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It was five years ago last month that Stanford set up the first MOOC. MOOCs were supposed to change the world: Udacity, Coursera and EdX were going to utterly transform education,
putting many universities out of business. Time to see how that's going.
(Ok, ok: the actual use of the term MOOC was applied to a 2008 University of Manitoba course led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Technically, using Downes' taxonomy, the
2008 MOOC was a "cMOOC" - the "c" standing for connectivist, if I am not mistaken - while the versions that became popular through Coursera, Udacity and EdX, etc. are "xMOOCs", the difference being essentially that learning in the former is more participative
and collaborative while the latter has more in common with textbooks, only with video. But the Stanford MOOC is what usually gets the attention, so I'm going to date it from there).
In the interests of schadenfreude if nothing else, allow me to take you back to 2012/3 to look at some of the ludicrous things people said about the likely effects of MOOCs.
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"In 50 years there will only be 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education" (Sebastian
Thrun, former CEO of Udacity)
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"Higher Education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity" - Clay
Shirky.
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"Higher education is just on the edge of a crevisse (sic)...five years from now these enterprises (i.e. universities) are going to be in real trouble" - Clayton
Christensen
And of course who can forget that breathless cliché-ridden gem of an op-ed from Don
Tapscott, about the week that higher education changed forever in January 2013 (i.e. the week he sat in on a couple of seminars on the subject in Davos). Classic.
So, five years on, where are the MOOC pioneers now? Well, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity got out of the disrupting-higher-education business early after coming to the realization that
his company "didn't have a good product"; the company pivoted to providing corporate training. Over at Coursera, the most hyped of the early pioneers, founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller have both left the company (Ng left two years ago for Baidu, Koller
left last month for one of Alphabet's biotech enterprises). Shortly after Koller's departure, Coursera released this
announcement which was widely
interpreted as the company throwing in the towel on the higher education market and following Udacity down the corporate training route.
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EdX, the platform owned jointly by MIT and Harvard thus seems to be the last MOOC provider standing. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also the one which has (arguably) been most
successful in helping students translate MOOC work into actual credits. It has partnered with Arizona State University in its "Global
Freshman Academy" and even allows conversion of some credits towards a specific MIT
MBA (conditional on actually spending a semester on campus and paying normal fees to finish the program). These "micro-MBAs" seem to catching
on, but precisely because they are "micro", they haven't made a big impact on EdX's overall numbers: their user base is still less than half Coursera's.
So what's gone wrong? It isn't a lack of sign-ups. The numbers of people taking MOOCs continues to grow at a healthy clip, with Global enrolments to date now over 35
million. The problem is there's no revenue model here. Depending on whose numbers you're using, the number of users paying for some kind of certification (a fee which is usually priced in double digits) is at best around 3%. So, work that out:
35 million users, with a 3% conversion rate, at $50 per user, and you've got a grand total of $52.5 million in total revenue. Over five years. Using content existing institutions are giving them essentially for free at a cost of anywhere between $50,000
and $250,000 per course.
This is not sustainable and never was. Whatever valid points MOOC boosters had about the current state of education (and I think they had more than a few), the proposed solution
wasn't one that met the market test. The basic problem is (and always has been) that higher education is fundamentally a prestige market. Distance education is low prestige; distance education which doesn't give out actual course credit doubly so. You can
disguise this by making delivery the domain of top universities, as EdX and to a lesser extent Coursera did - but top institutions don't want to diminish their prestige by handing out actual credit to the hoi polloi over the internet. So what you get is
this unsatisfying compromise which in the end not enough people want to pay for.
Some of us said this five years ago (here, here and here) when
MOOC-mania was in full flow and critical faculties were widely suspended. Which just goes to show: higher education is the world's most conservative industry and the rate of successful innovation is tiny. Your best bet for imagining what higher education
looks like in the future is what it looks like today, only more expensive.
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