MOOCs Will Grow Up, Must Become Sustainable

Burck Smith, CEO and founder of online education firm StraighterLine, may be showing his age in his recent blog post. After all, he references Marky-Mark, the leader of a 1990s hip-hop group who ultimately grew up into award-winning actor Mark Wahlberg.

Smith’s point is that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will almost certainly grow up, just as Wahlberg did, once the excitement of the moment dissipates. When that happens, firms such as Coursera and Udacity are going to have to produce revenue, which will likely mean they will no longer be massive, open, or free.

“As providers of open content and open courseware have recognized over the past 15 years, simply making content free doesn’t change the dynamics of the higher education market at all,” Smith wrote. “Further, free content isn’t very good business, just ask the newspaper industry—and their content changes every day.”

Students earning credit for online courses taken will be the key to sustainability.

“Only those who have created a low-cost, low-risk pathway to credit will have results to show,” Smith continued. “It is the hard work necessary to create this pathway that transforms flash-in-the-pan Marky-Mark organizational models to mature and sustainable Mark Wahlberg ones.”

MOOCs on a Smaller Scale

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have become big news in higher education. Tens of thousands of students are taking advantage of the free, not-for-credit courses offered by some of the most prestigious universities in the nation.

Now, throw LOOCs and anti-MOOCs into the mix.

LOOCs, or little open online courses, are being tested at the University of Maine, Presque Isle. The pilot program, called OpenU, offers four online courses open to between two and seven online students for free, in addition to the regular paying students taking the class. The online students get no formal credit for completing the course, but, unlike MOOCs, can receive personalized responses from instructors on assignments and tests.

“Students are not paying, but they are getting the full experience,” said Presque Isle Provost Michael Sonntag in an article about the program in Inside Higher Education. “If they want to write every paper and take every test, our faculty members have agreed to give them feedback.”

There are even ways for students to receive some credit for the course. OpenU students can earn up to six credit hours through the UMPI prior-learning program if they enroll in the school, according to the university web site.

The UnderAcademy College appears at first to be a joke, with courses such as Grammar Porn and Underwater Procrastination and Advance Desublimation Techniques. However, it is also “offering serious content taught by professors at some well-known institutions,” according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

UnderAcademy offers classes limited to 15 students. The goal is to deliver quality liberal arts and humanity classes by providing “students with the opportunity to focus on the process of learning and control the courses themselves rather than worry about the end product,” Talan Memmott, founder of UnderAcademy and lecturer of digital culture and communications at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

“Based on some spirit of humor that seemed to underlie everything, I assumed it was largely a joke,” said Mark C. Marino, associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California, who taught his “Grammar Porn” class last spring. “But Talan would say that this project is research into alternative pedagogical practices that are collaborative, less hierarchical, and take place online. That piqued my interest.”

Who's Going to Pay for Online Education?

It’s been 20 years since the Michigan State University began its Computer-Assisted Personal Approach (CAPA) project.

Within five years, the award-winning program multi-media project that offers mostly science and math courses reached more than 6,000 students on the MSU campus and was available at 40 institutions nationwide. By 1999, it became a LON-CAPA (Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach) program offered at more than 70 institutions that had received funding from the Sloan and Mellon Foundations.

The problem for online education, massive open online courses, and open-source software is not necessarily the funding. Firms are investing millions of dollars in these start-up firms, but the question remains if it’s a sustainable business model.

Gerd Kortemeyer, associate professor of physics, education, has seen how the project works as director of the LON-CAPA project at MSU and identifies the biggest question facing online learning is who’s going to pay for it? He talked about his concerns in a recent post on the Educause listserv:

A lot of bandwidth gets spent these days arguing that open education and free stuff is good … and that traditional colleges and textbooks are quickly approaching obsolescence. I am oscillating between enthusiasm and cynicism.

Our open-source content-sharing project, LON-CAPA, just celebrated its 20th anniversary: www.lon-capa.org/anniversary.html, and we are starting a successor project, www.courseweaver.org/.

Looking back over those 20 years, it's been an almost constant uphill battle for funding. Some money came from grants, but that model is inherently unsustainable: you can get money for new initiatives, but you cannot get grant funding to sustain something that works. Some research funding was even harmful to our project, as it made us do experimental stuff that did not benefit the majority of our users. The remainder of the funding has come from traditional colleges and universities.

Looking at MOOCs, open content, open-source software, etc., I still do not understand the business model, and I don't see it seriously discussed, except occasionally like in the Chronicle article about Coursera: http://chronicle.com/article/How-an-Upstart-Company-Might/133065/—notice the "might" in the title.

Somebody in the end has to pay for salaries, retirement, health insurance, connectivity, hardware … at the moment, it seems like the business model is parasitic on traditional higher education. How is it going to move out of that mode?

My cynical self is reminded of the infamous dot-com business model: "We make a loss with every customer, so let's get more." Are we heading toward a dot-edu bubble? Please convince me of the opposite.

A good question, indeed.

Big Investments Being Made in Online Education

Investing in online education has become big business. Since the beginning of September, news reports have surfaced of $5.7 million in venture capital going to a Chicago-based education startup called eSpark Learning. At the same time, the Canadian firm Desire2Learn reversed its strategy of not using external funding and raised $80 million.

eSpark, described by its founder and CEO as the Pandora radio for education, targets students in grades K-8. Students are given a custom playlist of apps and then asked to rate how much they like the app or how much they are learning, similar to the way Pandora listeners rate songs played, according to an article in TechCrunch.

Desire2Learn, which develops cloud-based learning systems, changed its funding strategy, in part, to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the online learning market. Blended learning programs, personalized learning, and open online courses have all contributed to that growth. Desire2Learn has responded by hiring 200 new employees in the past year, according to a report in Reuters.

Finally, the online educational startup Straighterline recently announced it will begin allowing college professors to attract online students to their for-credit courses through Straighterline and even set their own price for the course.

The company landed $10 million in investment capital last April and plans to use the funds to expand its marketing to institutions across the country. It already offers online learning in nearly 40 courses for a fee of $99 a month and a $39-per-course registration fee. Its long-term goal is to create a platform where students can pick and choose courses created by professors for credit.

“The idea is the student has those choices,” Burck Smith, founder of Straighterline, told The Baltimore Sun. “It’s really an experiment in creating a market for professors and students to meet up.”

New Site Helps Sort Through Online Course Offerings

College students can go online for everything from a pizza to their textbooks for the upcoming semester. Now there’s a web site that purports to help them get a better job after graduation.

Skilledup.com is a portal for online courses and practical training programs. With a sluggish economy and a tight job market for college graduates, the site has been designed to make it easy to find and compare course options through the use of keyword searches. It claims to have more than 40,000 online courses from hundreds of providers, and is working to include massive open online course sites, such as Udacity and Coursera.

“If education doesn’t have [return on investment], it probably doesn’t deserve to be called education,” said Nick Gidwani, who launched the site Aug. 21. “There are so many kids out there earning seven bucks an hour who can have a decent life in a short period of time. … And this is one way to achieve that.”

Gidwani created the site after watching two interns he had hired for $12 an hour land high-paying jobs in just months after taking a series of low-cost online courses. The site was his solution for workers to sort through all the possible courses available online.

“There are so many kids graduating these days who are smart and really computer-savvy, but don’t really have any skills that translate on Day One,” he told eCampus News. “So many people spend $100,000 on a college education and don’t have much to show on the first day of work. That’s unfortunate.”

Udacity Pulls Math Course over Quality Concerns

Udacity, a start-up firm offering massive open online courses (MOOCs) taught by “world-renowned university instructors,” recently decided to cancel its Logic and Discrete Mathematics course because it didn’t live up to the quality standards set by the company.

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in an e-mail that while the entire class was recorded and edited, it didn’t meet the “quality bar” during the firm’s internal testing. Thrun did not say what that quality bar was, how many students had signed up, or whether the course would be offered in the future, but did praise the work done on the project by Jonathan D. Farley, associate professor of computing and information science, University of Maine at Orono.

“We want to make clear this disappointment is in no way a reflection on Jonathan, but on the Udacity team and the constraints we put on ourselves,” Thrun wrote.

Farley said he spent 45 hours recording the lectures and three hours of preparation for each hour recorded, but he also agreed with Udacity’s decision to pull the plug on the course.

“I blundered when recording some of the logic, and the camera was not on,” he said. “And also some of the mathematical proofs needed to be explained in a different way. It’s a totally different way of teaching because you have to figure out how you can reach 100,000 people.”

MOOCs make headlines for offering an online alternative to traditional educational programs, often free or practically no charge, but critics remain. As one commentator to the Chronicle article suggested, “Quality control is particularly important at this stage, when so many critical eyes are looking at online curricula,” so Udacity’s proactive approach could be the kind of move that may silence some detractors.

New Study Shows Potential of Online Learning

A new report found that college students using an interactive learning online (ILO) system with one hour of classroom instruction each week scored the same in standardized tests as students taking the same course through traditional classroom methods. Results from the study may lessen concern about students’ learning results when taking online courses.

“This method appears to have potential,” says Matthew M. Chingos, a senior research consultant for Ithaka S+R.  “I view this research as a proof of concept that at least one instance of a high-quality online course can produce equivalent outcomes, and hopefully future versions that are higher quality will do even better.”

In fact, students in the hybrid course scored slightly higher and devoted 25% less time to coursework, according to the report Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials. However, students also reported enjoying the hybrid course less than students taking the traditional class.

Chingos says he believes the ILO course lacked features students expected from an online course, which led to the lower score. He also speculated that better features would produce better results.

“If you could imagine a future version of a course like this, taking advantage of more addictive, interactive, exciting features, getting students even more involved in it, the hope is that in the long run, this won’t just produce the same outcomes in less time for less money, but will actually improve the quality of the educational experience,” he says.

MOOC Provider Multiplies Partner Schools

Coursera, an organization that provides a platform for free college and university courses online, created a stir when, seemingly in one fell swoop, it added a dozen more schools to its roster.

Signing on to offer selected topics through the platform were Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia. Already on board are University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, and an institution in France.

Some in academia, including this commentary in Inside Higher Education, viewed the announcement as validation that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are no longer a novelty but a genuine game-changer for postsecondary institutions. But it’s not clear exactly how they will change the educational playbook.

The Atlantic provided an inside peek at how an instructor approaches a MOOC, noting that many of those who take the courses already hold degrees, maybe even advanced degrees. These students aren’t necessarily seeking another diploma, though possibly they do want some sort of formal acknowledgment they successfully completed the course, which is something Coursera can provide. A certificate would come in handy for resumes or performance reviews.

Some course-takers are instructors themselves, maybe checking out the “competition” or looking to crib a few ideas for their own classes. Coursera’s course list, at least for now, is heavy on science-related disciplines. No doubt that’s where the demand is.

Online enrollments continue to exceed overall higher education enrollments

An article from Campus Technology discusses the results from research regarding online education that was conducted by Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, and was funded by The Sloan Consortium. The groups have been conducting research since 2002 and this year’s survey included 2,500 colleges and universities across the U.S. The survey found that online enrollments continue to grow substantially faster than overall higher education enrollments. The results show that 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course during the fall 2009 semester. This is an increase of nearly one million students from the fall 2008 semester. It also represents a twenty-one percent growth rate which greatly exceeds the less than two percent growth rate for the overall higher education student population.

The survey also found that over three-quarters of academic leaders at public institutions, 55.4 percent of private nonprofits, and 67 percent of for-profits believe that online learning is as good as or better than face-to-face instruction.

For more information, the full report can be found here.