The Ed Techie

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?

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.

My MOOC tech ecosystem

On my open course H817Open I use a mixture of technology, and thought it might be useful to describe these here, and also to indicate what I'd like to do beyond this.

The technologies are:

OpenLearn - This is where the bulk of the content is hosted and also forums. It is provided by the OU for OU content only, so not an open content system. It made sense to use this, but some recent changes have made the page rendering slow, and the design is suitable for a one-off visit to find an OER in that it prompts you to find other resources, it uses up too much screen real estate on this for a MOOC.

WordPress - this is the blog aggregator, based on the DS106 model. Students blog on their own spaces, but they register their blog with us. We then syndicate all the feeds using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I wanted them to use any blog they liked, so I tried using a Google Form that has a Martin Hawksey script to autodiscover the feed. This hasn't really worked as feeds are hidden all over the place and I've ended up adding most in by hand. We ask students to tag posts with #h817open and only posts with this tag are accepted (there is a setting in FeedWordPress for this), so if they blog about going shopping, that doesn't get pulled in. This has worked quite well. For next year I think I would ask learners to restrict their platforms to blogger, wordpress or tumblr as we can then write a bit of code that will automatically discover feeds in the known locations for these platforms.

Mailchimp - I send a weekly email outlining what is coming up and addressing any issues. This has been surprisingly important, and probably the key component. Mailchimp allows you to send emails to upto 2000 subscribers for free. I get a csv file from the openlearn platform and upload this, then create the weekly email. A lot of the identity and tone of the course arises from this email so it's worth investing some time in getting it right (I don't know that I have).

GMail - I set up a generic email account for the course to handle queries

Cloudworks and badges - we experimented with badges and the Cloudworks system has a very neat tool for creating a badge. However it's a bit fiddly in that you have to create a cloudworks id and then a mozilla one.

Blackboard Collaborate - I deliberately haven't scheduled many synchronous events as I wanted a more open course in terms of timings, but I did get George Siemens to give a talk and we have a discussion and review session planned. The OU has signed a contract with Blackboard so we went with this for easiness, but I think I would explore Google Hangouts next year.

Twitter - I ask people to use the #h817open hashtag, but I have to say Twitter has proven to be less significant, or less active, than I expected. I would probably make a specific activity around this next year to encourage use early on.

Google Plus - I didn't create a specific Google Plus community, but learners created one immediately and it has proven to be lively, interesting and supportive. It has beaten twitter as the forum of choice.

Blogs - as I mentioned above, most student activity is undertaken on their own blogs. They can use any platform they like (although note my reservations about this for next year). I've been trying to promote a 'collaboration-lite' model whereby you can work largely independently, but through the aggregator (or Google Plus) you can connect and share as much as you like. I think this has worked for some learners but not others.

So that is my collection of tools - a mixture of in-house and out-there technologies. I met Philipp Schmidt last week and at the same time had a twitter conversation with Martin Hawksey which has set me thinking. What I would like is an open course DIY toolkit. You come along, select which functions you want and it recommends a bunch of open technologies (although not necessarily open source) with examples of where they've been used, and hey presto, you roll your own MOOC. I may work on this soon, but if anyone wants to have a crack, let me know.

5 reasons to do a MOOC & 5 reasons not to

I gave a presentation last week with the above title. In my preparation it wavered between 10 reasons to do one, and 10 reasons NOT to do one, which indicates my ambiguous take on MOOCs, so I settled for half and half.

By "do a MOOC" here I mean for an instructor or an institution to offer one, rather than a learner take one, although you can infer some of the learner reasons also. Later in the week I followed the uniteMOOC session up at Newcastle via Twitter and some very similar responses were being given there. My presentation is below, but actually, you'd be better off looking at Sheila MacNeill's splendid Prezi on the subject, which was part of the Newcastle event.

 

5 reasons to do a MOOC & 5 reasons not to from Martin Weller

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?

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.

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.