The “Academics and Academia” category covers topics related the ways in which colleges and universities function that are relevant to technology-supported education. One key aspect covered here is pedagogy—how people teach—and how technology impacts teaching and learning.
But this category also includes more institutional aspects that are relevant to technology-supported education, such as how campus leadership supports (or doesn’t support) new initiatives, politics and bureaucracy that impact these efforts, and so on.
Finally, “Academics and Academia” covers commercial and non-profit services that provide support for technology-supported education initiatives, such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies.
Improvement in post secondary education will require converting teaching from a solo sport to a community based research activity.
Herb Simon
For all the talk lately of the “future of work,” we don’t talk enough about the future of work for educators. We have a growing shortage of well-trained instructional designers, course architects, accessibility experts, learning engineers, and similar specialists. This gap is only going to grow as improving student outcomes becomes increasingly critical to sustainability for colleges.
That’s one reason why I’m pleased to announce an e-Literate Standard of Proof webinar on iDesign’s LX Pathways program, a new competency-based digital curriculum for professionals looking to develop these skills. iDesign created them, in part, to help with their own employee recruitment challenges as the company grows. This is a great resource for the sector, which was developed by iDesign, made available free or cheap—depending on which option you take and how far you go with it—to anyone, and tested with Harvard School of Education graduate students.
Come hear iDesign Chief Learning Officer Whitney Kilgore and Patrice Torcivia Prusko, the Associate Director of Learning Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education Teaching and Learning Lab talk with me about LX Pathways.
The webinar is on Thursday, February 20th, at 2 PM ET.
I’m delighted to announce that D2L has become the Empirical Educator Project’s first official Foundational Sponsor. The major principle behind sponsorship in EEP has always been that we only accept sponsors who have something to contribute in addition to money. The same is true for Foundational Sponsors. D2L is offering more to the academic participants in the Empirical Educator Project than just money and free resources. They have both demonstrated through participation to-date that they are good participants and offered enough value in future participation to earn pride of place. Their behavior is a model for other commercial participants in the educational community to emulate.
To begin with, D2L VP of Market Research Kenneth Chapman, who I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been in EdTech, has been incredibly supportive of our work to-date. He arranged an integration demo to support Carnegie Mellon University’s OpenSimon announcement at our last summit. He’s sent staff to CMU’s LearnLab summer school as a follow-up. He’s made his people available for our work and has consistently and actively looked for ways to collaborate. Ken’s leadership and enthusiasm convinced me that I wanted to deepen the relationship between D2L and EEP.
In terms of what D2L is offering as a Foundational Sponsor going forward, as I wrote earlier in this post, there’s the money (and contributions of financial value) and the participation. Let’s address the material part of the contribution first. D2L has committed to sponsoring EEP for the next three years. They have also offered up Brightspace as the EEP online community space for that period of time. This second part is going to be increasingly important as EEP work starts to become year-round and as we prepare to open up at least some of that work—both sharing and participation—to the general public. And D2L has offered up the help of its support team, including superstar Ben Campbell, to help us get the site set up and to teach us how to take maximum advantage of the affordances of the platform.
By themselves, as generous as those offers are, they wouldn’t be enough to earn D2L a place as an EEP Foundational Sponsor. What sealed the deal was D2L’s interest in increased participation. I can’t share details yet, but at a high level, there are two aspects. First, they are actively interested in offering up Brightspace as a laboratory for experimentation. One natural place where that collaboration may go, as mentioned in D2L’s press release, is integration with Carnegie Mellon University’s OpenSimon software. As I mentioned further up in the post, there has already been a little work done in this regard, and there is plenty more to explore.
At least as important is D2L’s offer to help bring the work and contributions of the EEP participants to the Brightspace user community. I’m really, really excited about the direction that this part of the conversation is taking and can’t wait to share more details as we nail them down.
After EEP’s summit this spring, Bart Epstein, the CEO of the Jefferson Education Exchange and a passionate advocate for the kind of efficacy work that EEP is attempting to promote, offered up a note of reasonable skepticism in EdSurge’s coverage of the event and the contributions announced at it:
When Tesla says that it’s making its battery patents available for free, you can be sure that all of the other car companies have incentives to invest time in reading and understanding those battery patents to read them and see if they can use them,” he said. “But when CMU opens up this software, it’s unclear who is out there that is saying, ‘Oh, there’s something in there that I want.’ We just don’t know how much impact it will have.
Bart Epstein
Nowhere is this concern more valid than in higher education. There are probably billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property contributions that, practically speaking, are languishing on university servers where nobody knows that they exist, what they are good for, or how to use them. If we want to bridge this divide specifically in terms of new knowledge that could actually help students succeed in the real world, then we have to go beyond publishing papers and releasing open source software and OER (as important as those activities are). We have to develop an ecosystem and a culture for the diffusion and uptake of this knowledge.
I invited D2L to be EEP’s first official Foundational Sponsor because their participation and other contributions will support our work in achieving this ambition.
Stay tuned for more information as this collaboration continues to evolve.
I am just thrilled to post the archive of our inaugural Standard of Proof webinar:
Summer Melt Standard of Proof webinar
https://youtu.be/7NoYUa_VHfs
It is a near-perfect encapsulation of everything that the Empirical Educator Project aspires to promote and foster: front-line educators, academic researchers, and commercial vendors working together to measurably increase student success and to do so in a way that is both persuasive in terms of the rigor of evidence and repeatable by other institutions.
As a reminder, Standard of Proof highlights academic collaborations by the Empirical Educator Project’s commercial sponsors with academic researchers and academic practitioners. All projects must either contribute new knowledge to the commons or promote the diffusion of established evidence-backed practices.
In this case, we have a story of a small EdTech start-up—AdmitHub—that has a total of nine randomized controlled trials either completed or in process with academic partner institutions.
Nine.
How many of your EdTech vendors have nine randomized controlled trials either done or in the works? How many have one? How many have you even asked this question? (If you want better answers on the first two questions, then try to improve your answer to the last one.)
They were able to do this, in part, because institutions like Georgia State University had real leaders, like GSU’s Tim Renick, who refused to accept the proposition that disadvantaged students were already beyond help by the time they got to college. Instead, the GSU folks (and their colleagues at other academic institutions conducting research with AdmitHub) set out to study their own practices and identify areas that they were failing students in ways that could be fixed. Using data, with the help of their vendor and an academic researcher—in this case, University of Pittsburgh Professor and summer melt expert Lindsay Page—GSU demonstrated that we can make education better and more equitable. It is the perfect counter-example to the sad situation I described in my post on what I didn’t see at EDUCAUSE.
This is the future that we all should be reaching for, folks. And it is reachable, as all three of my guests made clear. The video is well worth an hour of your time. Standard of Proof webinar production values will improve as we learn our craft, but the conversation quality just doesn’t get much better than this.
We’re actively working on the spring webinar line-up and will have some juicy conversations scheduled by the time you return from your holiday break.
This post is partly a nudge for you to sign up for the inaugural e-Literate Standard of Proof webinar coming up this Monday at 2 PM and partly a post to tell you why I’m so excited to be kicking off the series with this particular story.
My macro thesis for a while now has been that colleges and universities are in the early stages of a transformation from having a philosophical commitment to student success toward being operationally excellent at supporting and enabling student success. That proposition has been a little abstract for some. If you want to understand what that looks like in the real world, I can’t think of a better example than Georgia State University (GSU) under Tim Renick’s leadership. And this webinar will tell the story of one of his seminal achievements.
Summer Melt is the classic example of the kind of problem that is traditionally invisible to universities that think of student success as a philosophical commitment rather than a core operational responsibility. It’s the phenomenon where students graduate high school, apply to college, get admitted, say they’re coming, fully intend to come, and then never show up. It disproportionately hits first-generation students, students of color, and economically disadvantaged students. Why? Because getting from admission to the first day of classes is a lot harder than many of us remember. You have to fill out a FAFSA form, which as Renick put it yesterday in his IMS presentation, is basically a tax return. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fill out my FAFSA. My dad did. Not every seventeen-year-old is lucky enough to be able to hand off that responsibility. Then there are inoculations, forms to be filled out and signed by relatives with whom you may or may not have contact, places to get to, fees to pay, and so on, and so on. In their eponymous book on the topic, researchers Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page tell us,
In some school districts where as many as 40 percent of college-intending students fail to matriculate, it would be more appropriate to refer to this as a “summer flood.”
Castleman and Page, Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College
Forty. Percent.
And some of these problems are very solvable—if you know about them. For example, once the GSU folks realized that immunizations were a problem that was preventing students from getting to the first day of classes, they started parking free immunization trucks outside during times when those soon-to-be students would be visiting campus.
The trick is knowing. So Tim Renick and his team partnered with an AI chatbot company called AdmitHub. It turns out that their CEO, Drew Magliozzi, had read the summer melt book too. And he thought his tool could do something about it. GSU brought in AdmitHub to try it out. But they also brought in Lindsay Page to conduct a randomized controlled trial. It’s one thing to say that you think your intervention improved a problem. It’s quite another to gather credible evidence.
To help these students, the university identified the common obstacles to enrollment that students face between graduating high school and the start of college, including financial aid applications and documents, immunization records, placement exams and class registration, among others. Georgia State developed an approach that would help at-risk students through these obstacles by instituting a combination of a new student portal to guide students through the steps needed to be ready for the first day of classes and an artificial-intelligence-enhanced chatbot, “Pounce,” to answer thousands of questions from incoming students 24/7 via text messages on their smart devices.
In 2016, during the first summer of implementation, Pounce delivered more than 200,000 answers to questions asked by incoming freshmen, and the university reduced summer melt by 22 percent. This translated into an additional 324 students sitting in their seats for the first day of classes at Georgia State rather than sitting out the college experience.
The “Standard of Proof” webinar series is designed to tell stories like this one: Universities working with credible vendor partners to learn and share something new and important about supporting students that is a benefit to the entire sector.
At the OpenEd conference this week, David Wiley made an announcement that was more significant than it may have sounded. Before I attempt to further characterize or analyze it, I think you should read it for yourself in its entirety, copied here from David’s blog: ((Disclosure: David is an employee of Lumen Learning, a sponsor of the Empirical Educator Project.))
In 2003 I invited a small group of about forty people interested in open content and open courseware to Logan, Utah. Since then, this annual meeting has grown year after year to where we are today – 850 people interested in everything from open educational resources and open educational practices to sustainability and social justice. This annual conference has been a remarkable forum for the community to meet, share ideas, and foster collaborations, and the conference community is larger and more diverse than ever before.
With that growth comes change. That little meeting I convened 15 years ago has evolved organically in a way that has served the community fairly well. However, as currently constituted, the conference does not leverage all the energy, enthusiasm, passion, and leadership ability in our increasingly large and increasingly diverse community. And so the time has come for us to reconsider, as a community, how we wish to organize ourselves, learn from each other, and collaborate with one another.
In order to make the necessary space for that conversation, this year’s Open Education Conference is the last I plan to organize. As of this Friday afternoon the conference will be adjourned indefinitely. This is not a call for another person or organization to come forward to keep the same conference running the same way into the future.
Rather, it’s a call to reset and start over. To go back to the drawing board – as a community – and critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences, to grapple with a range of ideas about how we want to learn from and collaborate with each other, and to talk frankly about our end goals and guiding values. And when something like a consensus starts to emerge, the community can choose what to do next. To borrow a phrase, this is an opportunity to revise and remix what is, honestly, a very traditional academic conference, into something – or some things – far better.
This reimagining must be owned by the community. It must be driven by the community. And it would be inappropriate for me to try to facilitate that process beyond extending a brief invitation. And so I invite all of you to use the breaks, lunches, dinners, and other free time you have here in Phoenix to engage in this critical reimagining and to explore with one another the possible shapes future meetings of our community – or communities – might take. I expect this will be a difficult, messy, and at times even painful process. But most things worth doing are.
On a personal note, I want to thank the hundreds of people who have made the conference incredible over the years by presenting, reviewing proposals, convening sessions, volunteering at the information desk, and in countless other ways. Thank you to our Program Committees. Thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Utah State University, Brigham Young University, BCcampus, and Lumen Learning for serving as the conference’s fiscal agents and logistics leads over the years. Most of all, thanks to each of you. Thank you for giving a bit of yourself to this community, for building each other up, and for moving the work forward. And, as always, thank you for everything you do for students.
I was at the conference for the first day and heard a range of different reactions to the news. Some said it was no big deal and that characterizing it as essentially a changing of the guard of the leadership:
I think the framing of the conference as "ending" was not the best choice of wording. Really, the founder stepped down, that's all. It's new beginning for more diverse & inclusive model. And I say this as some1 who was participating in #oer since 2003 #opened19#notgoinganywhere
I think the framing of the conference as “ending” was not the best choice of wording. Really, the founder stepped down, that’s all. It’s new beginning for more diverse & inclusive model. And I say this as some1 who was participating in #oer since 2003 #opened19#notgoinganywhere
@lpetrides
Others expressed more concern about the nature of the handoff from David to the next steward than Lisa did, but the fundamental view was the same.
In my opinion, these reactions miss an underlying dynamic that makes this change more serious and difficult to patch over than it may appear on the surface. OpenEd was always at least partly an exercise in coalition politics. The attendees were a mix of people coming with different primary and secondary goals that overlapped enough for them to make common cause. That coalition has crumbled. In fact, it has been crumbling for some time. The idea that this conference could have been neatly handed off to some new steward as-is assumes that OpenEd is is otherwise tenable as-is. I don’t believe that is true.
This is not ultimately about David Wiley or even Lumen Learning stepping away from organizing the conference (although the loss of an organization willing to manage an 850-person conference is a significant blow). My conversations with various OpenEd participants this week provided ample confirmation to me that there continue to be long-standing and deepening fractures within the OpenEd coalition, even though many of the participants are either not fully aware of them or not seeing how consequential they are in terms of how people may think about future convenings.
I am by no means suggesting that OER or “open education”—whatever that is—is itself in danger of ceasing to exist. OpenEd is the only conference I know of that fell apart in a year when it had record attendance. If anything, OER adoption appears to be accelerating. In fact, I believe it is precisely OER’s success and growth that may have pushed this long-simmering problem to its breaking point. That growth has caused the balance of power within the coalition shifted in ways that created tensions among coalition members. Ultimately, those tensions proved insurmountable. The center did not hold.
The OpenEd conference as we know it is dead. It may come back in some form, possibly even next year, and possibly even with the same name. But it won’t be the same coalition with the same focus and balance of interests. It won’t be the same OpenEd. That is neither necessarily bad nor necessarily good. But whether it is good, bad, or indifferent, it is a fact.
This was foreseeable—and foreseen
The OpenEd coalition has long consisted of (at least) three different groups with three different primary goals:
Increase access to education by lowering cost of curricular materials
Increase quality of education by increasing quality of curricular materials
Promote values of education by fostering autonomy for educators and agency for learners
Many—possibly most—of the OpenEd participants would likely say that they support all three of these goals. (I certainly do.)
That’s good. Overlapping priorities are a critical success factor in building coalitions. But it’s not everything. Depending on how you interpret and rank these three priorities, your beliefs about strategy and values could be quite different. And there have long been signs that, in fact, there were very serious tensions among the views and priorities of the coalition members.
In 2015, Phil Hill and I gave a joint keynote at the OpenEd conference in Vancouver. The theme of our talk was precisely that OpenEd was a brittle coalition that could fracture if the coalitional challenges were not addressed. Phil, in his part, talked about the challenge and opportunity that faculty surveys about OER demonstrated. There was a lot to be accomplished. My half of the talk was about my experience as a climate activist and how hard it is to build a coalition that holds together and accomplishes its goals over time (hint hint).
Here are some of the questions that I encouraged the conference participants to discuss:
What is your goal?
What is your theory of change?
What is your strategy?
Who do you have to convince?
What are your obstacles?
What power do you have?
Who are your natural allies?
Who is persuadable?
What is your best message?
Who are you willing to let win?
What are you willing to give up?
At the time, Mike Caulfield noted on Twitter that the question about who you are willing to let win was a particularly important one.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. A fight broke out about the planned conference programming that was bad enough to have caught the attention of the Chronicle:
Less than two weeks before its 16th annual meeting, the Open Education Conference has canceled one of its keynote panels — “The Future of Learning Materials” — after facing a backlash on social media.
The panel, which had been scheduled for November 1, was slated to include representatives from Cengage, McGraw-Hill, Lumen Learning, and Macmillan, all for-profit publishing companies, as well as the managing director of OpenStax, a nonprofit. It was supposed to explore the potential role of traditional commercial entities in the future of open education resources.
“That role could be anything from ‘no role’ to ‘deeply committed participant,’” David Wiley, a member of the program committee and a co-founder of Lumen Learning, said in an email. Of the more than two dozen speakers and panels nominated for keynotes, the future panel was one of the top vote-getters on the program committee, he added.
But the reaction to the panel highlighted the often contentious relationship between advocates for open education resources and commercial publishers, as open resources expand in the learning-materials market. The outcry also raised broader questions about the politics of providing platforms to those with opposing views and social media’s tendency to amplify outrage. Many open-ed advocates pushed back against the framing of the panel and objected to elevating profit-seeking entities with a keynote and prescreening questions audience members could ask.
The conference’s program committee, comprising Wiley and 11 others involved in open education, said the decision to cancel had stemmed from “toxic behavior” on Twitter, adding that committee members had received “abusive and harassing” direct messages. Two panelists withdrew, according to a statement, and potential replacements declined to participate because of the tone of the discussion on Twitter. But some in the open-education community, both those who had pushed back against the panel and those who had stayed out of the discussion, said they did not see anything particularly troubling in the public posts.
Wiley declined to share copies of the direct messages that committee members had received, or to comment on their nature. Several committee members and panelists did not respond to requests for comment.
A Conference on Open Education Invited For-Profit Publishers to a Keynote. Then the Objections Began.
To be clear, this latest episode is a symptom of the crumbling coalition rather than the cause of it. Phil and I saw this kind of tension—and occasional acrimony—as far back as 2015, which is what caused us to warn about it. Here’s one quote from the Chronicle article which marks one end of the spectrum of disagreement:
In conjunction with the statement announcing the panel’s cancellation, the programming committee also released all of the questions that had been submitted to the panel. Of the 56 questions submitted, many were directed only toward the for-profit panelists and could be quite pointed. “Why should open-education advocates and OER publishers listen to the opinions of the commercial publishers, whose greed has directly caused the current textbook-cost crisis?” said one question.
Others took the position that, while they were open in principle to commercial publishers participating, some of those entities did not meet key standards for good behavior and good will:
Rajiv Jhangiani, associate vice provost for open education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in British Columbia, published a blog post outlining how he thought commercial entities had engaged with open education maliciously in the past, and how many of them were trying to improve how they work with the field.
“While this may seem like a tricky balance, I see it as quite straightforward to criticize openwashing” — marketing as open education without offering a fully open product — “by a commercial player while also recognizing positive developments from the same actor,” Jhangiani wrote. “You see,” he wrote later in the post, “I do want to have these discussions with commercial players. I am interested in a diverse and healthy commons, and I take no joy in skewering for-profit actors publicly when they perpetrate harm and lie to advance their bottom line.”
While it is not a 100% match, OpenEd coalition members’ views of this sort of question—who they are willing to let win (and under what circumstances)—tend to correlate with primary goals. On one end of the spectrum, those who see OER as a particularly effective tool for achieving their primary aim of improving quality of curricular materials (and therefore student outcomes) are likely to be most tolerant of commercial vendors whose tactics they don’t always agree with but who may contribute in multiple ways to improving student outcomes, both through OER and through other means. On the other end, coalition members with different primary goals tend to be least tolerant of the commercial vendors and less forgiving of their perceived bad behavior, in part because these advocates tend to hold a theory of change that is tied to correcting power imbalances. For example, the claim that the publishers’ “greed has directly caused the current textbook-cost crisis” entails the beliefs that the publishers have had all the power to control prices and that correcting the fundamental problem requires taking away power from the publishers. Different primary goals or different theories of change may lead people to different conclusions about who they are willing to let win under which circumstances.
Making matters more difficult, as OER moved from a fringe interest to a more mainstream trend, the balance of attendees at OpenEd has changed from a high percentage individual contributors who sometimes felt alienated from the decision-making processes in their home institutions toward a higher percentage of participants who came precisely to advance institutional initiatives. As is often the case in coalitional politics, it is impossible to completely separate the political from the personal. People attending OpenEd come with both their professional responsibilities and their personal convictions, which tend to be deeply enmeshed among people who are passionate about what they do for a living. As the coalition came under increasing tension from the changing mix in priorities, personal tensions were also bound to increase.
While I did not follow the public fight about the panel on Twitter and have no inside information about any private messages that were exchanged, Phil and I had both seen enough similar behavior by 2015 to have been concerned about whether this group would hold together over the long haul.
What may come next
As I have tried to say throughout this post, the current situation is not a signal of OER’s failure but rather a side effect of its success. Note that none of the three priorities I listed at the top of this post included “OER are intrinsically good and an end in themselves.” Even folks who tend to believe that openness is an important value that leads to other good things—and I count myself as one of those people—argue that a Creative Commons license is an end in itself. An open content license or, more broadly, a bias toward openness of various types can be useful in accomplishing a wide range of goals. And because interest in using OER has increased across a range of people who are pursuing different goals, it is no longer adequate to talk about “open education” and “open pedagogy” as nebulous things that we don’t all need to define and explicitly agree on because it is somehow obvious that we all agree enough. That simply isn’t true anymore, to the degree that it ever was true in the first place.
The OpenEd conference as we know it is dead because it represents a coalition that has, at least for the moment, crumbled under the weight of its own growth and diversification. What comes next will almost certainly be one or more attempts to either reconstitute the old coalition or build new ones—or, most likely, both.
I think it more likely than not that somebody will run a conference next year that will be called “OpenEd.” I also think it more likely than not that there will be one or more conferences—regional, national, and/or international—that attempt to build a new coalition that aligns more closely with one or more factions rather than trying to reconstitute the same blend as OpenEd as it has existed to-date. The efforts that succeed will be the ones that embrace the task of coalitional politics and develop a strategy that both recognizes the real differences among participating factions and develops an explicit strategy to attract and retain a coalition that can maintain alignment over time.
There will doubtlessly be OpenEd participants who passionately disagree with this analysis, and some who may even be angry over it. Unfortunately, that is new to neither OpenEd nor e-Literate. A public platform is a blunt instrument. Sometimes the only way to both ethically and effectively get a message across in a venue like a blog is to be plain spoken and independent-minded at the risk of offending friends.
The OpenEd coalition fell apart this week. It is not the end of OER or open education. But there are multiple paths leading forward from here. Finding the one that maximizes opportunities to do good will depend on the degree to which future coalition members are willing to take a hard look at what went wrong and learn from failures.
Now that Coursera for Campus—which I have occasionally erroneously referred to as “Coursera for Schools” in previous blog posts—has been launched, we have some more information about what it’s really about. (I’ll embed the launch video at the bottom of the post, but if you’d rather go straight to it, you can find it here.) I think it’s significant and portends significant trends in the sector.
Before we get to that, let’s get one item of business out of the way related to my previous posts. As IBL Education notes, Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said, “Coursera for Campus is not a full-featured LMS. We expect many universities to stay on their LMSs.” IBL News further notes, “According to the company, Coursera for Campus’ LMS is designed to supplement the existing Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle systems.” [Emphasis in original.]
So Coursera for Campus isn’t LMS play, at least for the foreseeable future. I was pretty harsh on Coursera’s SVP of Enterprise Leah Belsky for her disruption language, but as I’ll get into later in this post, this kind of category mistake is actually quite easy to make and one that other courseware providers have made.
Because that is exactly what Coursera has explicitly become with their Courseware for Campus offering: a courseware provider. The less obvious part is that MOOC design and courseware design have been converging for some time now. Their increasing similarities in instructional affordances have been masked by the differences in the business models of their parent companies. And even less obvious is that the Venn diagram of courseware companies and OPM companies is starting to overlap significantly.
“A 21st-Century textbook”
In the launch presentation, Maggioncalda called Coursera for Campus, in part, a “21st-Century textbook.” Take that seriously. These are MOOCs repurposed as curricular materials. And it’s really not that big of a leap. Remember that the pedagogical model of the xMOOC course generally doesn’t require heavy participation from the instructor. Some instructors do participate heavily, while others, less so. A lot of instructor energy goes into course design and lecture video production. The actual live support could be from the instructor, but it also could be from TAs, or it could be self-study. Or, in the case of Coursera for Campus, it could be a different instructor. From its inception, the design model of xMOOCs began decoupling faculty course design from faculty course delivery.
There is some messiness, of course. The biggest challenge in terms of textbook-like may be the lecture videos. Faculty may not love having some other personality featured as the star of the show. But there are two mitigating factors to that. First, Coursera’s design staff is likely guiding faculty toward authoring instructionally sound videos, which would tend to reduce the total amount of talking head content in any given course. Second, textbook-provided commercial courseware, which is still often written by star authors in their field, now also features talking heads. Here, for example, is the Cengage MindTap introductory video for Economics, by author Greg Mankiw:
Greg Mankiw’s head, talking
“But,” you may be thinking, “MOOCs are not designed like courseware.” One of my Twitter followers made a comment to the effect that at least courseware has an instructional design philosophy, unlike xMOOCs.
That person is mistaken, and here is the proof:
These analytics are only possible with backward design
During the launch presentation, a Coursera executive made the statement that “any of the courses that have been authored on Coursera come with an out-of-the-box analytics platform.” If those analytics look anything like the picture above—and I would bet money that they do—then the courses have been built on a backward design philosophy like the one I have been describing in my recent post series on content as infrastructure.
This shouldn’t be surprising. As I wrote repeatedly throughout that series, almost every professionally designed course uses that design pattern. And Coursera is known for having strong professional course design support.
(I’m telling you, folks. That content pattern is the revolution of our time.)
Update: Matthew Rascoff has reminded me to acknowledge that the professional course designers on campuses play large and critical roles in the design of these courses. The larger point is that, on both sides of the fence, there are trained, professional course designers who are applying this design pattern.
While I haven’t looked at their catalog myself in quite some time, I would not be surprised at all if many of their offerings stack up pretty well against commercial courseware titles. For one thing, while xMOOCs have a bad reputation for anemic social interaction relative to other course models, they probably have more social interaction designed into them than many commercially published courseware titles.
Courseware platforms vs LMSs
It’s easy to get confused about the boundary between a courseware platform and an LMS. I know because I have worked on and consulted on both. The LMS companies inevitably start thinking, “Damn, there are so many courses that get delivered through our platform, and so much money made on selling them. And guess what? Everything that faculty build and deliver through our product is a course! The textbook publishers keep rebuilding what we’ve already built. Badly. I mean, have you seen their grade books? Why can’t we be the platform and get a cut of all that money?”
So they try to displace the publishers. And they fail. Every time.
The textbook publishers, meanwhile, start thinking, “Damn, our customers really hate their LMSs. We’ve built all these LMS features, and they keep asking for more. I mean, we’ve already built a grade book. Wow, that was painful. Why can’t we be the platform and get a cut of all that money?”
So they try to displace the LMS companies. And they fail. Every time.
Here’s the critical difference:
LMS developers have to optimize for a wide range of faculty preferences, teaching styles, and teaching conditions. They have to accommodate every grading scheme imaginable. They have to handle huge classes and tiny classes. They have to deal with face-to-face, online, and blended. Constructivist, lecture, and whatever else. That’s why they spend so much time adding grade book micro-features and then optimizing the usability to handle all those micro-features without being totally overwhelming.
Courseware developers, in contrast, have to optimize for the content. If the subject is software development, then you need an interactive code editor and test engine. If it’s accounting, then you need a test engine that looks like a spreadsheet. If it’s chemistry, then you need a molecule visualizer and manipulator.
Which side of the divide do MOOC platforms land on? Here are a couple of slides from the Coursera on Campus launch:
These subject-specific affordances, plus competency-based analytics, were the platform highlights of the Coursera for Campus presentation. Not the grade book that can do anything. Not the test engine that can provide any kind of feedback. Not announcements or an event feed. This was all about courseware.
“But wait,” you say. “Courseware for Campus lets faculty author their own courses. Isn’t that different?”
Yes. And no.
Way back the better part of a decade ago, when I was at Cengage working on the MindTap platform, the company debated whether to open it up to customers and license it without content. (“We can disrupt the LMS!”) In the end, there were two major barriers. First, as a print-centric company in the midst of a transition, the authoring tools were not remotely faculty-friendly. And second, as a publisher whose bread and butter came from royalties, there was a fear of cannibalization of the business.
Coursera has neither of those problems. It was born as a two-sided market, which means that it never owned the content to begin with and always had an incentive to make authoring as easy as possible. It may have taken some time to fully realize that vision, but we were destined to arrive where we are now.
Further, as textbook publishers increasingly move away from celebrity franchises and toward fee-for-service contracts with their authors, they will have motivation to make similar moves. McGraw-Hill Education doesn’t advertise it widely, but they have been licensing the authoring platform for SmartBooks for several years now. Authoring support can work with a courseware platform as long as the range of course expectations for delivery models can be constrained. And MOOC courseware fits the bill. It’s a genre.
Coursera for Campus is a harbinger of the future, not for the LMS industry but for the textbook industry. And they are an early mover with certain advantages in their business model.
The courseware/OPM convergence
One critical element that I don’t want to lose in all of this is the implications for the OPM market. Let’s not forget that (a) Coursera has been pushing into that market aggressively and successfully and (b) that market has been under massive pressure and upheaval lately. 2U has been the canary in the coal mine, having lost roughly four fifths of its market value since the beginning of the year. ((Disclosure: 2U is a 2019 sponsor of EEP.))
To be clear, I think there’s some noise obscuring the signal. Two of the reasons why 2U took such a big hit are that the stock got way ahead of itself and some self-interested players have been extraordinarily successful at generating FUD around the market category in general.
That said, there is no question that the hype around selling an infinite number of $40K masters degrees has met its demise. There are two barriers to OPM growth, which is another way of saying that there are two barriers to conventional online degree growth, and they have both proven formidable barriers to crack. The obvious one is cost. The less obvious one is geography. It turns out that, even in an era when people can take courses from anywhere in the world, they will tend to take them from their local institution or not at all. For all the talk of “national universities” and “mega universities,” it’s not clear that such beasts really exist. For the most part, big universities have proven exceptionally good at soaking up every ounce of demand for education in their local areas. So the next sustainability play is not so much about reaching students far away as it is about serving students you already reach for 40 years rather than for four.
And interestingly, that is essentially the pitch that the Coursera executives made about Coursera for Campus—even when they were pitching in India. They weren’t making the pitch that the American stereotype would have predicted, of reaching the rural millions. They were talking about lifelong learning. Skilling and reskilling. From an OPM perspective, this pitch gives the company with the large catalog of low-cost and constantly refreshed inventory a competitive advantage.
That said, there was definitely a bit of hand waving going on regarding completion rate. The Coursera executives talked about University of Illinois’ degree program as having over a 90% completion rate as if that remarkable achievement could be solely attributed to the fact that it was a degree program. I suspect there are some hard-working support staff at the University of Illinois who might quibble with that clean of a causal analysis. I don’t think the Coursera folks are directionally wrong, and I don’t think they were intentionally misleading, either. But I do think that they oversimplified, and that running a highly successful program at scale with a 90%+ degree completion rate entails a lot more than just handing out a piece of sheep skin at the end. The reason I bring this up is not because I want to snark on Coursera but because the part that is being glossed over represents a number of support areas that OPMs compete on (and that more traditional OPMs and OPEs pride themselves on excelling at).
The gap between “MOOC” the course model and “MOOC” the courseware model is very much an open question in terms of student success. The MOOC courseware model, particularly as implemented into affordable degrees at scale delivery models by pioneers like Georgia Tech and University of Illinois, are creating an alternative delivery model that could start putting pressure on OPMs supporting more traditional models. Coursera on Campus, in addition to creating an additional revenue stream for the company and putting pressure on courseware providers, potentially ups the ante in the OPM market. But we need to look to those universities which are pioneering affordable degrees at scale to understand the service gaps, marketing gaps, and cost differences between MOOC courseware and the totality of what they are doing in order to understand the what it would take to replicate their success.
In the meantime, consider the implications of the Coursera on Campus model for the future of companies like Pearson and Wiley, which own both courseware and OPM divisions, or McGraw-Hill Education, which has begun experimenting with opening up its platform for content authoring by customers. ((Disclosure: Pearson is a 2019 sponsor of the Empirical Educator Project.)) It’s not necessarily all bad, but it is a potential accelerant to change that is already in the wind.
It’s a wild, wild, wild, wild world, my friends.
Here’s the full launch event for your viewing pleasure:
Coursera has announced, with some fanfare, their Coursera for Campus initiative, which Jeff Young at EdSurge has characterized as an attempted entrance into the courseware market but which Coursera Vice President of Enterprise Leah Belsky described as aimed at the LMS market.
From the EdSurge piece:
Coursera for Campus is designed specifically with colleges in mind, says Leah Belsky, Coursera’s vice president of enterprise. That means the service includes new features tailored for use in an academic environment, including plagiarism detection to spot cheaters and integration with existing student gradebooks in the learning management systems (LMS) that colleges use.
Meanwhile, Coursera is opening up its technology platform to any college to use for free to deliver course materials on their own campuses. That means that colleges could use the Coursera software as an alternative to their learning-management system. Belsky argues that Coursera’s system is better designed for delivering online courses and interactive lessons than most LMSes.
“We’re talking about a potential major disruption to the LMS market,” she says. “We don’t have all the features of an LMS but what we do have is all the tools to create cutting-edge interactive learning experiences.”
This is bad framing from a PR perspective, but more importantly, it just plain misses the real potential value proposition and chases a plainly imaginary one instead.
First, I hear a constant stream of complaints about both major MOOC providers having platforms that are not even fully adequate for their original purpose (though the situation does seem to be improving, particularly in terms of data analytics). At least one very high-profile customer, who I won’t name here, uses the MOOC platforms basically as a store front while putting their actual courses in an LMS. This comes at a time when some Blackboard customers still balk at switching from the classic to the Ultra experience because of feature gaps on level of granularity of test question feedback. MOOC platforms are interesting and have some innovative features, but they are neither mature for their original purpose nor tuned for the broad range of usage that a campus LMS must serve. Second, disruption talk is particularly tone deaf from anyone in a product category that was very recently known for hyping that they would be disrupting the university itself. And finally, disruptive innovation is an unfalsifiable theory that has thus far shown itself to have no predictive power in higher education. It’s a provocative idea that may have some generative intellectual value, but really, it’s well past time for every company that has aspirations in education to drop the word “disrupt” from their public vocabularies. Coursera for Schools may well have a decent value proposition, but this isn’t it.
Jeff’s framing is closer to the truth: This is primarily a courseware play. There’s a little bit of gray area because courseware platforms and LMS platforms are slowly drifting toward each other in terms of design, but if they ever do converge, it won’t be in the next couple of years. No, this is about repurposing content. And the real story here is that the content needs to be repurposed because we have an overpopulation of MOOCs that are in the midst of a die-off. I’m not saying that MOOC companies are dying off. As far as I can tell, Coursera seems to be healthy. (I have less visibility into EdX’s financial status.) What I mean is that previous generation of the Stanford/MIT/Harvard-style xMOOCs, having failed to achieve either their mission or their sustainability goals, are now being repurposed into other things. Because we don’t have better names for those things, we still call them “MOOCs.” But they don’t meet the definition of Massively Open Online Courses. Even the Stanford/Harvard/MIT definition.
Meanwhile, there are zombie MOOCs on these platforms that are in the process of getting killed off. Not too long ago, one campus stakeholder told me that their MOOCs basically serve the same purpose as their YouTube marketing videos, except that the YouTube videos get much better viewership and cost a lot less. I don’t expect the MOOC to die entirely, but two years from now, there will be a lot fewer of them than there are now. We just may not recognize that change if we insist on continuing to call any online enrollable thing with more than 30 students a “MOOC.”
The known failure
What’s weird is that everybody has known that the xMOOC was a failed experiment within 12 months of it reaching peak hype, and the widely known evidence has only mounted since then. In a January 2019 article in Science that was tellingly titled “The MOOC Pivot,” authors Justin Reich and José A. Ruipérez-Valiente write in the summary,
When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals (1). To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates (2)—has not improved over 6 years. [Emphasis added.]
The entire (paywalled) article is worth reading, but honestly, is any of the above a shock to you? xMOOCs, as originally designed, are not replacements for face-to-face classes. They do not lead to reliable course or credential completion. They do not do a good job of serving underserved populations. And they do not create sustainability models by giving a way expensively produced courses and making up for the cost on volume. They have value for some folks. I’m glad they exist in the world. But as an alternative system of education, they are a failure.
We see this proven out again and again, in multiple variations. Most recently, ASU has largely shut down their Global Freshman Academy, a large undergraduate MOOC experiment designed to give students credit for their first year of college and attract them to matriculate to ASU for a degree. From the IHE article:
Of 373,000 people who enrolled, only 8,090 completed a course with a grade of C or better, just over 2 percent of all students enrolled. Around 1,750 students (0.47 percent) paid to receive college credit for completing a course, and fewer than 150 students (0.028 percent) went on to pursue a full degree at ASU.
Was Global Freshman Academy an experiment worth running? Absolutely. In fact, I fervently hope that ASU will be more forthcoming than they have been so far with the lessons they have learned from the experience. Did students in those courses gain value? While that article doesn’t provide significant data on this question, I strongly suspect that many did. Were MOOCs an effective vehicle for saving freshmen roughly 25% of the cost of a college tuition while still getting them on to sophomore year? Clearly not.
So what has worked as a MOOC-like alternative to the traditional degree? What’s the closest we’ve come to fulfilling the original vision? The most high-profile success has been Georgia Tech’s affordable graduate degrees at scale. Note: I have not seen them refer to these courses as “MOOCs.” They talk about “affordable degrees at scale.” Yes, these are big classes. And yes, Georgia Tech does use MOOC platforms as part of their delivery ecosystem. But their experiment was never about “massively open.” It was about “affordable at scale.” They wanted to see how inexpensively they could offer a degree while keeping some of the same structures and conventional quality checks that their face-to-face programs have. And for Udacity, Georgia Tech’s first MOOC partner, the degree program represented a pivot. (The first of several.) They essentially acted as a kind of Online Program Enabler, which is a weird category that crosses boundaries of platform, content, and services.
When I look at Coursera’s latest announcement, I see an offering very roughly akin to the one that Udacity originally made for Georgia Tech, but with a heavier emphasis on prepackaged content—likely because Coursera already has a lot of content on the platform that may be quite good but is apparently not going to be disrupting universities, or conventional degrees, any time soon. If Coursera were to become (in part) a two-sided market for universities to buy and sell interactive curricular materials from each other, that’s not necessarily a horrible future for either the company or its customers. But it is suggestive of the collapse in the hype we’ve seen in both the MOOC and the OPM markets.
OPMs, courseware providers, and “MOOCs”
I want to return to the portion of that quote from the Science article about MOOC providers turning into OPM companies, which I highlighted but didn’t address. Again, that’s obviously true. All this talk about “micro masters” and “degree pathways” essentially amounts to a claim that many working professionals would like to pursue their post-graduate education in small, career-oriented (but still accredited and tuition-burdened) chunks. Likewise, MOOC providers like to talk about how MOOCs provide an inexpensive sales funnel to get degree students.
While I haven’t seen direct hard data to support either claim, I’m more inclined to believe the former than the latter. A “micro-masters” program is essentially a large certificate program that can count toward a larger degree. Certificate programs have been around forever, and they sell. On the other hand, I’ve seen no public evidence that the MOOC, a course genre which has trouble getting students to the end of the first course, is going to be successful at getting students to matriculate to a program in significant numbers. The ASU Global Freshman Academy isn’t a direct comparison, since it is undergraduate, but the numbers are still pretty discouraging.
Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente have their own opinion about the competitive advantage of MOOC providers in the OPM space, and it is revealing:
The primary competitive advantage of MOOCs relative to established school-as-a- service providers involves cutting labor costs through automation. Many “traditional” online programs include small class sizes, synchronous sessions with instructors, and human-graded assignments. Many degrees offered by universities with the technology and support of Coursera and edX will be one- half or one-quarter as expensive as typical U.S. professional online credentials, with the bulk of savings coming from a combination of larger class sizes, fewer or no synchronous sessions, reduced contact with instructors, and more autograded assignments (12).
This is precisely the value proposition that the digital homework solution—courseware’s older sibling—brought to the face-to-face lecture hall in survey-level courses. Digital assessment is what enabled those courses to swell to 500 or more students. The authors continue,
Because MOOC platforms support programs that look more like “traditional” online higher education, the literature on online learning can provide guidance. By most indications, students typically do worse in online courses than in on-campus courses, and the challenges of online learning are particularly acute for the most vulnerable populations of first generation college students, students from low-income families, and underrepresented minorities (13). If low-cost, MOOC-based degrees end up recruiting the kinds of students who have historically been poorly served by online degree programs, student support programs will be vital. Some recent research has explored online and text-message–based interventions for supporting these students, but most research suggests that human connections through advisers, tutors, and peer groups provide the most important student supports (14). These human supports will push against lower tuition costs. MOOC- based degree providers may find that highly effective online learning for diverse populations costs about the same to provide as highly effective residential learning (12).
When you start playing with this balancing act in order to arrive at…ahem…an affordable degree at scale and quality, you likely end up with something that looks very much like the Georgia Tech solution. It’s not a free degree or a $1,000 degree. It might be a $7,000 degree or a $14,000 degree. And that’s at the graduate level. It’s not clear that we know how to do this at the undergraduate level yet.
But the more interesting implication vis-a-vis MOOC providers is that their value proposition starts looking more like that of modern courseware support with some services bundled in.
As MOOC providers compete with conventional OPMs, there are entirely separate questions of financing the program development (via revenue share or some similar mechanism) and marketing. The MOOC providers have the advantage of their portals for marketing; students may go to Coursera or EdX to look for a credential program (as opposed to a full graduate degree program) before they’d go to their local university. I’ve not seen that proven, but at least it’s plausible. And the financing is what it is. Either you want a revenue share or you don’t.
But as a genre of course, the population of xMOOCs is dying off. We don’t see it because we’re also calling the thing that is replacing them—which isn’t open—a “MOOC.” The collection of actual xMOOCs that are still functioning as full and (more or less) open courses is slowly shrinking to fit the size and shape of the professional non-degree credential market. Forking off from that is something that looks like a MOOC but is actually prepackaged courseware, to be licensed like a textbook and taught by individual instructors at different universities, with or without a face-to-face component. Then there’s this third thing—the affordable degree at scale—that is using MOOC and courseware affordances, which are increasingly the same affordances, to teach more students with similar learning outcomes at a lower cost. So far, only in professionally oriented graduate degree programs. And finally, there are zombie MOOCs that have no strong reason to exist and are being killed off by the platform providers for whom they are loss generators (sometimes to the dismay of the universities who invested considerable time and money in creating them).
OK, maybe I was wrong. The word “disruption” is still relevant in at least one sense.
