As Phil noted in his analysisof the SJSU report, one of the main messages of the report seems to be that some of what we already know about performance and critical success factors for more traditional online courses also seem to apply to xMOOCs. But how good is the ed tech industry at taking advantage of what we already know?
Not very good, as far as I can tell.
The dominant story in higher education for 2012 was clearly the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), particularly the xMOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. There has been a lot of debate on the merits of xMOOCs in terms of disruption, business model and academic quality. While I think these questions are interesting, the more important impact from xMOOCs can be seen in terms of forcing higher education as a system or culture to no longer ignore online education as a self-contained side issue and instead evaluate the role of online education for all of higher education.
Ignoring the Impact of Online Education
For decades, if not centuries, the higher education system in the US has been holding on to a relatively stable status quo. Demand for postsecondary degrees constantly rises, the economic value of these degrees rises, the reputation of institutions remains high. This status quo has held despite two very uncomfortable underlying issues. One is that tuition and total student costs at a faster rate than inflation or even health care. The second is that US higher education as a system has not leveraged the remarkable gains from technology that almost every other industry has achieved.
It’s true that there have been many innovations in higher education based on technology usage such as online software, but the system at large has been remarkably resilient and avoided any structural change. Yes, the vast majority of institutions have a centrally-supported LMS, but the pedagogical design of most courses has remained unchanged. Yes, many individual faculty have designed rich learning experiences within their courses, but their departments and colleges have typically resisted the uncomfortable discussion of whether these new pedagogical models should diffuse to the broader set of courses and programs. Yes, there have been online education innovations from for-profits and even public colleges such as Rio Salado and SNHU, but these organizations have remained self-contained and not directly affected the mainline non-profit educational model.
Recently I wrote a post arguing that xMOOCs such as Coursera, edX and Udacity will likely evolve and that “while the current examples of massive online courses are interesting, the real potential of MOOCs will be revealed in future generations.”
Today Antioch College announced that it is creating a new MOOC-for-credit partnership with Coursera. The key points as summarized by Tony Bates (via Inside Higher Ed article):
This article reports on an interesting deal signed between Coursera and Antioch University. Antioch is a well-established private university with campuses in four different states, with around 4,000 mainly adult students. Under this deal:
- Antioch University will pay Coursera for the rights to offer MOOCs from 33 universities for credit as part of its third year undergraduate program, focusing particularly on students transferring in from community colleges (the fourth year will be on campus)
- Antioch will charge a lower tuition fee for these courses (closer to community college fee levels than public universities’)
- Antioch will assign a faculty member to provide learner support for Antioch-registered students in each MOOC-based course, with about 20 students per instructor (as for on-campus classes)
- Students will take an exam at the end of each course for credit from Antioch
- Coursera will pay rights to the universities contributing MOOC courses to Antioch.
