Human Learning #45 — MOOCs are dead, Adaptive is coming (at last) and Facebook are hungry
Welcome to issue 45! First order of business, I’m dropping the newsletter to a monthly cadence, it’s partly laziness. I do however also want to focus a bit less on the news and a bit more on the articles — as a Christmas present, there are two articles this week.
This issue looks at whether a major social network — like Facebook might acquire a MOOC platform or whether social networks will try and dominate the ‘commodities’ business of smaller, work relevant online courses and push MOOCs towards a largely online degree model. Maggioncalda in an interview said he wanted to avoid the commodities business — hence degrees and one assumes that’s in part because massively scale players can dominate that industry in a way that less capitalised MOOC platforms with partners that are slower to move — are a poor strategic fit for that market.
Feel free to weigh in.
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My article — Where do MOOCs get off? — on how Social networks might eat MOOC platforms (like, literally eat them, with a diagram and everything)
My article on how RecruitmentTech’s arrival will redefine Edtech
State of the MOOCS
Udacity ruthlessly focus on margins ahead of an anticipated IPO — After a 5% staff cut a few months ago, Udacity are set to cut a further 125 jobs including their São Paulo office bringing them down to just over 300. On the flip side they are doubling down on their enterprise offering in China, the Middle East and India. Udacity have a made a play of talking up Brazil since their early days — evidently certain dynamics in the market have put them off. Udacity have also made dramatic price changes — with Nanodegrees prices up between 30- 100% and so far price increases have worked as they increased their revenue by 25% this year. Expect the IPO in 2019 — here and here
MOOCs are dead (again), All Hail the Online Degree — Anant Agarwal is the latest to say MOOCs are dead, like edX he’s behind the curve but is he right? Mostly yes, the major international platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity(strictly speaking it abandoned MOOCs years ago) and FutureLearn) have largely paywalled leaving mostly government subsidised providers like FUN etc to provide the free stuff. The platforms have all tilted to online degrees, chasing the OPM market and they hope, the OPM margins.
The degree play is wonderfully summarised by Phil Hill. Recounting an interview, Coursera CEO Maggioncalda said that Coursera’s B2C model (MOOCs) was too easily commoditised so he doubled down on online degrees with a value proposition of: a big brand at half the price. Phil Hill refers to this as the ‘good enough option’, MOOC platforms are arguing that its nearly as good as the on campus but online is cheaper so the degree should be too, 2U’s (implicit) argument is there degrees are identical to on campus so students should pay full price. These differing philosophies set up a battle between the old OPM providers and MOOC platforms which I’ve argued MOOC providers are better placed to win.
So MOOCs are kaput? If we look at the first two letters (Massive and Open) then largely speaking yes but the courses aren’t disappearing nor is the strategic intent behind them. While the B2C model has disappointed, B2B is being vigorously pursued (see Coursera’s numbers) so users can still expect to see them being pumped out but the skew will be towards the skill economy — which to be honest, is nothing new — here and here
Edtech’s Business
Georgia Tech hit the high street — Georgia Tech are aiming to open storefronts across the US in malls and co-working spaces in order to enrol more students in their online degrees (they have 10k already). Online degrees have an oddly localised property (at least in the US) whereby most students who enroll are within 100m of the University. Georgia Tech think the key is to provide a physical presence to help would-be customers. This is reminiscent of 2U and WeWork’s partnership, Sean Gallagher argues they are learning from the multi-channel approach of Disney i.e. sell a product and experience. If he’s right degrees are literally coming to a store near you #commoditisation- here
Ed’s tech’s
Arizona State University scale up adaptive — I haven’t covered adaptive for a while — there were lots of experiments but it wasn’t clear any had gained significant traction in Higher Ed — until now. To recap, Adaptive is where the software adjusts the difficult of the exercises according to the student’s performance — if you’re flying it steepens the learning curve,if the reverse it flattens the curve. ASU originally used it for maths but now Physical and Life Sciences have got in — the latter creating ‘BioSpine’ to support students. Results have been impressive with 20% test improvement in the adaptive modules. ASU say the key benefit has been to help students make the leap to college level maths — a critical transition that sees many drop out. If other Universities can replicate this success it could mark a substantial turning point in Edtech’s ability to not merely change the deliver of education but to improve outcomes.
It’s not clear how scalable adaptive is — 101s seem viable — both because that appears to be where adaptive is most effective and because curriculums may differ less — enabling adaptive providers to scale their service to different universities much as textbook providers do now — here
Tangents
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