MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. But what is a MOOC, exactly? How is a MOOC different from other educational instruments?
A short answer can be derived from its name. MOOCs are:
- Massive – some MOOCs have hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in a single course at the same time.
- Open – typically, MOOCs are open enrollment, meaning anyone can sign up for a course. Many, perhaps even most MOOCs are also available either for free or at a low cost to students.
- Online – MOOCs are online. This is the only way to accommodate MOOCs' massive class sizes.
- Courses – This one is perhaps self-evident, but MOOCs are courses – logically organized lectures, lessons, exercises, examinations, and other pedagogical tools and methods.
With these powers combined, they are Captain MOOC!
Okay, cheesy 20th century cartoon references aside, the combination of these factors has created a novel, technologically innovative approach to education.
A more nuanced approach to answering the initial questions posed in this post is to look at the history of MOOCs. When/how/why did MOOCs first come about?
Predecessors to what we today call MOOCs run back to the early 2000s. The image below posted in Li Yuan’s Cetis Blog shows the evolution of MOOCs over time.
As the diagram illustrates, what a MOOC is isn’t always straightforward. Taking a step back to a time before MOOCs leads to one of MOOCs' influential ancestors: Open Educational Resources, or OERs. According to UNESCO,
“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”
The concept of making educational resources available - either through original creation or copyright changes - for free stems from the idea that education is, or at least should be, a public good. The idea that education should be free is not new to the 21st century, but MOOCs' novel uses of technology in education are driving down the costs of share education materials.
More than just sharing materials, however, by 2012, MOOC platforms, including Udacity, Coursera, and edX, were beginning to offer courses on a wide variety of topics. The courses offered on these platforms were (and still are) often either free or comparatively inexpensive and open to the general public, providing access to what has in the past been education restricted to those admitted to the world’s top academic institutions.
Traditional classroom instruction, on the other hand, is expensive. There are instructors, facilities, and materials to pay for, and classroom sizes are limited. Soaring costs for higher education have left many graduates deeply in debt and would-be students questioning whether there isn't another, cheaper alternative for educating themselves. Not surprisingly, then, one of the forces driving MOOCs is their potential to greatly lower the costs associated with education. With the ability to broadcast live and on-demand video at low costs, many students can benefit from a single instructor’s expertise, with the added benefit of allowing students to absorb the content on their own schedule and at their own pace. (You can’t rewind your teacher in a live class.) Moreover, the costs to institutions of higher learning and their students can be greatly reduced.
Critics might find it ironic that universities are cannibalizing the high-tuition, small-class-size cash cow, but with the internet's democratizing force on information distribution and accessibility, it could be that those leading educational institutions devoting significant resources to offering their most valuable product for free to the masses are seeing the writing on the wall: innovate or die. The successful educational institutions of the future might be those that figure out the right balance between personal attention to students and scaling content and courses to reduce costs, and no institution wants to be left behind.
So the business case for MOOCs, both for students and educational institutions, is clearly there. But MOOCs (or whatever one might choose to call them in a post-MOOC world) are still in their infancy. Critics suggest MOOCs are not the solution to challenges in higher education, citing low completion and pass rates (even in optimistic reports). In addition, it’s hard to replace the traditional four-year, on-campus college experience. Education is about so much more than the information. It’s about the whole experience.
It will take additional time to see whether these critics are right. But as the diagram above also shows, MOOC platforms continue to evolve and adapt as well, moving into corporate training, competency-based education, and new service models. What comes next, and whether academia and the general public have passed “peak MOOC,” remains to be seen. What is clear is that technology has the potential to revolutionize education and in ways has already begun to do so.