as well as for formal education and vocational training, which brings us to free sample pricing. We can view enrollment over time as follows:
The spike in the first few weeks is mostly browsers -- people who want to see what the course is like and what the workload is. They would be getting a free sample.
After a few weeks, the enrollment decline slows and we are left with the students who are interested in completing the course. As we have seen, some are seeking formal credit and others entertainment and the joy of lifelong learning. Those people would presumably be willing to pay for the course. How much?
San Jose State University is currently running a trial in which students will get credit for Udacity courses for $150. The results of that pilot study are not yet in, but $150 is less than the University price.
How about the non-credit students? Let's say a typical MOOC runs 10 weeks and the first three weeks are free. What would people pay for seven weeks of entertainment or lifelong learning? Would it be as much as a movie? A hardback book? A steak dinner?
We can noodle around with a simple spreadsheet and get some napkin-sketch revenue estimates. For example, let's assume a for-credit price of $50 for a certificate of completion and a non-credit price of $20. The median number of students completing the MOOCs shown above was 2,777. Assuming that ten percent of those are for-credit students and the MOOC can be offered four times a year, we get annual revenue of $214,000. If we use the mean completion rate of 4,447, the revenue estimate increases to $343,000.
Note that under these assumptions, the bulk of the projected revenue is from the entertainment students, not for credit students.
If an organization offers several courses, are numbers like that sufficient to cover the overhead of management and administration, production, software refinement, community facilitation, hosting and bandwidth, etc. and pay a teacher who is full time on a single course?
A question for any good teacher reading this -- how effective a teacher would you be if you only taught one course and spent full time delivering and improving it?
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Update, 4/17/2013
Coursera revealed that they had revenue of $220,000 in the first quarter after starting to charge for verified completion certificates (http://bit.ly/12nd8Rb). The income was from students paying between $30 and $100 per certificate. Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said prices were "around" $50.
This gives us a first cut estimate of what someone hoping to get job or school credit for a course might be willing to pay. No doubt, the going price for certified completion will be higher than the price for un-certified completion for entertainment and curiosity.
(Coursera uers who pay for certification have to submit a photo ID of themselves to the company and are also tracked based on their “unique typing pattern” to ensure that people who take tests or turn in assignments are who they say they are).
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Update 5/23/2013
I posited a simple characterization of people signing up for MOOCs as either "browsing" or "enrolling." Phil Hill presents a more nuanced characterization in his blog post on blog student types, classifying students as no-shows, observers, drop-ins, passive participants and active participants. Details are presented in the paper called Deconstructing Disengagement: Analyzing Learner Subpopulations in Massive Open Online Courses.
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Update 11/27/2013
This post in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that MOOCs have failed in higher education, and are better suited to vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/1/2013
Prominent MOOC provider Udacity has shifted emphasis from college credit courses toward vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/9/2013
A University of Pennsylvania study of a million enrollees in 16 MOOCs shows they have relatively few active users and low completion rates.
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