Massive Online Open Courses

This post is a part of the Intask to Education series where I’m exploring the changing relationship between education and work. You can read the first post here.

Until the internet, professors and instructors — key distributors of the information needed to meet the demands of the industrialized economy — were only accessible by paying students.

However, professors, instructors, and institutions haven’t had a monopoly on education. Apprenticeships have demonstrated that working professionals can pass along information about professional skills to the next generation without going through an institution. Trade schools and community colleges provided alternatives to traditional 4-year universities. And American, tax-supported public libraries have allowed autodidacts to visit and learn from them since 1833.

Yet, it could be argued that universities and trade schools have had monopolies on widely accessible education classes and courses — constructed paths for learning the knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits stored in the easily available information.

Enter MOOCs: an evolution in distance learning

Massive online open courses, or MOOCs, are defined as “open-access online courses that allow for unlimited participation.” MOOCs appeared about a decade ago and took off in 2012 with the rise in popularity of nonprofits providers such as edX and for-profit providers such as Coursera and Udacity.

Upon first glance, MOOCs seems to be one of the early concepts aimed at democratizing traditional education. However, the idea of distance education has been around since the 1840s. The only real change over the last two centuries is that teachers and students exchange learning materials, problem sets, and communications through the internet instead of through the 19th-century postal system — eliminating a lot of communication friction and geographical barriers.

That said, the internet may empower the ability to provide equal, if not better, information quality through MOOCs than the average in-person university or community college. MOOC providers can source each course’s material from the world’s top universities. For example, the more than 1,900+ courses provided by edx.org come from world-renowned universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, University of California (Berkeley), and Georgetown.

MOOCs’ ability to deliver class material more efficiently than its physical counterparts also benefits educational outcomes. Students can choose to consume personalized MOOC material at their rate and mitigate the risk of misunderstanding fundamental concepts. Ideally, students could also access an abundance of supplementary material to reinforce relatively tricky lessons.

A threat to current institutions?

If every university course in the world were available, affordable, and personalized, it makes sense that some educators predict that MOOCs will overthrow most universities.

Sebastian Thrun, a former Stanford and Carnegie Mellon professor who co-founded Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, only around ten institutions in the world would deliver higher education.

Others, however, cite several of MOOCs’ problems as evidence this new method of delivering courses would never replace universities. Historically, MOOC completion rates are relatively low; most MOOC completion rates range from 7–15%, compared to a 59% average graduation rate for students seeking 4-year bachelor’s degrees at traditional institutions.

However, MOOCs and traditional universities’ graduation rates vary significantly. Top-ranked universities such as Harvard boast a 98% graduation rate. Relatively expensive MOOCs also have higher completion rates; in some cases, Udacity reported completion rates as high as 87%.

It’s not clear what factors determine completion rates of universities or MOOCs. There seems to be a positive correlation between student debt and graduation rates, so it’s possible that the sunk cost fallacy pervades students who have significant financial commitment. University completion rates also vary widely among various races and ethnicities. When it comes to MOOCs, a small survey by Open Culture, an online education media outlet, suggested that MOOCs’ time commitment, assumptions of knowledge, lecture fatigue, differing objectives, and lack of a healthy community dissuade people from finishing their courses, among other factors.

Opponents of MOOCs also note that traditional universities, community colleges, and trade schools offer several things that MOOCs don’t.

First, MOOCs don’t provide the number of resources as traditional institutions. For example, conventional institutions might enlist tens of staff for one-on-one questions, review sessions, and personalized grading for more subjective and harder to grade subjects. They also might have buildings, tools, and machinery that would be too costly to access outside of being a part of an institution.

Second, traditional institutions provide a valuable alumni network for networking and mentorship.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, traditional institutions offer widely-acknowledged credentials that are necessary for specific jobs and post-secondary degree programs. The Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown forecast that 35% of jobs will require at least a bachelor’s degree, a need that only traditional institutions can fulfill.

The Future of MOOCs

MOOCs will likely continue to grow in popularity as traditional institutions struggle to keep pace with the educational demands of society. According to a Chegg survey that interviewed students enrolled in 2 or 4 year colleges, only 50% of students think they’re ready for the workforce. Similarly, only 39% of managers believe students are prepared for the workforce. It’s possible that students will turn to MOOCs or alternative education providers to better prepare themselves to meet the technical demands of their potential future employers as these trends grow and enrollment falls in higher education.

Additionally, MOOCs will grow in popularity as more organizations become less stringent on accreditation requirements for specific jobs and as MOOC providers adopt micro-credentialing. Some MOOC platforms already offer credentials recognized by larger companies such as Walmart, GE, IBM, Adobe, and Volvo. Other top-tier companies, such as Apple and Ernst and Young, are increasingly willing to hire talented individuals without any strict credentialing requirements. IBM even coined the term “new-collar initiative” to describe its programs aimed at capturing the talent pool of individuals that lack degrees.

MOOCs’ effect on traditional education institutions

Perhaps Sebastian Thrun’s prediction that in 50 years we’ll only have around ten universities isn’t too unreasonable.

As the MOOC industry matures and goes through its consolidation life cycle, we will likely see traditional education institutions continue to adapt and change their core offerings. Instead of producing proprietary courses and trying to increase the perceived quality of their course content, education institutions might focus on building their alumni networks, growing the number and reputation of accreditations offered, improving the perceived quality of education professors and facilitators, bettering the quality of student life, and lowering the price of participation.

Wes Wagner is a startup and Spanish enthusiast, B2B SaaS marketer, future-of-work fanatic, and student. He currently works at Cheddar, a billing SaaS platform built for developers, where he focuses on the startup’s content and analytics.

This publication is part of Wes’s undergraduate honors thesis at the Kelley School of Business.