It occurred to me that some of the things I’ve written regarding the shortcomings or limitations of MOOCs might look like a form of ingratitude.
After all, institutions around the world are paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their courses up on the web for free. Companies like Coursera, edX and Udacity (and the investors and institutions behind them) are pouring millions into perfecting the platforms for online course delivery. And the people who work there are putting in startup hours to get “product” (i.e. high-quality college level courses) out the door.
Speaking of hours, think for a minute about the time professors are putting into bringing us the best of their work while also juggling their other teaching and research responsibilities.
Given all this, are critiques of the limitations in MOOC testing (for example) or speculation about the speculative nature of MOOConomics a form of nitpicking or an act of tough love?
Unsurprisingly, I would claim the latter. And not just because this improvement in assessment or that change in approach to community building might improve the experience I and fellow learners are having right now.
For the MOOC experiment itself might rise or fall based on how quickly it can capitalize on its successes, improve on the shortcomings those success have exposed, and discover ways to make MOOCs financially viable over the long term.
But like most transformative experiments, success in one area creates challenges in another. For example, one of the most significant things to change over the last 12-24 months has been the attitude of colleges and universities towards sharing their educational resources.
Whereas previously such sharing might be done on a limited basis, MOOCs have engendered a “give-your-best-stuff-away-for-free-and-figure-out-how-you’ll-make-money-later” behavior pattern across the educational multi-verse, coupled with a sense of urgency to climb Onboard NOW!!! And (at least for the time being) this dynamic has succeeded in overwhelming the natural tendency of prestige colleges and universities to look to their own institutional needs first, treat other campuses as rivals, and hold tight to their assets.
With more and more campuses demonstrating this devotion to free learning, such sharing creates a new cultural norm which (like the Open Software Movement) is likely to persist even if the current MOOC players expand, contract or transform. But this cultural change also makes it difficult to see where the money will come from to ensure next round of courses can be created and shared for free.
In business, there are two approaches one can take when revenue does not meet expectations: cutting corners and taking chances.
Cutting corners usually involves slashing bottom line expenses to make up for top line losses while hunkering down in hope that the good old days will return again if you can just hold out long enough (a strategy that didn’t work out so well for WordPefect Corporation or the Ottoman Empire).
But taking chances means staring reality in the face, eliminating old products or business models that no longer make sense, and creating new things for a new world that leverage resources and market position (think Apple and IBM).
Extending this analogy to free learning, we need to be putting time and effort into making MOOCs so good and so popular that they become an indispensible part of the educational landscape. For once that happens, financial stability will likely follow (even if success doesn’t end up being measured in the number of Internet billionaires created).
And so I and others who have been smitten by the free learning bug will continue to share our thoughts, our passion and – yes – our critiques on a project we hope to see succeed and expand beyond even its creators’ wildest dreams.
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