What is the Future of MOOCs? 

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article on Massive Open Online Courses, Steve Kolowich reports that “political, regulatory, administrative, and faculty barriers to the unfettered online education that MOOC promoters envisioned have proved high, and it’s starting to look like what those companies have to offer universities may be technology tools and services that are more helpful than revolutionary.” One telling development is that a bill that was submitted to the California State Senate in March to push public universities to award academic credit to students who passed MOOCs was quietly withdrawn. 

The biggest MOOC companies – Udacity, EdX, and Coursera – continue to raise money and expand, but they acknowledge that the future is uncertain. “A medium where only self-motivated, Web-savvy people sign up, and the success rate is 10 percent, doesn’t strike me quite yet as a solution to the problems of higher education,” says Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. “Credits are the coin of the real,” says Russell Poulin at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, “and if that’s where the coins are, these companies are going to drive there.” This will put the MOOC companies in direct competition with platforms that have been around for a while, including Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Instructure, as well as textbook companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill that have expanded into the online world. 

What might the future look like? Ronald Rogers, a psychology professor at San Jose State University, co-taught an introductory statistics course on the Udacity platform last spring. Close to 20,000 people from around the world signed up for the MOOC version, but only 3,000 of them completed the course and earned a certificate from Udacity. Professor Rogers, though, was most interested in the 82 students who were taking the course for credit through San Jose State. For them, it was a regular online course; their written assignments were graded by human beings, they were able to contact Rogers for help, and he could log in to the Udacity platform to see where individual students seemed to be stuck and reach out to them. At the end of the semester, only half of the 82 earned a passing grade – a lower pass rate than students in the face-to-face version of the course – and other online/Udacity courses had similar results. The university decided to put its experiment with Udacity on hold. 

“The MOOC ‘Disruption’ Proves Less Than Revolutionary After All” by Steve Kolowich in Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 16, 2013 (Vol. LIX, #45, p. A6), 

http://chronicle.texterity.com/chronicle/20130816a?sub_id=0vTVxOksD...

From the Marshall Memo #498