The Ed Techie

You can stop worrying about MOOCs now

I guess we all knew the MOOC bubble would burst sometime, but I'm saying it's happened this week - it just doesn't know it yet. The reason? Commercial MOOC providers have started making noises about becoming elearning courseware providers for standard education providers. 

So we have Clayton "I'll disrupt your breakfast" Christensen talking about "hybrid innovation". This turns out to be blended learning, which many people have been promoting for at least 15 years (although calling it hybrid innovation at least maintains the illusion that it's new and sexy for a while longer). That's not a bad thing, blended learning is an entirely sensible and appropriate response to combining the best of face to face teaching and the information rich resources of the net. It's just not very new.

Then Coursera make an announcement that they are going to explore "MOOC based learning on campus". I mean, what does that even mean? That's blended learning, or e-learning, and again, not exactly new. If you take the MOO out of MOOC you're left with just a C, and no-one's that interested in just a C. This follows on the back of Georgia Tech's not free, online Masters MOOC, which looks awfully like a not very well supported elearning course.

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that MOOCs are rather retreating from their initial promise/threat of world domination here. They're becoming a means of approaching elearning within traditional education systems. There's a couple of possible reasons for this.

The first might be that those Venture Capitalists are now demanding a solid and quick return on their investment. The initial open model isn't offering this any time soon, so a quicker route to pay back is to work with existing providers and students who are already paying. As people such as David Kernohan have been pointing out, the problem with MOOCs funded by VCs is that sooner (rather than later) they want their money back, and they'll make you shift your model to do that. The open access publisher FlatWorld Knowledge provide a useful precedent here - eventually the VCs wanted their money back and 'open' was the first thing to go.

The second, is that this is what they always intended to do anyway. Mike Caulfield called this long ago, as he helpfully sums up here (at my request, thanks Mike). Commercial MOOC providers were never really interested in being free providers of education - they wanted to become courseware providers to the education market. As he put it as early as 2012:

"We now understand the endgame here. We now get the business model. The idea is not “send your students to us!”. The idea is to become yet another online vendor of services to higher ed."

None of this is bad - a commercial elearning provider, that may be helpful. It's just not very exciting. And it certainly doesn't warrant the coverage it gets. Can you imagine if Coursera had launched as a provider of elearning content to universities? I don't think the media would have been as willing to reprint their every press release and promote them so uncritically. So it's been a smart game to push the 'future of education for everyone' line, but surely that game is up now?

So what about MOOCs, you know, those free, open courses? Is this the end of them? No, I don't think so, but maybe they can now become what we always wanted them to be, focused on access and experimentation and not hype and commercialism.

If education were free, what would MOOCs be?

Here's a thought experiment, if there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen... oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right?

So, on with our thought experiment. At the opposite ends of the spectrum we have two scenarios: It doesn't change a thing, as MOOCs are about a different form of learning; or it completely kills MOOCs as their main feature is that they are free.

Then there are some elements inbetween these two extremes:

• MOOCs become more focused on niche subjects not served by higher education - many current MOOCs offer courses straight out of conventional curriculum, indeed if they want big numbers for monetisation then the curriculum becomes narrower. But in a free higher ed system MOOCs can fill some of the demand and gap not met by conventional curriculum. These would be offered by communities, societies, individuals for interest and maybe universities and commercial providers for professional development
• MOOCs are outreach focused. While competition is lessened in a free HE system between universities, there is an increased pressure on them to perform social-good functions (since they're being paid for by the tax payer). MOOCs are a useful means of achieving this, with the emphasis now on open access, and less on shop window.
• MOOCs offer a different granularity. Related to the above, the full 3 or 4 year degree is not for everyone, and MOOCs provide a means of offering smaller chunks of courses. There is less pressure on them to be a taster or freemium model for the full degree in a free system. They operate as smaller units of learning which may be aggregated, but may not, appealing to leisure learners and professional updating.
• MOOCS are experimental. As with the current system there is room for MOOCs to act as a means of experimenting with technology, pedagogy or curriculum. This allows universities to trial approaches and learners to trial subjects, without impacting upon the core degree. The impetus to do this may be lessened in a free HE system however.

My guess is that in a society where higher education is freely available, then the commercial focus on MOOCs decreases. They are competing less directly with an expensive system, and their main selling point of being free is undermined. But I also suspect they wouldn't disappear. In fact, they end up being altogether more interesting I think, and other features about them come to the fore. And that probably tells us quite a lot about the current MOOC debate.

Uncle MOOC

Uncle MOOC will be looking after you for a few weeks...

A metaphor is always a handy way to get a grip on something new (as long as one is aware of its limitations). My attitude to MOOCs changes on a weekly basis, and so does my MOOC metaphor - I'm sure you've got one of your own: the MP3 of education, this year's SecondLife, industrial revolution applied to education, a giraffe smoking a cheroot rollerblading down the Champs-Elysees - it can be pretty much whatever you want. So here is this week's MOOC metaphor.

MOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his own. They are great fun for the nieces and nephews, they are inventive, playful, and the kids always look forward to them arriving. But this uncle secretly (and after a couple of beers, not so secretly) thinks he could do a better job at raising the kids than the parents. He may also think they prefer him to their actual mum and dad. "Why don't they do all the stuff I do with them?" he thinks. "I'm great at getting them out of a tantrum, I do my distraction technique and they forget it. I never see their dad doing that," he compliments himself. "I would have a set of rules that the kids would respect and obey, not this slapdash approach," he vows.

And then, of course, he has kids of his own. Suddenly he realises he has to work as well as raise the kids, that his distraction techniques don't work with a tired 6 month old at 3 in the morning, that he has to do it every single day and getting the basic stuff done like feeding, bathing, looking after them is a real achievement in itself. 

This is how I sometimes feel about MOOCs and their relationship to formal education. They are good fun, they offer something new, a lot of learners really enjoy them. But they shouldn't kid themselves they can do the robust, day to day stuff better than the existing system. If they had to, they'd soon find that a lot of their energy is spent on the not-so-fun stuff, because that is required of them. But, like our friendly uncle they do also make the parents think "maybe we should go to the zoo more often," and "he does know how to get the best out of Tommy, I could learn something there". 

So when I see pieces like this announcement that Georgia Tech are offering an online Masters (they don't even have the good grace to blush when they use the term 'MOOC 2.0") it begins to sound not unlike, ooh, I don't know, an Open University (but with cheaper staff support). This makes me think - this is the first signs of MOOCs discovering that it wasn't quite as easy as they thought, but they still like to dress it up as a revolution.

That's my metaphor for the week, I'm sure Dominik has some better ones. What's your MOOC metaphor?

Edukashun is brocken - the Tumblr

To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy 'education is broken' meme used to justify venture capital, I've set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/

I think there's a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out largely as a pretence for some solution the company or individual has to offer. But I'll take anything in this area really. I would like to pretend that one day I'll go through them and do a semantic analysis or cluster analysis of concepts. But I'll probably just make a sarcastic one-liner instead.

Any suggestions for inclusion just tweet me @mweller.

Mildly interesting aside - I often talk about finding the right voice for a blog. This one is the carefully considered, balanced, poorly written one. I found that as soon as I started doing this tumblr blog it revealed a much snarkier, sarcastic me. Some people may like that, others not.

H817Open reflections

My small MOOC open course, H817Open ends this week, so I thought I'd post some reflections on how it's gone.

I'll start by saying what my intentions were for it. The idea was to mix formal and informal learners (as it is one quarter of a Masters level course), to blend OERs and MOOCs (it is in the OpenLearn repository and exists after course end), to use an activity-based 'collaboration-lite' model and to adopt a range of technologies.

In general it went well, the learners seemed to enjoy it, although we saw the familiar drop-off of participation. It was only on a small scale so I don't think I can draw any big conclusions. I've summarised my thoughts in the slidedeck below, so won't repeat them here. If you have time I'd thoroughly recommend looking through the blog aggregator at the student contributions, they're fabulous.

 

I will say though that I'd do it again, and it's been one of the most engaging teaching experiences I've had for a long time, if also one of the most exhausting.

In an earlier post I said the puppy would get it if people didn't enjoy it. Suffice to say the puppy is alive and well, and that is as much as we can hope for:

The MOOC wars

I admit it, I'm slow on the uptake, but I had a lightbulb moment David Kernohan pointed me at Donald Clark's post on MOOCs "More action in 1 year than 1000" (no hype there then). As Brian Lamb has reported a wikipedia edit battle around MOOCs to remove the early MOOCers such as David Wiley and George Siemens from the picture has also taken place. Initially I thought this was just a bit of ignorance, but Clark's post made me understand - it is part of a wider narrative to portray MOOCs as a commercial solution that is sweeping away the complacency of higher education. 

So Clark dismisses the impact of early MOOCers, claiming it was Khan that caused it all: "It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn’t have any HE baggage." Why? Because it appeals to the narrative to have a saviour riding in from outside HE to save education. If you acknowledge that these ideas may have come from within HE then that could look like venture capitalists latching on to a good idea in universities and trying to make money from it. That doesn't sound as sexy and brave.

This is more than historical pedantry. I'm not saying all mentions of MOOCs must start with an agreed paragraph that acknowledges Downes, Wiley, Siemens, Couros, Cormier. The intention here is to create an explicit narrative, and as narratives are founded in history, it requires a careful construction of this to support the ongoing story. The narrative goes something like:

1. Higher education is irretrievably broken
2. MOOCs have come along from outside and shown how it can be done for free and at scale
3. MOOCs can answer all your education issues and make a profit

Why do people like this narrative? For three reasons I'd suggest:

1. It's sexy and revolutionary
2. They have a commercial interest in it being accepted
3. It appeals to their ego ("I'm such a revolutionary thinker, give me a keynote")

Of course it falls apart at any detailed inspection. Clark calls MOOCs a sustainable model. Are they? At the moment they rely on those boring, haven't changed in a 1000 years universities to pay the staff to create the courses. How sustainable is that when you've had the glorious revolution? Can they really meet all educational needs? The drop-out rate is high as we know, and they tend to suit experienced learners. They meet some needs and can be very exciting, but as the new universal solution they'd create a lot of problems for a lot of learners (which some brave company would then arise to meet). 

Open education wasn't sexy, it was about giving stuff away. Entrepreneurs don't like that model, hence Clark's dismissal of the OER movement (which, at the OU anyway is actually proving itself to be sustainable and part of normal business, but hey, we don't want to hear that). Universities have been around 1000 years - that must be bad, right? If a company had been around for 1000 years, I think we'd be saying it must have a pretty good model. And of course, no innovation ever comes from inside universities.

And all this takes away from the really good stuff in MOOCs. I love MOOCs, they advance open education, they allow experimentation, they do shake up thinking in a good way, they raise the profile of teaching. This is good, exciting stuff. 

On Twitter Mike Caulfield said it reminded him of this clip:

So I know Clark is just trolling for attention and one shouldn't respond, but it's worth highlighting this nonsense when it arises because it seeps in and reinforces the new narrative. Don't be mistaken, there is a genuine battle for the future happening here, and it starts by rewriting the past.