The Wrongologist

Although
the name may remind you of an outfielder for the 1986 New York Mets, MOOC is an
acronym for Massive
Open Online Courses. Depending on your point of view, they are the future of
higher education, the end of higher education as we know it, both, or neither.

MOOCs are aimed at
large-scale student participation and open access via the web.

Usually, a MOOC course is a series of
video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests that
are open to anyone. That makes them just OOCs. The M part comes from many people all
over the world taking the course simultaneously.

As we saw
in the success of Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good,
free online materials can attract
extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

A recent
commentary from NYU’s Clay Shirky, “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy,” compared MOOCs’
ability to disrupt higher education to what the music industry faced in the
advent of file-sharing networks.

The parallel to the
music industry is apt: When MP3 compression was developed; the recording
industry concluded it would be no threat, because sound quality mattered most.
Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the
record store?

Then
Napster happened. It became the fastest-growing piece of software in history.
The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed overnight. If Napster had been
only about free access, control of distribution of music would then have
returned the record company. But that’s not what happened.

Instead,
Pandora happened. Rhapsody happened. Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon
sold MP3 songs. Because people
realized you could buy the killer song without paying for the mediocre filler
on the rest of the CD.

The
recording industry crushed Napster, but they couldn’t kill the niche that Napster
filled. Since 2000, revenues for the sale of recorded music have fallen
dramatically. According to the RIAA, recorded music sales dropped from $13
billion in 2000 to approximately $7 billion in 2011. The dollar value of the recorded
music market is now half what it was a decade ago.

The thought of Academia’s
revenues from tuition falling by 50% has to be a source of night terrors for
university leaders everywhere. It may explain any and all of the formal efforts
and informal experiments with MOOC education that have emerged in the past
year.

If we
continue the analogy, university education is now facing similar disruption; with
its MP3 being the MOOC, while it’s Napster is Udacity, an education start up
with links to Stanford University.

Last year,
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,
an online course at Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted
160,000 potential students and 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs
anything possible on a physical campus. As
Thrun put it, “Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors
in the world combined.” Seeing this, Thrun founded Udacity, an educational
institution designed to offer MOOCs.

Last March, Tamar
Lewin stated in The New
York Times:

This has many
academics worried about how MOOCs will affect higher education (and their jobs!).

As they
should. In 21st century America, where many new college students reach
graduation with a mountain of personal debt, MOOCs may be regarded as a cost
efficient alternative. Colleges are aware that tuition, once a number that was
never really questioned, is becoming a
value decision by prospective students.

The American public views
most of higher education (through master’s level) as a “commodity,” that
should be sold primarily on the basis of price and convenience, subject to
meeting a minimum standard of quality.

Many university
administrators have already adopted elements of this view, using terms such as
“customer,” and “stake holder,” to describe how the school relates to students,
their parents, and others in their orbit.

Universities
have certain advantages over the recording industry. They are mostly non-profit.
They employ lots of smart people. They are decentralized and their core
competencies are research and learning from the past.

Armed with
these advantages, will it screw up as badly as the music people did? Possibly.

Consider the economic
environment: The
number of highly respected colleges is finite and demand for college is growing,
so institutions have been able to raise tuition faster than CPI for the past 3
decades. Consequently, we face the spectacle of students graduating with hundreds
of thousands of dollars of debt or worse, not finishing due to high costs.

But the cracks are
starting to show:

• Colleges
  are finally feeling some price pressure

• Computer-savvy
  teens and 20-somethings forgoing college to join start-ups in Silicon Valleys
  all across America

• The
  explosion of online degree-granting offerings have already coalesced into
  serious alternatives to traditional, brick-and-mortar colleges

Students and parents
who want the 4-year country club experience will always attend them. But for students
who just want to learn the material and get a job, there will be options, and
the MOOCs could become a successful element in the mix.

Universities
are learning a great deal from their experiments with MOOCs.  Armed with
massive amounts of data about the “classroom” performance of students, they can
adjust lectures, course material, and examinations to improve comprehension,
both online and on campus.

MOOCs also
have promotional value for participating colleges and universities.  It’s
one thing to brag on the website about brilliant faculty.  It’s more impressive when tens of
thousands of people experience their brilliance firsthand, with the college’s
name attached.

The huge enrollments
that provide these benefits, the sharing of knowledge and feedback from huge
numbers of students, the widespread publicity, also create problems: While
professors have found ways to promote discussions and collaborative learning
among students, they have not yet
figured out how to completely protect against cheating, how to answer students’
questions in anything like real time, or how to identify and assist those who are struggling.

Almost inevitably, if
the large-enrollment, on-line college course models are successful, they will put many colleges and
universities out of business, and dramatically reduce the size of many others.

No
university has developed a viable business model for MOOCs.  Udacity gets
some revenue from corporations, including Google, for developing
high-level, specialized courses.  For a fee Coursera provides potential
employers with the names of high-achieving students.  In both cases some
of the money is returned to participating institutions, but, at present, it is
insufficient to cover the costs of course development.

And the
costs are considerable. A good MOOC requires technology and people, including
blogs, online discussion boards, Twitter, tagging, document sharing and many
teaching assistants.  

When done
well, the production is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. When done
poorly, it is unwatchable and no one will complete the course.

In this new
environment, there will also be opportunities for some educational institutions
to offer new, valuable niche components
to college education.

But that won’t happen
without serious, realistic thought and planning, of a qualitatively different
nature than has ever been needed before in Academia.