MOOCs ado about nothing?

I've blogged before about MOOCs and whether they are the approach which will disrupt the traditional university business model. An article on the BBC website which I saw today adds an angle to the discussion.

First of all, what do I mean by disrupting the traditional business model? It’s like what Apple did to the market for CDs – they took a bundle of different technologies (mp3 players; the internet) and by selling iPods and setting up iTunes changed the whole business of selling music. Goodnight record shops. Ben Hammersley writes about this in his (very excellent) book, 64 things you need to know Now for Then. His argument (it kind of grows out of the different chapters in the book, rather than being explicitly stated) is that disruption via digital technology to an existing business model is inevitable – a question of when not whether.

At the moment MOOCs don’t seem like the disruptive model – there are real questions about non-completion rates, certification and standards on the one hand, and how to make it pay on the other (but see also my blog post about this, and the University of the People idea). And this is where the BBC story comes in.

Sean Coughlan reported in April about learning centres for people studying MOOCs. Basically, these are organised and facilitated sessions (classes, if you like) for people following a particular MOOC in a given locale, to meet together help them study. The article reported that there’s a much lower drop-out rate for students who attend a learning hub. And also, interestingly, that the classes become something else:

"When students are gathered for their Mooc classes it becomes a focus for other spin-offs, such as firms wanting to recruit staff or to get students involved in developing commercial projects."

This gives more options for ‘monetizing’ (to use the business jargon) the education process via MOOCs – if innovative companies or recruiters can find a way to gain economic value from a learning centre, they might pay, leading to more learning centres, more people gaining educational value from MOOCs, and possibly MOOCs becoming a realistic alternative to registering as a fee paying student at a university. It probably won’t mean the end of the motivation to go to a campus university for UK students (if that were the case the Open University would have taken everything over years ago) but it might tip the balance for some international students. And that would nibble away at a really important part of the business model for many UK universities.

Just a straw in the wind. For now.

The heart or the head?

Idealism and reality seem currently to be clashing in higher education, and the turbulence is bringing some interesting things to the surface.

On the one hand, there’s an idealism inherent in the notion of higher education, which sees it as a liberating force for the individual and society and that there is a moral duty to deliver the enlightened world which could arise if more people benefited from a higher education. And in the UK context, that strand of thinking was given a boost by the introduction of considerably increased tuition fees for undergraduate study in England in 2012. The notion that access to higher education should not be rationed by affordability, as well as provoking riots in Trafalgar Square, led to some radical initiatives, such as the Social Science Centre in Lincoln, which enables people to access a ‘free co-operative higher education’ and the Free University of Liverpool, which has now wound up.

And on the other hand, the gritty reality that the traditional form of higher education in the UK (ie full-time, attending a campus away from home) is an expensive business to deliver, with a spiral of expectation created by higher fees, a focus on the non-academic aspects of the student experience, leading to phenomena like the ‘athletics arms race’, on which Paul Greatrix has blogged, and a yearly cycle of what-more-have-we-got-to-justify-high-fees?. Sustaining a large sector, which employs over 450,000 people in the UK (HESA staff return 2012-13, table A), requires a lot of money. Which means you’re straight back to the argument about where the money comes from, who pays, and whether it higher education funding is more like a progressive tax or a means test which in itself acts as a barrier.

(This reminds me of a chant during a late-1980’s demo against student loans:

"Education should be free
For the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie!")

The BBC flagged another interesting initiative – the University of the People. This claims to be free if people need it; to be online (but not dependent upon high specification technology); to be international; and, crucially, to offer US accredited degrees. If it is what it seems to say it is – voluntary, humanitarian – then it clearly sits with the heart not the head. And if it is offering proper degrees of a high standard, then it will surely attract a lot of students.

It’s too early to declare that this is the shape of things to come: the challenge of supporting a few hundred students online is different from the challenge of supporting tens of thousands, and the initial enthusiasm may wear off. But what if the University of the People accepted credit transfer from completed MOOCs? A lot of business models might be seriously disrupted, and the heart-versus-head question might become starker still.

Dealing with uncertainty

A really excellent blog post by Gavan Conlon on wonkhe got me thinking about uncertainty within the higher education sector. Gavan’s post was about the RAB charge for tuition fee loans, which turns out to be higher (at the moment) than had been forecast. But also about the longer term changes to the higher education sector which arise from the policy changes.

This is just one example of the uncertainties around UK higher education at the moment. Let’s name check a few of them:

• Will international students keep coming to the UK given growing HE sectors elsewhere, and the current government’s hostile stance to migration?
• Will universities be able to regain steady patterns of student recruitment, or is the current system volatility set to continue?
• How much further will research funding be concentrated after REF, and will this make research unsustainable in some universities?
• What will the disruption to established patterns of higher education from the internet be? Is it MOOCs, or some other disruption yet to come?

There’s lots to be said about each of these, but that isn’t the point of what I want to say (not today, anyway!). The point is, that no-one who works in or cares about universities can act as if some basic assumptions won’t ever change. And this is a problem, because universities operate on a long cyclical model. For example, the students graduating in summer 2014 with an undergraduate degree, after 3 years of study, entered university in 2011, on promises made in a prospectus which was signed off in autumn 2009. Before Browne, before tuition fees, before austerity budgets.

So universities have to adapt to events, but they carry a heavy burden of commitments which make his hard, and which place burdens on staff who are very busy just delivering the day-to-day. (If universities are sometimes seen as slow to change, I think this is one of the reasons)

There’s no magic wand which will protect a university, or a team, or a person in a university, from change. But there are things you can do to help you prepare. Here’s three things you can do

1. Keep reading news.  And thinking about it.  By the time something is a headline it’s too late to avoid it, but by looking into what’s behind the headlines, and thinking a bit about what factors are driving developments, you can see further into the future.  The film Armageddon is a bit like this (honestly!)  If you nudge the asteroid far enough away from earth, it flies past harmlessly, but if you wait too long it’s gonna get you.

2. Scenario planning: imagine a few futures – in the five year horizon works well – and think about what would have to happen for that to come true, and what would be the implications if it did. So, for instance, suppose that in five years MOOCs are a dominant form of learning in higher education: a higher completion rate; reliable ways found to assess performance. If it were like this, who wouldn’t follow courses from Harvard and Yale? So universities would need to think about changing the teaching model, to focus perhaps on small group teaching as an adjunct to online lectures (welcome back, blended learning!) And to find ways to award credit for MOOCs. Will this happen? Personally, I doubt it, but if you were, for instance, responsible for quality assurance processes in a university, you might want to look at your APL rules to see how much use they would be in this scenario.

3. Keep yourself lean: I don’t mean exercise more, but lean in the sense of the processes that you use. Do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and have you thought about what effort you might be wasting doing things that don’t need to be done? Some of that’s about priorities, but some if it is just about being efficient. Here’s a clear introduction from the Cardiff University's Lean University team about what lean is and is about – there’s lessons and benefits for all of us.

So there’s three steps: read the future, think about it in a structured way, clear the decks so you can react.

The disruption that is to come

Registrarism's blog post Surviving an avalanche - which reminds us of the hype a year ago by IPPR about The Massive Changes To Come in higher education - got me thinking about what the real disruptive digital approach to higher education will be.  

MOOCs have a lot written about them, and there's serious money behind them, but that says that they are a business proposition, not an educational one.  I think the disruptive technology is on us already, and it's not happening to universities, its happening in universities.  It's the use of social media by academic staff to interact with students.

My Twitter feed includes a couple of lecturers who tweet well, and whose account is clearly part of their day-to-day engagement with their students.  There's the expected ups and downs.  Some great conversations which show how Twitter in the classroom can qualitatively change students' engagement with the topic and the class.  And some exchanges where the immediacy of Twitter enables a student to express their frustration very directly to the teacher.  It's obvious that the quality of how the lecturer responds to the latter - quickly, openly - contributes a lot to the positive uses that Twitter can have.  It enables a lecturer to be visibly personally authentic, and who couldn't like that?

This is the revolution, I think.  As the use of social media becomes part of the everyday fabric of life, those in universities who don't use it, or who don't use it well, may find themselves less noticed, and less able to make a difference.  And the qualities for personal authenticity in social media are quite different to some of the norms of university life: social media isn't hierarchical, and it isn't always serious.  

If this is the disruptive technology for higher education, then it won't be an avalanche that buries us, it will be a slow rise in sea level.  Like the good citizens of High Brazil in Terry Jones' Erik the Viking, we may be up to our waists before we notice that things have changed for ever.