The Ed Techie

H817Open MOOC content available

(Enjoy the MOOC or the puppy gets it)

The content for my MOOC, no, I mean, open course, on Open Education is now all available in the OpenLearn environment. It doesn't officially start until March 16th, but I'm adopting a more flexible approach than many MOOCs so you can work through it in your own pace (and it'll stay up afterwards).

Some points to note:

• You don't have to enrol to view the material, only if you want to contribute to forums and also to get course emails
• Use forums instead of comments, there is one per week
• When you enrol, nothing magic happens.
• The OpenLearn platform has recently had a major architectural overhaul which does something fancy with Moodle and Drupal. But, erm, this means pages are loading slowly at the moment. Be patient and smile.
• You don't have to do every activity every week, it's a pick n mix model
• It's a bit experimental, so don't view it as a precursor for shiny things from FutureLearn
• Be nice to each other and especially to me

So if you haven't enrolled, there's still time. I'll probably send round another email (I have ambitions to become a spammer) on Thursday just as course start reminder.

Goodbye to two colleagues

I don't often use this blog for personal reasons, but two colleagues are leaving the OU, and for various reasons I can't make either of their leaving dos. So, to assuage my guilt, and also to publicly acknowledge and thank them, I'm blogging it. I'm sure it's better than a fountain pen as a leaving present.

The first colleague is Ross MacKenzie. Ross works in what is called Learning and Teaching Solutions. They do all the content creation stuff from editing to DVDs to running the VLE. In fact, it was Ross who succeeded me as VLE Director - I'd come up with a solution based on an open architecture, which Ross very sensibly translated as a decision to go with Moodle. This single decision did an awful lot for open source (many other universities took it as a cue that it was okay to adopt Moodle), and also for the Open University it was important to embrace open source. Part of the story of the OU over the last 15 years has been to engage with changing definitions of what it means to be 'open'. And the VLE was a big part of this.

Ross is unusual for a technical chap in that he is helpful and likes to say yes. Arguably this makes him unqualified for the changing world of educational IT (I'm joking IT friends! Sort of). He is also a very good photographer, and plans to do more in this line. He has been going for nearly 3000 days continuously over on Blip, check out his photos there and on his blog (he likes to travel to cold, inhospitable places). 

The second colleague is Tony Walton. Tony has worked in the strategy office and alongside various PVCs. For a few years I worked on a number of projects which Tony was charged with leading. I used to joke that a coffee with Tony was a dangerous event since you'd end up on a strategic project. When I list the projects I worked on, mainly because of Tony, you'll appreciate the impact he's had on the OU as well as on my career: Getting the initial Hewlett funding for OpenLearn; developing a new Broadcast Strategy that moved away from TV and led to the founding of our Open Media Unit; the VLE which saw us move to a centralised elearning system; SocialLearn which was the OU's first engagement with social media (and a forerunner to FutureLearn in many ways).

As with Ross, these projects have all helped the OU engage with what it means to be open in 21st century. Like Ross, Tony does not have typical administrator traits, I won't stereotype (again) but he's helpful, unflappable, unassuming and enthusiastic about his tasks. 

Tony and Ross, it's been great working with you - enjoy your retirements (or in Ross's case, new career), the OU will miss you (wipes tear from eye). Here's a retirement card for you both to share:

Disrupting disruption

David Kernohan likes to joke that he has a disruption klaxon that sounds whenever that over-used term is deployed. It must have sounded like a nuclear attack warning when reading this educause piece (which he pointed me at, and which Pat Lockley gives the perfect, hilarious response to). Now, I'll confess, I've used the D word in the past. I liked Christensen's first book, it was well researched and well argued. But like so many concepts it has been misapplied to the point where it is meaningless.

If you are about to employ a consultant, particularly in education, I will offer you this money-saving advice for free: don't look at one that uses the word 'disruption' (or, even worse, describes themselves as a 'disruptor').

Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides glamorous disruption.

So, everything has to be disruptive, a game-changer, a revolution, an all-encompassing tsunami of change. It can't just be useful in a particular context. That educause piece judges OERs a failure precisely because they are not disruptive. That tells you more about the author than it does about OERs - in their world only disruption matters. Take the OER based TESSA project. Useful? Undoutedly. Disruptive? Probably not. So, who cares about it, right? We should aim higher than getting well paid speaking gigs for middle-aged men with goatees who skateboard to work.

Any educational technology advance in the past 15 years will have been claimed to be disruptive by someone: elearning, learning objects, VLEs, OERs, games, MOOCs. The thing is all of these are very useful for particular problems. But if they ain't disruptive they're no good.

So this is my motto from now on: don't be disruptive, be useful.

Last thought - whenever I hear disruption, it is not David's klaxon that plays in my head, but Mitchell and Webb's NumberWang, except it is now "DisruptionWang". Try it, you'll find it makes as much sense.

 

UPDATE: DisruptionWang is sweeping the nation. You can now get the t-shirt (courtesy of David Kernohan)

Registration open for my Open Education MOOC

A year ago we decided to rewrite one of our Master's level courses, H817, Innovation and Openness in Education. I volunteered to write one of the four blocks of the course, on open education. I blithely suggested, "I'll probably make it a MOOC." It seemed fitting as MOOCs and different flavours of openness were the subject of the block. At the time MOOCs were all a bit new, experimental and fun. 

How that glib suggestion has haunted me. As the profile of MOOCs have increased so the demands and requirements placed on creating one have multiplied. But with the help of some great people at the OU (it's been great to work with people who want to help rather than just repeating "no") we are finally ready to roll.

Yes, now you can enrol on the MOOC, which starts officially on March 16th. There is some set-up work that can be done and you'll be registered to go then when it's all live.

Not another bloody MOOC I hear you cry! Yes, but I hope to be testing some new elements as well as providing damn fine learning materials. Here's what I think is mildly distinctive about mine:

• Not celebrity focused - although it's written by me, it doesn't feature me, the activities are written in an objective style. I'm uneasy about the whole celebrity academic thing in MOOCs, but I know some people like that sense of following an expert, so we'll see if this less personality focused model works.
• Collaboration-lite pedagogy - in a lot of our formal courses we have very structured group work, which develops important team working skills, but is very time-consuming and often unpopular. I'm trying to use a 'collaboration-lite' model here (I'm not the first, DS106 and others do it very successfully). The intention is that you act as individuals, but through blogs, twitter and yes, good old-fashioned forums there is room for engagement and community. It's as take as much community as you want model. Some people like to study alone, others want to socalise, I'm hoping to cater for both.
• Open as to time - although it will run as a cohort for 7 weeks from March 16th, the course will then be 'frozen' and stay open in the OpenLearn environment. This means that although you won't be studying it with people or have any support, you can study it any time. I would like to see staff development or study groups create their own cohort and do it whenever they want.
• Mix formal and informal distance learners - Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and David Wiley have all run open boundary courses before, where the campus students mix with the informal learners. So it's not that new, but it's the first time we've done it at the OU, and I'm not sure it's been done with distance learners that much before. So it'll be interesting to see how these groups mix.
• Forum support - I've been lucky enough to get some cash to pay two of our associate lecturers to support the course by looking after forums and checking twitter. This doesn't mean they are acting as personal tutors to everyone, so don't bombard them with queries, but I'm interested to see what levels of support are needed.
• Badges - okay, not that novel, but there are three badges associated with the course, so again, I'm just interested in how much take-up of these there will be, and whether people want more.

The course outline is as follows:

• Week 1: Openness in education 
• Week 2: Open education resources
• Week 3: Moving beyond OER
• Week 4: MOOCs
• Week 5: Pedagogy in open learning
• Week 6: Operating in an open world
• Week 7: Conclusion

Go on, give it a bash, what have you got to lose but your evenings?

It's kinda personal

Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this!

You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're people who wouldn't have read it. And the book brings out different concerns and reactions in them, many of which hadn't occurred to me. This going beyond your usual readership is a salutary lesson for any writer, and has made me rethink some of the way I write.

In his post Jim comments:

"I understand it would be impolitic for Martin to mention this in the book given his audience, but for me that is the real radical line of reasoning for open scholarship—a clear picture of just who the people behind the ideas ideas are, and what “such people” represent more tangibly as human beings."

I don't know about impolitic, I just forgot to mention it. Whenever I do sessions on social media for educators I always address this point. Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

In Amis's The Pregnant Widow the main character finds financial success but as soon as he does, his ability to write poetry dries up. You can't have both. Maybe that's the way it goes with social media.

 

Chips ahoy for MOOCs

In a post some time back I mentioned that academics now have to compete in an attention economy, and this isn't something we're used to doing (or very good at). It means making your slideshare attractive, or making your blog post punchy, or giving your paper a snappy title. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems awkward and artificial.

MOOCs/Open courses will be the next in this line. I've heard more than one commentator say you have yo grab learner's interest in the first 5 minutes of a MOOC (maybe that's too long). That probably isn't true of formal education, where you have a captive audience. It may be a good tactic for a lecture, but it isn't a necessity. 

There are lots of lists of great opening lines to novels - this list puts "Call me Ishmael" at no 1, but I have to say I'd disagree, given the criteria I'm about to set out (Pride and Prejudice at number 2 is a better example I think, and Clavino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller at 14 is probably the best - how can you resist that?).

For me, opening lines (or shots in cinema) need to achieve three things:

1) Quality - you need to know you're in the hands of a gifted artist and it's worth investing the next few hours/days/months of your life in their work.

2) Content - is this something I am going to be interested in? Good opening lines will let you know what type of subject matter, or genre this is, although very good ones may well subvert this expectation too.

3) Direction - you don't have to give the ending away in the opening lines, but a tease about the direction pulls the reader in.

So, armed with my three criteria I thought I'd look at my favourite opening lines of a song (for this month anyway). It's not as lofty as the books in the list, it's The Hold Steady's "Chips Ahoy". The opening lines go:

"She put $900 on the fifth horse in the sixth race
i think its name is "chips ahoy!"
it came in six lengths ahead, we spent the whole next week getting high"

I make no pretensions that's poetry, but it's a good opening to a rock song. And it meets my criteria I think:

• Quality - that number motif is carefully crafted, and the choice of the horse's name (after a biscuit) instead of some fancy name like Beauregard, sets the tone perfectly
• Content - you pretty much immediately know what sort of life this is depicting, and the type of tale it will tell. This is not a story of middle class alienation in the suburbs. 
• Direction - anything that starts with this positive note, you know won't maintain it, so it gives a good hint at the direction it will take (unusually, the song has a sequel too, called The Weekenders, which contains the great lyric "It's not gonna be like in those romantic comedies/ I bet no-one learns a lesson")

Now, I've just created a MOOC open course and it certainly doesn't start off with a carefully crafted opening line or snappy 2 minutes. It starts off with a course description, learning outcomes and an overview. All very worthy and useful stuff. I think it does meet my 3 criteria, but it does it too slowly. A question then for those developing and studying open courses is the extent to which we should deliberately craft these big bang openings? Do learners need them to decide or do they come with a different set of priorities? You may be prepared for the slow build in learning. Or is the attention economy online just too strong a force?

Just asking the questions. Oh, here's a video of Chips Ahoy while you ponder the answers.

How do you fix a problem like education?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/7408506410/ >

I've blogged a couple of times before about my frustration with the education is broken rhetoric. To be clear this doesn't mean I think everything is rosy and we carry on as we are, but I think it's too simplistic and doesn't really get us anywhere. I'll try and explain why in this post.

Clay Shirky posted a piece on MOOCs as higher education disruptors last year, and has followed up with another piece here. He uses the phrase "school is broken" so my education is broken klaxon went off, forcing this post.

I should say that, unlike some of my edtech peers (stand up David Kernohan and George Siemens), I like Shirky, I think he is often very perceptive and he is also a very persuasive writer. In this piece he definitely nails some things - most significantly the common misperception of a university student and university life. It isn't young people at pristine universities, so making appeals to this type of learning as typical doesn't do anyone any favours. I wonder though how many people really do this? Maybe it's a US thing - in the UK we've had a very mixed economy of higher education (including that Open University thing) for a long time now.

I have a number of issues around the education is broken theme though. It's never clearly explained what exactly is broken. Is it the cost? Is it student achievement? Is it student drop-out? These are quite different issues. If cost is your main concern, then maybe it's not that education is broken, but that education funding is broken. This is quite different. You could argue here that the problem is not with an inefficient education system (I'm sure it is inefficient, but certainly less so than it used to be), but rather with the notion of an education market. As has been pointed out in the UK, marketing spend has gone up considerably in universities. This is a natural consequence of making education compete in a market place. As is providing better sports facilities or bars than competitors. All of this spend has little to do with education, but having created a commercial market through fees, you can't then complain that universities behave in an entirely appropriate way to survive in that context.

If it is student drop-out that is your main concern, then I agree, we could do a lot more. A small example, but my colleagues on the Bridge 2 Success project worked with many of the students Shirky identifies, and who had struggled with maths to the point where it was preventing them from gaining employment. By creating an online course from OpenLearn content and backing this up with support (sometimes face to face, sometimes online) they got something like an 80% pass rate. Absolutely we need more ideas like this, simply sending people back through the same system that they've struggled with before makes no sense.

So, I think we need to decide what is broken with more clarity before offering solutions. We need to know what is broken to fix it effectively. I don't want you amputing my leg and fitting me with a prosthetic, no matter how marvellous it is, if my problem is migraines.

My second beef/horsemeat (UK joke) with Shirky is his naive view of MOOCs as panacea. He cites a book "Don't go back to school" which interviewed 80 people who had dropped out of school and gone on to be successful. I'm sure there are very interesting lessons to learn here. But really, a carefully selected sample of 80 people? And from that you want to make recommendations about education for everyone? 

So when Shirky promotes MOOCs as the equivalent of MP3 or YouTube, he underestimates the demands that will be put on them, and is, unusually for him, wrong about the analogy. MP3s could replace vinyl/CDs pretty much completely. Free MOOCs can't replace education because much of the cost of education is nothing to do with the educating part. Taking a MOOC for fun is great. But when your job will depend on it, then you'll start making demands of it that currently don't exist. If MOOCs replace higher ed then they'll need to find ways of doing the following:

• Dealing with student appeals
• Coping with a diverse range of students and abilities
• Ensuring quality control of content
• Develop assessment methods and procedures that can be defended
• Ensuring robustness of service
• Ensuring accreditation reliability and trustworthiness
• Complying with numerous regulations on issues such as accessibility
• Etc

You get my point. All of these requirements will cost money. So MOOCs as universal education method will soon begin to cost more and more. They'll also start to spend more and more on recruitment and marketing. Sound familiar?

But, I think he is right when he highlights price as a factor. Free education is one revolution, cheap education might be even more significant.

 

The MOOCs that ate themselves

[Image by David Kernohan]

Unless you've been in a very long meeting you can't have missed the story about the Coursera/Georgia Tech MOOC that ran into difficulty and was cancelled (yes, we get the irony that it was Fundamentals of Online Education, no need to go on about it). The Georgia Tech MOOC was trying to do some different things, maybe they didn't all work, but I don't think it was the disaster it's been portrayed as. In the early MOOC days this level of experimentation would have been accepted (I didn't sign up for it, so I'm just going on the reports of others here). It seems that the level of expectation around MOOCs has made this level of flakiness unacceptable.

This is but the most publicly embarrassing example of a growing trend I've noticed. As MOOCs have become mainstream and high profile there is increasing pressure on them to be very high quality, robust and efficient. There is a good deal of brand reputation now invested in them. In short, they have become the equivalent of television broadcast. This means that they're expensive to create, need to appeal to a broad demographic, and have high production values. If this is their direction then there are several inevitable outcomes:

• They become unsustainable - a good MOOC is so expensive to put on that it simply isn't worth doing. You're providing it for free after all.
• Only elite institutions offer them - given the expense, only those institutions who have the money, or the skills to produce broadcast quality content will provide them.
• They are conservative - as Georgia Tech found, it's better not to try anything risky or innovative, because the cost of failure is too great.
• MOOC failure will be costly - if you fail publicly and damage your own, and your institution's reputation, don't expect them to give you promotion. So why risk it?

That'd be quite a depressing scenario, in such a short space of time MOOCs could have moved from the 'we're all in this together' ethos to another form of broadcast controlled by a few. Hopefully people will still experiment with the cMOOC type approach, and offer a huge buyer-beware caveat. But unless we want to kill MOOCs, I'd suggest we all cut them a bit of slack as learners.

Open scholarship as resolution to the academic dilemma

There is something of a tension at the heart of the relationship between academics and the institutions that employ them. Institutions want to have academics with a high profile and external recognition. But they also want them to do work for them, as they're paying the wage. Academics want to have a high profile and external recognition, but also recognise that a good proportion of their work may need to be for the institution in roles that don't attract much of this.

Usually this balance is fairly easy to maintain, but the problem is that much of the work involved in scholarship doesn't directly benefit the institution. Consider these examples:

• Examining PhDs
• Giving keynote talks
• Being external examiner on a course
• Sitting on project advisory boards
• Reviewing papers for journals
• Being an editor, or sitting on a conference committee
• Writing journal papers

Performing many of these can come under the type of work you need to do to stay current in your field (examining PhDs is a good way of being up on research I've found), but others less so. Giving the same keynote for the tenth time might help the individual do some networking, and could possibly lead to a joint research bid, say, but the direct benefit for the institution is rather tenuous.

As an aside these are also the type of 'glue' functions that keep scholarship functioning, and operate on an unspoken reciprocity basis - eg if you don't examine PhDs then you can't expect people to do the same for you. There is a strong element of game theory here. You could indulge (or an institution could demand that its staff indulge) in selfish behaviour. This might lead to gains for you, but only if others continue to be benevolent. If everyone opts for selfish behaviour then we get the familiar tragedy of the commons - the whole system becomes unsustainable because it would be foolish to be anything other than selfish.

When times are good, this tension is less evident. But when times are tough, and staffing levels low, then this tension comes to the fore - "you can't attend this committee meeting that you're now on, because you're in Cyprus giving a keynote? But you didn't attend the last one because you were in Edinburgh doing a PhD viva."  Or, "you're teaching load has doubled, John has retired, can you take on his PhD students as well?"

Maintaining an external profile is still important to the individual (indeed, when job security is low, it becomes an increased priority as you may find yourself looking for a new post). So, how to do it when there are competing demands on your time? There are obviously lots of negotiations and ways of stressing academic credibility, etc which will vary from person to person and institution to institution. But part of the answer is also to engage in open scholarship.

This came to mind as I struggled to manage my own workload the other day (yes, time to break out the violins). In doing my workload planning for the year it became apparent that I was (as all good footballers say) committed 150%. We pretended this wasn't the case to make the figures fit, but it means there is no slack in my diary, and that's before new things such as FutureLearn come along.

I currently turn down about an invitation a week to speak at various events because I've invariably got meetings for the various OU projects I'm leading on already in the diary (ramp up the violins). I managed to write a paper before Christmas but I'm struggling to produce another one. It is a good paper I think, but I need 3 to 4 days uninterrupted to write it and put the data into order. Traditional scholarship is just very time consuming. This is a good thing, it means the outputs are (hopefully) of a high quality. 

But you may get squeezed on this, and this is where open scholarship comes in. While I haven't managed to write my paper, I have managed to produce a couple of blog posts. I can do these in a lunch time, or on a Saturday morning when I'm trying to avoid watching James Martin misuse the word literally on Saturday Kitchen. MOOCs may play into this also, if your teaching load is increased, then making courses open at least gains some external profile (although, as I am learning, it does involve a lot more work too). The same might be true of presentations shared via YouTube or Slideshare. 

So, the question that is usually asked of open scholarship type activities is "how do you find the time for all this extra stuff?" We may be seeing this inversed - how do you find the time for the traditional stuff? 

MOOCs are your friends

<Image Giulia Forsythe http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8028605773/>

(I know what you're thinking: "if only someone would write an opinion blog post on MOOCs, there just aren't any out there").

Reactions to MOOCs tend to fall into two camps. The first is the MOOC will conquer all group who see them as saviours of learning and destroyers of universities. See Clay Shirky's MP3 analogy for an example (and also David Kernohan's excellent response) although this month's MOOC hyperbole award goes to this techcrunch piece.

The second camp are the dismissers. MOOCS are a fad, they aren't anything new, or they're so flawed they aren't worth considering. See for example, MOOCS fad and bubble .

What I want to consider here though is the idea of MOOCs being complementary to existing Higher Education practice. It's a line I've promoted before, in my digital scholar book I make the argument that:

"Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either through generating their own, sharing or discussing, the outcome is a larger population of active learners. A population of active learners are more likely to engage in formal study than a population of passive consumers."

I've been asked to do a couple of MOOC presentations recently, and I've tried to provide examples of where MOOCs can work in harmony with current educational practices, either boosting recruitment, enhancing the student experience or allowing different approaches. So, here's my top five ways in which MOOCs are your friend:

1. Open up a portion of courses - one could structure online (or blended) courses so a portion of them is a stand-alone MOOC. This is what I'm doing with H817, where my 7 weeks of the 20 week course is open. This allows students to see if it's the type of course they want to study, to make connections and experience studying. We found this type of trialling quite important in OpenLearn (as the research report sets out). It has several benefits for the institution and the learner. Firstly, it's the shop window, so it can increase student recruitment. Secondly, it can increase student retention, since those learners who will struggle can find this out for free, and either take a different subject, study at a different level or take preparatory material. Thirdly it can widen participation, reaching audiences you may have struggled to reach before, because they can try it for free and widening participation is one of those strategic targets many universities set themselves and then struggle to achieve.
2. Open boundary courses - DS106 and Phonar are good examples of these. A campus based course with fee-paying students supported on campus, has an open boundary so informal learners can study online too. As well as the advantages set out in 1) this has particular benefits in certain subject areas. Photography is one such area where exposure to a wider audience, including professionals and experienced hobbyists, is beneficial. But for all students there is a benefit in developing a network of peers beyond their immediate cohort.
3. MOOC collaboration - HEIs can collaborate on MOOCs which are useful for a range of their students. Why teach the same subject at several places, when you can create a high quality MOOC that they all take, and is recognised by all participating HEIs?
4. MOOC recognition - by formally recognising certain MOOCs, HEIs could shorten some of the courses they offer. For example, if you have successfully completed four of these ten MOOCs, then you can skip the first year of a degree programme and complete in two years. This may not look like a win for the HEIs, but it could be. For the students it means fees are reduced by at least a third, which might make degree study more attractive. For campus universities they are selling the 'campus experience' more, without it costing quite so much, and as with 2) we may see higher retention of students who do sign up because they've been through MOOCs already.
5. Curriculum experimentation and expansion - formal, online courses are an increasingly large investment for HEIs, which means course approval is more rigourous. The demands placed on a formal course are lessened for a MOOC (although they do not disappear), which allows for experimentation. And because you are appealing to a global audience, what is not a viable course for a campus, fee paying constituency may well be viable to a global community of informal learners. This means you can experiment with the curriculum, and find out if courses, or technology, or pedagogy, can be rolled into your formal offerings. It also means you can offer a broader curriculum, because you can offer your own low-cost MOOCs but also recognise others. "Hydro-engineering and Russian?" We do the engineering part, you do the Russian via this MOOC. 

So there you have it - MOOC as slightly annoying friend.