Opening up Massive Online Open Learning
An exploration of the hopes, disappointments and (potential) improvements of MOOCs
In my last piece for OKHE1 I wrote a brief commentary on whether MOOCs can really be considered open. I determined that while there were very high expectations for MOOCs, with 2012 being dubbed the ‘Year of the MOOC’, these learning platforms still had many barriers to overcome to be a truly ‘open’ learning platform. In more recent years the conversation about MOOCs has reflected this same scepticism with some polls showing a steep decline in positive perception of MOOCs among academic leaders — and even the CEO of Coursera Rick Levin stating that the concept of MOOCs quickly replacing a traditional degree programme was “a mistaken idea from the beginning”.
With over 4,000 Google results for the exact phrase “MOOCs are dead”, we could be forgiven for assuming that the MOOC was just a fad and that their potential as a truly open learning platform was a pipe dream. Given the great expectations for MOOCs to help us in our goal of open learning, I am hopeful that this isn’t this case. In this article I will be taking some time to look at MOOCs in three different lights:
- The potential benefits of MOOCs for Higher Education Institutions, teachers and learners
- The current barriers and criticism of open learning through MOOCs
- Recommendations for ensuring MOOCs champion the ideals of open learning and provide adequate support for teachers and learners
I am hoping that through a more detailed analysis of the hopes, reality and potential improvements of MOOC platforms I will be able to get a better understanding of what needs to take place in Higher Education for both teachers and learners in order to better support open learning. So, let’s start at the start… what are the potential benefits that MOOCs can bring to Higher Education?
Before delving into the more social benefits of MOOCs, it makes sense to start with the ‘money talks’ side of things — namely MOOCs potential to generate income for universities. In a 2016 report Belleflamme and Jacqmin outlined the potential for HEI revenue from MOOCs — by taking advantage of economies of scale and low maintenance level for delivering a course, a large number of learners can be taught with a low amount of effort. If learners are paying for certification these large cohorts can generate substantial income. The potential profit revenue has made MOOCs an attractive investment for venture capitalists, with platforms like Coursera receiving high levels of funding in recent years.
Outside of financial gain, MOOCs could serve a role in helping deal with the increased demand for higher education, which has been increasing steadily — with a projection that by 2020 more than half of worldwide students enrolled in Higher Education will be from China, India, Brazil and the USA (British Council, p.22). As it stands the current HE system will not be able to meet this demand — the UK have already needed to implement measures to create new universities to try and help. MOOCs with their scalability could be key to delivering open education en masse and allowing UK universities to profit from the increasing demand for higher education internationally.
Meeting this demand through an open learning platform would also fulfil a key social goal for MOOCs which was that they would provide truly open education to any and all learners, thus widening access to higher education for a variety of groups including students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and populations of developing countries. In a 2013 TEDx talk Ro Kanna (former Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Obama administration) explained how MOOCs could help reduce costs of higher education and allow older learners or people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to access the education they need to take on skilled work.
The potential for MOOCs to improve the open teaching and learning experience for both academics cannot be understated. In terms of improving teaching, the early hopes were that the ability to track, record and analyse learner interactions with MOOCs would allow for the improvement of teaching — with the BBC reporting that MOOCs could help build the perfect teacher. Other expected benefits for learners are the ability to use information systems to automatically adjust the learner experience depending on a student’s needs, and easily perform experiments to see how the learner experience could be improved.
Another way in which they could improve teaching and learning is outlined by Yuan and Powell (p.17) who believed that MOOCs would force HEIs to think about how they innovate to create new ways of teaching, flexible learning paths and there would be an incentive to ensure their course is open and accessible to as many students as possible. MOOC learners have been shown to appreciate the ability to access the course from anywhere at anytime and working to a self-directed schedule. MOOCs were also praised for:
“enabling the massiveness and diversity of the participants, allowing anyone to take advantage of such learning opportunities regardless of time, pace, geographic locations, formal prerequisites, and financial hardship” (Liu et al, 2015)
As mentioned by one of my fellow OKHE participants, another potential benefit of MOOCs is the ability to try before you buy (p.23) — allowing students to try out a course to consider whether it is really for them, or if they are capable of the level of learning. The advantages of this would be twofold in that it helps learners avoid committing to the wrong choice and expenditure of a traditional degree programme, but also universities would benefit from the higher retention rates of students who knew what to expect from the course and were more certain in the choice they made for their degree programme.
Given these high expectations for MOOCs, let’s take a look at how these have been met by MOOCs in their current state…
It’s perhaps no surprise that MOOCs seemed to be a disappointment when they didn’t quite live up to the hype and revolutionise Higher Education. In fact, it seems that many of the barriers to open learning that I explored in my OKHE 1 article are indeed affecting access and ability to learn in MOOCs. For starters MOOCs have not been able to improve the supply of higher education — at the current time MOOCs are not yet a viable alternative to a traditional degree programme, with only 13 FutureLearn programmes offering accredited courses. That’s not to say that MOOC’s aren’t being used though — FutureLearn alone now has over 5 million registered learners and many of those who are taking part in MOOCs have reported have found them useful and received both tangible (e.g. career benefits) and intangible (e.g. improved skills) benefits from their online studies.
It is perhaps when it comes to looking at widening access to higher education that MOOCs have caused the biggest disappointment in terms of open learning. Research into MOOC participants has shown that they tend to be already degree educated, older, in employment, and well off. (1,2). It seems that MOOCs have for the most part helped the socially advantaged who already had access to educational resources! A Harvard study found that the correlation between household income and likelihood to participate in a MOOC was that for every $20,000 dollars increase in household income the person was 27% more likely to take part in a MOOC. It has also been shown that students who are better off are also more likely to gain certification from MOOCs than those from socio-economic background students. Higher levels of parental education have also correlated with an increased likelihood of MOOC participation.
As far as widening access for developing countries goes, early reports into enrolment on a Coursera MOOC found that less than 30% of the students who completed the course were from developing countries. Further research identified that developing countries were not accessing MOOCs due to the following reasons: inadequate access and proficiency with Digital Technologies, problems with Infrastructure, language and culture barriers. A UNESCO report that aimed to help policy makers in developing countries implement MOOCs summed up the limited impact they have had on widening participation worldwide:
it has been observed that MOOCs may not promote equality and the democratisation of education… most MOOC participants today are well educated and have already had access to HE. In addition, to participate in a MOOC, one needs an Internet connection with good bandwidth, as well as digital skills. (UNESCO, p.25)
Another barrier to open learning for MOOCs is when digital readiness for online education is analysed. Students from lower socioeconomic groups are less likely to have either the access or the level of digital ability needed to excel in online learning. As shown in research by Hansen and Reich more affluent students are likely to have already used digital learning resources, and had support from mentors — meaning they will acclimatise more readily to an online learning environment, which will improve completion rates for these groups. It has been claimed that there is performance gap between academic performance in online learning compared to the traditional classroom, but it seems that this is further exacerbated for students identified as ‘at risk’ (the groups we most want to reach with open learning!). What’s worse — these effects were further compounded if a large number of ‘at risk’ students are peers on the same online course!
Critics of MOOCs have been quick to point to the low completion rates of online courses as a failure of this venture into open learning. The high dropout rates in MOOCs is now well documented across HE and the private sector, in the UK completion rates of Futurelearn courses had an average completion rate of 13%, with the average UK completion rate for MOOCs at 12% (MOOCLab). I was able to identify several common themes in why MOOCs were receiving such low completion rates including: no intention to complete, time pressure, unrealistic expectations, lack of pressure, lack of support, no sense of community or presence of others. This concern around the lack of ‘presence’ in online learning was shared by teachers too who found it difficult to not have immediate feedback and response to discussion points after spending time and energy developing the MOOC. Ang, another OKHE participant also previously wrote about the student perceptions of lack of immediate feedback:
“I noted with interest when discussions were not monitored for a few days one or two learners actively commented on this and were not happy”
Given these persistent barriers to open learning via MOOCs in Higher Education, what can we do to try and break them down and further develop MOOCs to realise the goals we had hoped for?
From my research into MOOCs would make the below recommendations in order to reduce barriers to open education and improve the usefulness of MOOCs in Higher Education.
Ensuring parity and openness
In order for MOOCs to help meet the global demand for higher Education they need to work towards being equivalent to the degree obtained from a traditional higher education. In a report on MOOCs impact on Higher Education HEFCE made the recommendation that both quality of education and learner support of MOOCs would need to be on par with traditional classroom for them to be successful. Further to this — widening access to higher education can only work when at risk students are targeted and supported in an appropriate way. It has been shown that MOOCs can offer more tangible benefits to learners from developing countries who complete the courses — but in order to get them to that stage we need to be thinking about student support from the very design stage of MOOCs.
Learning from the data
In order to break down barriers and help learners make the most of MOOCs, we need to start using the data that we have gathered to improve the learning process. One example of this is in the research by MOOCLab which analysed UK MOOCs and found that by studying the datasets they were able to determine an ideal course length and workload (p.25) that would help improve completion rates. Further to this research has shown that different learners can be segmented by learner intention based on their behaviour — this could in theory allow for MOOCs to automatically adjust their content to ensure that they help each individual learner fulfil their goals. These kind of automated learner behaviour systems could also be used to identify students who are struggling with course content and likely to drop out — the MOOCs could then either adjust accordingly, or flag this for the teacher to follow up personally. By making sure that we are taking every step we can to help learners achieve their goals and identifying students that are struggling, we will help to break down barriers such as issues with digital literacy and time management etc.
Creating engaging courses
Once we have identified methods from which we can identify and support students who are struggling, we need to keep those in mind from the very start when developing courses. For teachers it is crucial that they have the opportunity to be trained (p. 6) in learning technologies, and in creating content which is engaging for online learners. It is also important that teachers effectively communicate the different support available to students from the outset of the course and ensuring that their cohort are given easy access to these support channels throughout their studies. Research by Park and Choi has shown that drop out rates for adult learners increase if they do not feel supported by their organization, regardless of their academic ability. As such, teachers need to embed the concept of organizational support throughout the MOOC at the initial design stage.
Supporting online learners
One of the key recommendations for supporting online learning, is to work proactively to reduce one of the barriers I spoke about above — the digital literacy gap. One such initiative has been undertaken by the University of Leeds — in conjunction with FutureLearn they have provided a series of MOOCs which are aimed at teaching students how to learn and collaborate online. Ensuring that MOOCs are responsive to students needs and aims will also help to engage them in their online learning journey. Building interactive content and activities that are relevant and useful to the real world can further help to ensure that learners are satisfied with their MOOCs and more likely to actively participate.
One of the common themes that I found in my research into improving MOOCs was the essential nature of social presence (p.73) and sense of community in providing a positive online learning experience and enhancing learner acheivements. This is perhaps the hardest aspect of a traditional degree programme to replicate in an online learning scenario, even attempts at developing a digital classroom (p. 12) have not been able to fully satisfy learners thirst for face-to-face interactions. There are many studies showing that efforts to build rapport between teachers and students can indeed make a difference in online class completion and satisfaction, and that social interaction is seen as highly related to student satisfaction and enjoying the learning experience (p 43). By working to increase the perception of a community (p. 1983) such as group discussions, leaderboards and responsive, constructive feedback we can better improve the learning experience for those taking part in MOOCs.
In conclusion, having taken a detailed look at the expectations, reality and potential for improvements of MOOC platforms — I am not convinced that MOOCs are dead at all! I share the opinion that, as predicted by the Gartner Hype Cycle, MOOCs may not yet reached their most productive state. By working to incorporate the improvements I have discussed above, and making use of the various other research initiatives into effective online learning, I am hopeful that MOOCs could still become a worldwide platform for truly open learning.
p.s. Thanks for reading :)
