e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Inside-Higher-Education

  • Revisiting 2012 Post on Barriers That MOOCs Would Face

    Revisiting 2012 Post on Barriers That MOOCs Would Face

    Inside Higher Ed published an article today, titled “Free MOOCs Face The Music”, about edX quietly adding support fees for many of their courses. Dhawal Shah and I both commented that we were not surprised by the move.

    Writing about the introduction of the fee, Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, a review site for online courses, said the announcement was the latest in a phenomenon he termed “the shrinking of free.” Regardless of MOOC provider — be it edX, Coursera, Udacity or FutureLearn — “all have cut back on what was originally free in MOOCs.”

    Phil Hill, co-founder of Mindwires Consulting and an author of the e-Literate blog, agreed that the edX announcement was not surprising. Early MOOC providers like edX thought they would be able to “get really big for free,” said Hill. “Magic didn’t happen, and now they’re facing reality.”

    There’s more information in the article worth reading, but I would like to revisit a post here at e-Literate from 2012 to help explain the point I made. In “Four Barriers That MOOCs Must Overcome To Build a Sustainable Model”, I noted:

    The current generation of courses has proven the feasibility of massive online enrollments, but the Kolowich article reveals that the result is based on a form of adult continuing education. The majority of students in the Udacity and Coursera courses analyzed were professionals in the software industry – hardly the target audience for those seeking a change in how we educate postsecondary students. The current MOOCs provide a nice proof-of-concept, but hardly solve significant educational problems.

    So what are the barriers that must be overcome for the MOOC concept (in future generations) to become self-sustaining? To me the most obvious barriers are:

    • Developing revenue models to make the concept self-sustaining;
    • Delivering valuable signifiers of completion such as credentials, badges or acceptance into accredited programs;
    • Providing an experience and perceived value that enables higher course completion rates (most today have less than 10% of registered students actually completing the course); and
    • Authenticating students in a manner to satisfy accrediting institutions or hiring companies that the student identify is actually known.

    Given this short timeline and the nature of investment-backed educational experiments, I think the real focus should be on whether and how MOOCs or successor models build on current scalability and openness while overcoming these four barriers.

    What have we seen since 2012?

    • Revenue Models: Coursera, FutureLearn, and edX moving towards an OPM business model, and Udacity focusing on corporate education;
    • Credentialing: All MOOCs offering some sort of verified certificates, and in the OPM cases offering actual degrees through their partner institutions;
    • Course Completion: MOOCs realizing that the two issues above lead to higher completion rates; and
    • Authentication: Verified certificates and OPM models requiring student authentication through webcams and approaches similar to online proctoring companies, and even partnering with proctoring companies.

    At this stage  pretty much everyone recognizes a blatant ‘I told you so’ post written while Michael is on vacation and unable to talk me out of it, so I’ll move along and cut off further commentary.

  • The Blackboard Patent Pledge

    I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

    (more…)

  • College President Fired Because of Blog…Or IS She?!

    Here’s a fascinating story that happened in my own backhard. According to Insider Higher Education, SUNY College of Technology at Alfred President Uma Gupta was forced out, partly due to an anonymous blogger: (more…)