The Challenge of MOOC platforms doing BA degrees
The challenges of FutureLearn’s undergraduate degree — FutureLearn will run an undergraduate degree from the University of Newcastle (Australia) beginning in February 2019. It will cover a number of subject areas; Anthropology, History, English in a liberal arts model. On campus students will be able to take the course and as with FutureLearn’s other degrees, the first course of each program will be open to encourage recruitment. It’s somewhat of a coup for FutureLearn, although indicative of their profile relative to the big beasts that it wasn’t more widely picked up. Yet also a gamble of sorts.
The other major platforms have have focused on Masters, and until now (and one suspects afterwards) so has FutureLearn. Masters degree are a much better fit for MOOC platforms. The primary reason is demographics — MOOC users tend to be graduates. That works pedagogically — they’ve learnt how to learn — but more importantly it fits the aspiration of either a professional learner advancing/career switching or someone learning for fun — which fits nicely with Masters degrees.
The fit is also critical to the value proposition MOOC platforms provide to universities. When universities go to online course providers such as 2U, they typically enter long, capital intensive contracts and they do so because 2U et al can provide students i.e the guarantee of revenue. Finding people to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars is hard. There are various mechanisms for acquiring students but it’s typically an expensive process with targeted marketing operations by country and demographic, along with recruitment staff to take the prospective students through the process. 2U have largely focuses just in the US but even there they focus within a handful of subject areas where they know the target market and they famously (within the Edtech world) recycle students who miss out on a top university into a lower ranked one — improving the efficiency and thus reducing the cost of each student acquisition. Even campus courses rely heavily on this people powered approach — Australian universities rely on educations to acquire up to 75% of their students (on a rev-share basis typically).
Naturally this market has started to go digital, Hotcourses a listing platform with a large userbase was acquired by IDP for just such a purpose. MOOC platforms take a similar approach, leveraging their freemium/low cost courses to have a large userbase from which to recruit — this is why Coursera was able to recruit up to 50% degree students from their own userbase. For a MOOC platform this is synergistic strategy — the demographics and aspirations of the majority of their userbase match — approximately — the profile of someone that would take a Masters degree from one of their partners. Universities can be confident that Coursera can put the bums on seats that will ensure profit and possibly make money on the side by offering courses on a freemium model to boot.
Which brings us back to FutureLearn’s undergraduate degree, seen from that view, an undergraduate degree looks like an odd choice. Can FutureLearn provide many of the students? In the short term they might not need to (1) the degree is open to existing Newcastle students for flexible learning (2) it’s an innovative experiment for the university and (3) they or a subcontractor might be responsible for the degree.
All that is true but that only gets you to the end of the experiment, a whole Bachelors is unlikely to be a one off experiment — Newcastle will expect recruitment. That will mean FutureLearn (and others who follow) will need to (1) find those users from their existing userbase (doable but not a direct fit for the aforementioned graduate profile) and/or build marketing and recruitment capabilities in-house that understand the online undergraduate market. Again doable but possible expensive and to what extent does that complement a Masters strategy in capabilities and expertise? It’s not clear.
