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No such thing as a free MOOC

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by Jeff Haywood 17 comments

In his recent Jisc blog, David Kernohan asks: ‘Why bother paying inflated fees to attend university? …What if you could get it all for free, online?’ Of course, it is tongue in cheek, because as my title above suggests, you don’t get something for nothing.

And that brings me to our recent decision in the University of Edinburgh to join our colleagues in North America and offer our own MOOCs - or massive open online courses - through the Coursera consortium.

It has been a very busy few weeks. After taking the in principle decision, there has been a tsunami of sorting the legals (you might be surprised at how much of this there is when you place your courses with another organisation, even if those courses are free!); choosing the MOOCs to develop; making sure we have enough capacity for shooting a lot of short videos in a tight timeframe; informing senior colleagues and University Court; organising publicity and responses to queries – at times it has felt over-whelming.

I must acknowledge here my academic colleagues for their enthusiastic response to our search for suitable MOOCs, and my real indebtedness to two of my staff, Sarah Gormley and Amy Woodgate, who have worked tirelessly on the big stuff and on the details.

So, why did we decide to ‘go MOOC’? My colleagues and I have been watching MOOC developments since their earliest days, aware that they offer interesting opportunities to explore new ‘educational spaces’ in which the scale goes way beyond large on-campus classes, and where assessment has to be thought about differently.

Of course, much of what we are designing is based upon experience with technology for on-campus courses and for our expanding range of fully online taught Masters programmes, and technology in our open LLL/CPD courses, but nevertheless it does have different dimensions. Over the years Jisc has helped enormously, with our participation and learning from others through programmes in pedagogy, learner experience, open content etc – its easy to forget that, because so much knowledge just becomes internalised.

For me, MOOCs sit as part of current thinking in open educational practices (OER, OCW, OERu, connectivism etc) – ways to flex and bend the constraints that much of our traditional HE formats impose on us, and on our learners. Currently, we are exploring some of this in an EC project OERtest, especially routes to offer credit for OER/OCW/MOOC-based learning. Out of the MOOCs we expect to learn about different course designs, to reach learners from a much wider base than normal, and of course, there is reputational value for us too.

So, the preparedness was there – the big decisions were How?, With partners or solo?, and When (early adoptor or mainstream)? An invitation to join Coursera, extended by Daphne Koller to our Vice Chancellor Tim O’Shea (Chair of Jisc Board) whilst he was on study leave in California, gave us the opportunity to answer all those questions, and we decided after some brief but intense reflection that now was the time and with peers in the US was the route.

This meant that we didn’t need to build our own infrastructure but could concentrate on the pedagogy and course construction.

We shall offer our courses *as a university* rather than from individual academic staff working without our support or formal involvement. We will quality assure all our courses to ensure appropriate quality. They will be short (5 weeks in the first instance) as we feel these learners may find sustained study at a distance hard going (as do those on taught online courses), and we will also stick to first year undergraduate level.

What did it cost, and is it sustainable? As with all online courses, the costs are front-loaded but even more so for MOOCs of this type, where the delivery cost (especially teaching) is low. We will spend effort and money on all our courses to get them to the right quality. We didn’t find that we had most of what we needed to hand to ‘re-arrange the pieces’ to form MOOCs, so we are going back to the design stage and creating new where necessary. One example is video lectures; we do have lots of 50 min video lectures but they really are not what we want to offer – we want shorter, focused segments with associated study and assessment. Ditto for assessment. So, it isn’t cheap for the typical university course to ‘go MOOC’. On the other hand, no knowledge is free and as we wish to explore this space, we feel the return will be worthwhile to us, and to those who take our MOOCs.

How will we sustain it? The model is to share with Coursera of the modest charge for the ‘certificates of completion’, and we will use that income to pay for our support for learners, offered in the light-touch form that these types of MOOC use. It should break even!

And for the future? I am cautious as to where the ‘MOOC movement’ will go. Some of the wilder speculation about ‘free online degrees’ and the ‘end of HE as we know it’ doesn’t help serious debate. Currently we know little about MOOC learners, about how to design and deliver successfully in a range of subjects, and most importantly at a range of levels (eg final year undergrad). Is the experience helpful to learners, and do they get value from their certificates of completion? Much more research is needed, and perhaps Jisc might find this a useful area in which to support the UK HE community.

I can see openings where MOOCs might find a useful place in HE – enabling those in less privileged HE settings to access courses in subjects that they cannot take, individuals with weak formal qualifications who might demonstrate competences at advanced levels as part of portfolios for recognition of prior learning, as a more formal way to learn for those ‘just interested in that subject’, and for teachers in universities to pick up new ideas as to how to teach and learn online.

MOOCs won’t suit everyone, any more than on-campus courses or distance education suits everyone but extending the menu of choices is valuable. They may not be suitable for all subjects.

I am sure the next few months up to launch of our courses and then through first delivery will be fun, and also hard work. I am really looking forward to it, and I must continue to resist the temptation to keep checking how many thousands of people have registered interest ;-)

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17 Comments

  1. Sara Frank Bristow
    Thank you for sharing publicly this insight into the decision-making process... so many have wondered what, aside from positive press and certification income, universities find appealing about offering a MOOC. This helps.
    Reply
  2. Anna Mathews
    Thanks for this blog posting. I would echo Sarah Frank Bristow's comment above: It's useful to see the how idea developed within your institution, and how you went about meeting the challenges.
    I've just signed up for Edinburgh's E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC course which begins in January and I am looking forward to it enormously.
    Reply
  3. Sian Bayne
    Anna - we'll look forward to seeing you on the 'E-learning and Digital Cultures' MOOC next January - thanks for signing up.
    Readers of Jeff's post might also be interested in our complementary article in the ALT newsletter which sets out our reasons for wanting to teach a MOOC, from the academic course team perspective.
    newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2012/08/mooc-pedagogy-the-challenges-of-developing-for-coursera/
    Reply
  4. Lewis Thomas
    What an amazing tool the Internet is. I have also just signed up for Edinburgh’s E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC course and look forward to learing from and working with Sian and Anna.
    I decided to do this tonight to discover what a MOOC course would offer me and how it interfaces with traditional education after reading this post. www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/07/30/essay-whether-online-education-will-make-professors-obsolete
    I think this subject is going to be getting very hot.
    I look forward to the start of the course.
    Reply
  5. Dominik Lukes
    Sorry, I missed this post when it first came out and have since written about how to MOOCify a course: researchity.net/2012/08/17/how-to-moocify-your-course/. This would have been relevant.

    I wonder about the choice of Coursera. Was it mostly marketing and money collection platform? Otherwise, it has relatively little to recommend it.

    Also, I'm not sure that shorter videos are necessarily better than longer videos in a MOOC. It's not the length that's the problem, it's the contraint of 50 minutes or so of the timetabled slot. I wouldn't mind watching/listening to a 104-minute lecture if that's how long it would take to cover the subject. Or a 13-minute one.
    Reply
  6. Luana
    I've been very intrigued by the concpet for a while, probably because I'm too cheap to pay for anything and was attracted by the notion of free I did sign-up for one of Dave and George's first MOOC about three years ago, after hearing about it on EdTechTalk. I was impressed with the organization of the course and quickly learned (and now apply daily) that it's because even the slightest room for misinterpretation about any detail will quickly lead to a multitude of emails asking for clarification. I didn't stay in the course very long, due to other pressures on my time, which leads to my only other observation from a student's perspective: when you pay for something, you (obviously) have a higher investment into that experience and are more likely to take it seriously. For me, since it was free and so massive that no one would notice me just silently ignoring the course, I lacked some of the motivation those other pressures may have given me to stay in the course. I suspect the drop-out rate of a MOOC is much higher than a more traditional course.
    Reply
  7. Micaele
    Nice post. You raise some interesting pontis. With regard the benefits for HEIs of early adoption; I note that most MOOCS seem to be run by individuals remarkably free of institutional involvement apart from the small number of course members registering for accreditation. It seems to be very much a grass roots initiative. I do agree that visionary HEIs could seek some competitive advantage in being an early MOOC adopter but a) how many such organisations are there? and b) would that change the nature of the MOOC by the very nature of being institutionalised?Of course the real reason I commented was to contribute to you getting ten responses so that you'll run your own MOOC. Of course it would have to be in teacher education unless you have other, hidden, talents that I'm not aware of from a brief perusal of your interesting blog.Mark@marksmithers
    Reply
  8. Martin
    hey Jenny thanks for the input. i'm still miullng my way through the implications of Deleuze's commentary for Connectivism and social media, but as i read it, there's a distinction being made in that devolution of control. One is a disciplinary society founded on institutions. The other is a control society (thus using the word differently from Martin when he talks about the control involved in traditional institutional research) wherein the institutions break down and a more digital model of constant modulation which involves buying into practices so, not the same people, or the same epistemology/ontology. but, i'm still working my way to some vague grasp of it. looking forward to further conversations.
    Reply
  9. Thomas
    Very interesting points raised.. MORE research to be done!
    Reply
  10. Bill Welham
    My concerns with moocs stem from the sustainability aspect. While MIT's OCW program brought in great numbers it fell short in terms of it's access limitations. By that I mean that in the MIT model you were not privy to all content and resources but rather an overview version. I believe that in that model it was an instructor driven prospect where the professor in question doled out what was available at his or her discretion. On the question of moocs, where does that leave teachers who have spent years developing their courses and strategies? Are they being payed extra by their parent institutions for this (it is their course design)? Where is that money coming from? In fact, where is any of this money that will be required to make this happen over the long haul coming from? What promises were made to investors? Advertising revenue? This is all opaque at the moment and the danger lies in the touting of societal goodwill for the generation of capital regardless of how it comes about.
    I do believe this to be a genuinely philanthropic innovation but at the end of the day everything costs something and I have a hard time believing that established HE will be able to undercut themselves for long.
    Reply
  11. Dr Abba Wakil
    Interesting comments on MOOCS, especially for the developing world.
    I am interested in academic psychiatry, and looking for an online course, and a mentor in this subspecialty of psychiatry.
    Wakil
    Reply
  12. John Hibbs
    This is very sound advice and should be considered closely. At first I was hugely encouraged by Coursera. But having taken their a few of their classes and see how badly they are "run", and having been deeply involved in online learning for almost 20 years, I am now disgusted by what Coursera is doing to the brand image of those they represent; and the impact that is sure to come by their pace. Here's the text of my remarks at the Global Education Conference a couple days ago.


    All thoughts welcome by return email. skipper@bfranklin.edu
    portfolio web site oregonhibbs.com
    Reply
  13. John Hibbs
    The drop out rates from Coursera MOOCs are very, very high. Did anyone ever consider what damage could accrue from the comments made by those dropping out do the brand image of the originating University? Take a Coursera class from the University and have a bad experience...Suppose 20,000 enroll and 80% (easily) drop out. That means 16,000 highly motivated, globally networked individuals have something that the MIGHT say bad about the University. In a world where "going viral" is common, what damage occurs the the campus students and the alumni as their diploma is not reduced in value. More? See
    oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/
    Reply
  14. John Hibbs
    I believe there are affordable ways to provide Help Desks - I call them life boats - open at least 80 hours per week and manned by real human beings. Most of the help they would be asked to provide are routine - even pointing them to the precise FAQ would be pretty simple. I think the "helpers" could be drawn from the University, perhaps given some credits as interns, or some cash, or a combination. Or I think there might be sufficient demand from the students to pay a modes fee to have live help on demand -- a few dollars for modest help would go a long way to improve retention rates...the more TLC the better the outcome, we all know that. One has to be as imaginative in the human help that is provided as is done with alll the technology wizardry. See more here
    oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/
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