Can MOOCs mitigate the job displacement caused by automation?
‘It might seem odd that I was taking law exams a few days before the verdict. It certainly seemed bizarre to my guards, who said I would not need a law degree where I was going. But I had continued my studies throughout the trial and I wanted to take the examination. I was single-minded about it, and I later realized that it was a way to keep myself from thinking negatively. I knew I would not be practicing law again very soon, but I did not want to consider the alternative. I passed the London Intermediate exams.’
These words are taken from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. They prove the essential role that distance-learning played in the survival of his mind and soul.
Upon his return from a tour in the U.K. to secure support for the freedom struggle, Mandela was arrested and given a five-year prison sentence. He began his imprisonment at Pretoria Local Prison. When an ANC hideout was raided by the police, Nelson’s charges were elevated and he soon found himself facing sabotage charges in what would later be known as the Rivonia trial.
Today, more than 15,000 students study on the University of London’s LLB program through distance and flexible learning. Some of those students are, like Nelson Mandela, incarcerated, and the University of London partners with the African Prisons Project (APP) in Kenya and Uganda to provide them with education in areas such as law, accounting and computing.
I also relied on a program similar to that used by Mandela to expand my knowledge. In 2013 I finished my BSc and MSc in Architecture, which I studied in Spain. After moving to London, I realized that I wanted to expand my studies; However, I had to make a living in order to be living in a city as expensive as London. Fortunately, somebody talked to me about the University of London International Programs and I found a perfect fit in the BSc of Economics and Management taught by the London School of Economics, which I finished in 2017.
Now let’s focus on the testimony of someone quite different from Mandela:
‘The thought of going to more school was not on my radar. It was never discussed between me and my parents. Never. Period. The words never came up. In my family you just went to work. You got a job that would provide a decent salary and some benefits. You bought a house and took care of your kids. We thought that more than a high school education was sort of a waste of time. Not one person in my family ever had gone to more than high school. Life just starts going and you have a family and a house and you’re buying things and you think that this isn’t so bad. I guess that’s why everybody thought that I was crazy for taking an online course on Coding. I guess it was a way to keep dreaming of a more stable and secured professional life’
These words were written by an employee referred to as Tim on a study conducted by Iowa State University on the experiences of displaced manufacturing workers as they retrain in community college settings.
Leaving the obvious differences aside, and understanding that Mandela’s situation was a way more traumatic and challenging one, it’s hard not to see some resonance between both statements.
Knowledge can set people free, both literally and figuratively.
This article focuses on the importance of the distance-learning development and, specifically, MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), to attenuate the sociological impact that automation will have on the global workforce. For that purpose, it is essential to understand the History both of distance-learning and job displacement caused by technological revolutions.
Distance-learning in the U.S: past and present
The origins of distance-learning can be traced back to the end of the 19th Century, when the University of Chicago was the first in the U.S. to offer such a revolutionary learning system.
1892: The University of Chicago started to offer“correspondence” courses.
1922: Pennsylvania State College offered some radio-broadcasted courses.
1953: The University of Houston offered the first televised college courses.
1960: the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. This would evolve into PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which would be used later to create many of the concepts of social networking that we know today: message boards, chat rooms and screen sharing.
1965: The University of Wisconsin started a telephone-based distance learning program for physicians.
1976: Coastline Community College became the first “virtual college,” with no campus and all courses broadcast.
1980: Various online programs began popping up all over the U.S. due to a higher percentage of personal Internet access.
1984: Electronic University Network (EUN) offered its first online course in 1986 (before the invention of the World Wide Web) for use with DOS and Commodore 64 computers.
1997: The Interactive Learning Network (ILN) was created and released to multiple schools as the first eLearning platform to be used at universities like Yale, Cornell and the University of Pittsburgh.
2000s: Most major universities began adding online courses to their curriculum, including some degrees offered entirely online.
2006: Apple introduced iTunes U, offering lectures on a long list of topics available to anyone willing to buy them.
2012: Udacity (founded by a Stanford professor who helped teach the AI class) and EdX (MIT + Harvard), two massive online education websites, opened and offered hundreds of university-level MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
Many people believe that Distance-Learning programs are suitable only for those students who lack time, economic resources or a combination of both. And it is partly true according to student surveys done in the U.S.
According to the survey done by BestColleges, the most common reasons for choosing online versus on-campus learning options are still the usual suspects: demand for flexibility due to existing commitments, lack of accessibility to certain on-campus studies and employer incentive or partnership.
And yet, eLearning is a high-growth market with more than $110 billion in revenues and more than 30% of the American student population relying on distance learning resources to increase their education. The growth of this market, both for people who are involved in exclusive distance-learning and those who are registered in a mixed program, seems unstoppable.
Companies are also relying on online professional development to improve their employees’ skills, with approximately 77% of U.S. firms currently using such platforms.
This is precisely the area where there is yet a lot to be done, especially if society wants to get ahead of a phenomenon that will drastically impact the job market: automation.
The impact of automation and the false promises of worker retraining
It is well known that advances in AI and robotics have been huge in the last decade. As a result, many jobs in the U.S. and all over the world will be displaced in the following years. Even more: an analysis by Ball State University found that a first wave of automation has caused nearly 9 in 10 manufacturing jobs to disappear since 2000.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, more than 73 million U.S. jobs will disappear by 2030, and even though this will not be the first time in History in which the production model in society is drastically altered because of technological revolutions (think of industrialization), many researchers believe that a rising productivity and other factors will not completely offset the job losses this time. Furthermore: it could well be that the positive and negative consequences of this phenomena will not impact all socioeconomic strata of society in a similar way.
The McKinsey report found that almost 39 million jobs could be lost due to midpoint automation, while 73 million would be destroyed by rapid automation. A significant number of workers will hence have to learn new skills or be retrained entirely: this could affect a third of the workforce in U.S. and Germany and one half in Japan.
On the other hand, AI and related technologies will also boost economic growth and thus create many additional job opportunities, just as other past waves of technological innovation have done, from steam engines to computers.
Precisely one of the four key areas that society will need to address according to the report is scaling and re-imagining job retraining and workforce skills development. Therefore, enabling displaced individuals to learn marketable new skills throughout their lifetime will be an essential task. It is also important to underline that this will consist of mid-career retraining, hence requiring a very specific type of planning.
Even though it is true that businesses will have to take a lead in some areas (such as on-the-job training), it seems that eLearning will unequivocally play an essential role in this paradigm shift. The main question then is: what kind of skills will workers have to learn? They could be summed up in:
- Digital skills
- Human skills that are less easy to automate: creativity, personal communication and managerial & entrepreneurial skills.
However, as it stands right now, community colleges and other affordable means of learning have failed to fulfill their potential role in retraining workers, something worrying knowing that a 34% of the $114 billion the federal government spends on workforce development goes to higher education — especially 2-year colleges.
The federal government has already called for better cooperation between industry and community colleges in demand-driven training, i.e. training that does not focus on skills that are outdated by the time students graduate. The World Economic Forum anticipates a rise in demand for some specialties, like mechatronics, that didn’t even exist a decade or two ago. And yet, some boot camps’ goal is not to teach students everything they need to know to be the best in a particular job, but just to get the skills required to secure an interview.
There are some positive exceptions, such as community colleges and technical schools in the Detroit area. The Henry Ford College has revolutionized many of its programs to focus on communication skills, critical-thinking and time-management skills. They don’t focus only on technical instruction any more, they prefer to help students build a foundation for a lifetime of learning and continuous adaptability.
And this really is the essential point that this article is trying to make: without a specific job at the end of a study program, many displaced workers are not going to waste their time retraining just to retrain.
It is a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma.
Employers don’t want to expand without the availability of an already-skilled workforce. Workers who have been displaced by automation, on the other hand, don’t want to dedicate too much time to retraining if they don’t have the warranty that a job will await at the completion of their studies.
Some of the retraining might be difficult for certain workers: someone in his 50s who has not been in classroom in decades might not be willing to spend some years to train for a new job surrounded by younger people and start at the bottom of the career ladder. Furthermore: many men don’t want to train for the jobs that are available, especially in health care, because of the stigma of having occupations associated to women.
Then, how can eLearning help improve this situation? How will distance-learning evolve to better serve those people who will need flexible learning and a warranty of a job at the end of their studies?
Workforce training as a new focus for MOOCs
Most of the students currently enrolled in MOOCs are already in possession of a degree. There hasn’t been much progress in attracting students who would really benefit from completing such courses and not have their jobs displaced by technological innovation. It is therefore essential to wonder why.
Many countries have already tried to promote the use of these resources. The French government teamed up with OpenClassrooms to give job seekers access to many online courses; The Saudi government even partnered with edX to reduce unemployment among young citizens.
If one asks many Education professionals, it will be very easy to find out that most people associate MOOCs to high level content from globally renowned universities. However, there are equally many platforms offering support in many other skills, from computing to basic math.
Luckily, it seems that some MOOCs, such as Coursera, are gearing towards paying more attention to this market.
Jeff Maggioncalda, Cousera’s CEO, stated in an interview the following:
With companies across the world facing a massive skills gap challenge, they are turning to Coursera to help them manage and transform their talent through an environment of accelerated change and rapidly evolving skills caused by digital and data revolution.
Employers across industries are investing in technology-centric credentials, including data science, machine learning, and cryptocurrency. That said, ‘hard skills’ are not the only types of expertise in demand. Many companies are looking for “softer” skills like leadership and adaptability, explaining the popularity of courses like Learning How to Learn.
In the last year alone, 18 companies have joined Coursera as course creators including Google, IBM, Cisco, BCG, and PwC. From IBM’s Blockchain Foundation for Developers to Google’s IT Support Professional Certificate to Deeplearning.ai’s Deep Learning, leading companies around the world are turning to online education to help address rising skills shortages.
Precisely one of the essential points raised by the CEO is the development of workforce training partnerships with individual employers. These were launched merely two years ago, and by 2019 more than 900 companies have started using Coursera for workplace training.
An essential advantage to this type of collaborations is the fact that they are curated learning programs that meet their specific needs, which means that the chances of landing an interview once the program is completed seem quite higher.
As automation evolves and a more significant part of the workforce is affected by it, it will be essential for the private sector to team up with MOOCs. On the one hand, many new positions will require skills that are not taught by traditional degrees; on the other hand, it would not be sustainable for society to have more than 30% outside the labor force.
The challenges for MOOCs and how to address them
There is no doubt that MOOCs are the future and that they will play an essential role in sustaining not just our economy, but our society itself. And yet, there are some challenges are being addressed and will need further work in the future.
- A lack of an effective system to measure and validate the progress of learners: if companies are to trust these programs as a means to filter candidates and employ those who are most suitable to the new positions, this is an essential point to improve. MOOCs need to have periodic assessments that prove the students’ comprehension of the material and at the same time ensure that users cannot cheat on these tests. For instance, a technology that blocked access to other websites while taking the exams or presenting tests with answers really hard to check on Google could be good ideas.
- A better integration between MOOCs and the college system, i.e. enabling the use of online course credits to claim a degree from a traditional college. This is something that is already happening in certain universities of the U.K., such as the University of Leeds, the University of Birmingham or Queensland University.
- A lack of personalized guidance, which is seen by many as the main barrier to make MOOCs as useful as possible for displaced workers. This problem could be considerably reduced by employing AI and a better tracking of each student’s use of the program. For instance, the platform might be able to detect when a student grasps new material more efficiently thanks to the use of charts, therefore adapting subsequent lessons to the comprehensive capabilities of the user. Predictive algorithms can identify learning pinch points, toxic course combinations or students at risk, for example.
- A better use of latest technologies to enhance practical learning: for instance, it is not hard to imagine a good use of VR sets to better teach certain processes or concepts that require a graphical and vivid representation of the subject being explained.
However, the main point to ensure that MOOCs really prevent a big part from society from being left behind, is the partnerships with companies.
As said before, middle-aged citizens who spent the last decades working will not easily be willing to spend time retraining if their expectations of landing a job as a result are not high enough. The private sector needs to understand this and use the increased productivity and profits derived from automation to be forward-thinking and open-source their skills training.
It will be an effective and socially-sustainable way of closing the skills gap that is about to be widened in the following years.
