MOOCs: Let’s Call It “Out-Teaching”
I was until recently a student at an Ivy League university, a circumstance I mention not because of any bragging rights but to show that I have some firsthand experience of the current enthusiasm for remote learning. It’s unlikely you’ve missed this trend. They’ve even come up with a funky acronym, MOOC, for Massive Open Online Course. Until a couple of years ago this was disparaged as the domain of the University of Phoenix. Now suddenly the New York Times is declaring 2012 The Year of the MOOC. To understand the progress in technology and pedagogy that is fueling this explosion, I recommend Understanding the MOOC Trend by a firm called The Education Advisory Board. Many of the obvious shortcomings of distance learning are being addressed in creative ways. So who could possibly question the value of delivering the wisdom of the world’s best professors to every corner of the world? Well, naturally I could. While I’m heartily in favor of the ideal, I’m not confident that it’s a good strategic decision for the top institutions, those best placed to take advantage.
What’s in it for the universities? Many appear to be taking an altruistic view, proceeding purely for the opportunity to educate more students, by orders of magnitude, than they could otherwise reach. On the other hand, private organizations and entrepreneurs are piling in, sometimes partnering with a well-known university. Coursera, Udacity and even the Khan Academy must be expecting to make money eventually; and you’d have to be a smidgeon naive not to assume there are trustees behind the idealistic professors at the storied institutions who are devising ways to monetize each new pair of eyeballs. Those who advocate for this outreach will acknowledge, and even enthuse, that there is the potential to disrupt the existing university business model. Should students continue to move to Binghamton and show up in person for lectures when they could stay in their PJs and attend Harvard’s edX courses on their laptop? For now they’ll have to, if they want a sheepskin. But that’s likely to evolve too.
If you’re the president of a university lacking in brand recognition, you might regret that you’re not well placed to ride this train; but your more elite brethren ought to find plenty of other reasons for reservations. Much of the MOOC hype assumes the existing model will remain untouched. It will simply become possible for many thousands more students to take a version of the same in-person courses. But of course there’s no change without unintended consequences and as professors adapt their courses to go online they will be obliged to make compromises at the cost of their in-the-flesh students. Responding to questions, delivering exams, providing office hours, these are all things that simply cannot work as effectively when the class includes a massive online presence. Some courses are better suited to online lectures; others get phased out. I watched the course of study I was taking evolve beneath my feet as it was adapted for non-resident students and I was not alone in feeling nonplussed.
Even without scaling it for thousands, an online lecture is constrained in ways that don’t apply in a lecture hall. I took a finance course in which a couple of lectures were delivered on-line for the professor’s convenience and the overhead was painful. “Can everybody hear me? Who said that?”, “I have a question, oh sorry, you go first.”, “Would so-and-so mute your mic, we can hear you chewing”, “Professor you’ve muted your mic, we can’t hear you.” Connections drop, audio and video gets out of sync, white boards and tablets don’t integrate the way they’re supposed to. We’ve all rolled our eyes at the lecturer who can’t work the projector; multiply that by ten when it’s online. Some of this is growing pains, but even the best technology and the smoothest application thereof inserts a layer between the student and the professor. No medium is perfectly transparent and without friction.
If one’s circumstances don’t permit shlepping to campus say, two evenings a week, then online learning is unquestionably better than nothing. Following hurricane Sandy, one of my professors delivered his lecture by telecon since many students were without power or public transit. I attended with my phone plugged in to a power bar in a Staples just North of the downtown outage area. It was certainly worthwhile if the alternative was no lecture at all, but I don’t have many notes from that evening. If you could go to Stanford while living in Buffalo, wouldn’t you? Sure, but would you really be getting a Stanford education?
Much of the value offered by this kind of institution, especially with advanced career-oriented degrees, is the opportunity to interact with others in your field. Their experiences are often more valuable than the words of the professor who may only have read about it. Distance learning initiatives introduce creative ways to provide similar interactions; but who can fail to be skeptical that groups working through chat rooms will form the same bonds and glean the same lessons as those closeted in conference rooms or corners of a library?
I suspect that the case for online learning is at the same place that out-sourcing was ten years ago. In the early 2000′s it was widely assumed that any IT operation could be run more cheaply out of India, Sri Lanka or the like. VCs considering investment in a start-up wanted to see the entrepreneur’s out-sourcing strategy in their business plan. But as more and more companies tried it many lessons were learned: phone calls, team collaboration sites, even video conferencing, none of these things replace regular face-to-face contact; time zones matter; cultural differences can surprise you; and costs rise. New out-sourcing contracts dropped by 20% last year, prompting Forbes magazine to proclaim the death of out-sourcing because “offshoring in 2013 will no longer offer sustainable cost-savings over in-house IT support”. Instead we talk about “near-shoring”, “right-sourcing”, and bring it all back in-house. There are certainly times and places where out-sourcing is the best option; but the gold rush is over and there are fewer beneficiaries then we expected.
People are going to pay for professionals courses so brand-name universities will be tempted to supply them. Even the best institutions have tight budgets, and while online courses will be discounted (many are now free; but tuition isn’t the only revenue possibility), the business case appears compelling. So the MOOC gold rush is on, even though there are obvious contradictions to delivering a best-of-the-best professor’s lecture over wires. Universities should consider the risk that in ten years’ time we will find ourselves where we are now with out-sourcing, still searching for evidence of a positive impact and surprised by the social and financial costs.
At that point, the Ivy League might have damaged their reputations by trying to deliver to a mass market. If we convince enough people that there’s no difference between Harvard’s online and in-person education, and then provide it to the hundreds of thousands, will it still have the same value? Can an institution expand in that way and retain the exceptional quality of the education that has made its reputation? To the extent that Harvard’s product is superior to others, it must be a delicate thing. It’s never easy to remain number one when there are the hundreds and thousands trying to emulate and surpass you.
And what about the role a university plays in its community? There are symbiotic relationships with the companies, municipalities, clubs and individuals who live near any university. If the focus shifts away from the thousands of students to the hundreds of thousands of online learners, might not this community become more diffuse and lose some of its quality? It’s not just the institutions that have something at stake in the gamble being taken with MOOC initiatives. Societies and reputations are both easy to damage and hard to repair.
It would be foolish to ignore the opportunities to profit in every sense from the MOOC movement; but it would be equally irresponsible to forge ahead without regard for the risks. I expect to see disenchantment and back-pedaling within five years time. If we call it “out-teaching” maybe we can keep the lessons of out-sourcing in mind.
