MOOCs Unmoored

Pieces like this one fit a pattern we’ve seen during the second half of this year where negative “backlash” stories have muscled out the educational utopianism attached to earlier media accounts of the MOOC phenomenon.  Yet even when listing all the alleged failings of the massive online course, such stories still find it difficult to say nothing good can come out of the world’s best universities giving away their best instruction at no cost.

If you can get past the unproductive “hype cycle” peaks and valleys, the story that seems to be emerging is that the original role assigned to MOOCs by early, potentially over-enthusiastic supporters (one which resonated in the popular press) – a role that predicted they would eventually (maybe even quickly) replace traditional college programs entirely –now seems somewhat naïve.

Indeed, programs designed to let students use a MOOC to replace one or more paid-for college classes have not had the uptake you’d expect if there existed major pent-up demand for such a service.  And early experiments in which MOOCs and traditional classrooms taught the same material in parallel (a la John Henry) seem to indicate that it’s too early to assume a massive course (even one taught by a masterful teacher) is ready to take the lead role in educating the traditional college cohort of 18-22 year olds.

But even if the number of 18-22 year olds seeking real college credit makes up just a tiny percentage of MOOC enrollees, the rest of the tens of thousands of students who sign up for most MOOC classes fall into categories that are just starting to get the attention they deserve as the story of MOOCs demolishing traditional higher ed begins to recede.

For as it turns out, young students (some younger than college age) are taking MOOCs, but they’re taking them in places like villages in Asia and Africa where access to high-quality free educational content is a godsend.  And the older, more educated students who still make up the majority of MOOC enrollees are starting to emerge as an interesting market looking for something that offers more than an iTunes U download without the inconvenience of having to drive to an extension school class once a week (presuming you’re lucky enough to live near one).

While these stories are playing out, the content making up a MOOC is finding its way back into brick-and-mortar institutions where it is playing a role in flipped classrooms that were already being implemented in many schools, giving teachers high-quality comprehensive material to tap into when they start curating their courses.  And let’s not forget the conversation MOOCs have opened up that required traditional colleges and universities to take a look at what makes what they offer unique (and worth paying for).

If I were to characterize the current stage of the MOOC movement, I would liken it to those periods when a new technology starts finding a home in places none of its creators expected.  For while it may have seemed obvious that MOOCs (which duplicate much of what you’d find in an undergraduate college class) should serve as a replacement for those college classes, now that this use is seeming not so obvious after all we should start looking at where  MOOCs are finding a home and learn something from that.

One of the great movies dealing with the story of a new technology diffusing into the culture in unexpected ways is Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, a documentary about one of the first electronic instruments and the bizarre life of Leon Theremin, its creator.  The machine was a quirky mashup of pre-solid state technologies played by waving your hands around a set of antennae, and when it first caused a sensation in the US (before its inventor was kidnapped by the Soviet secret service and dragged back to the USSR) it was primarily seen as a concert instrument for playing classical music.

But as the machine (and the technology behind it) became unmoored from its roots, it began to show up in unexpected places (making “spooky” flying saucer sound effects in 1950s science fiction films, or as the source of that sound you could never identify in the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations).  More significantly, the technology behind the device became the inspiration for all electronic instruments to follow.

The film illustrated this unmooring by showing a vintage Theremin floating through space, an apt visual metaphor for how new technologies take on a life of their own as they interact with living and unpredictable people who find ways to make use of them in the real world

So dragging the conversation back to MOOCs, I would consider the current thrashing about for a proper home for this “new, new thing” as a sign of health – or at least energy and excitement (even if it may seem like a roller coaster ride for people who were hoping for the predictability of a ready market when they invested thousands of hours, and millions of dollars, to participate in the MOOC experiment).