Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have only been around for about a decade.  And like all history at one point in time, we are currently living it. Changes in education are occuring rapidly.  The recent creation and proliferation of online content and the means by which that content can be distributed has created rapid growth in the availability of that content in the form of discrete online courses.  Online courses that are developed and available to anyone with an internet connection continue their upward growth curves, but are experiencing changes in how (and why) they are being delivered.

But educational and training content delivery to learners is not new.  Through several modes of production and delivery, educational content has been widely distributed for a long time (see the Timeline of Educational Materials, below) as learners were physically far away from the course and the content creators.  Correspondence courses that delivered paper lessons via mail to learners’ mailboxes have been around since before the 1900’s. Most of these early courses consisted of training for the military or for industry to help scale up employment for the factories that quickly needed workers.

Later, some courses offered ways to increase fitness, become better writers or artists and even learn to play the piano.

But delivery of excellent educational material, scaled for a massive audience,  openly distributed, and available to anyone with connection to the internet is a relatively recent phenomenon. And the fact that they were initially offered for free was (is) a radical concept, in light of the questionable motives of some correspondence courses showcased above. This chapter will talk about MOOCs and education, including here at Ohio State, and  will hopefully serve as a contribution to an overall history of learning technologies.  And even if this chapter’s subject – the impacts of MOOCs at Ohio State and elsewhere – should fall victim to obsolescence, Ohio State’s educational community and the broader culture of education will have been changed by its emergence.

    There are differing accounts of the “birth” of the MOOC in its current form.  MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) concept was announced in 2001. With free access to course material and lectures online, its creation began a movement toward the second “O” in “MOOC” – “Open”.  MIT started with 50 courses and in 2007 virtually all courses were moved online. This was free content, the same course material that MIT students had access to.  The only difference between OpenCourseWare and a MOOC was the organization of that material – no course structure was developed in OCW.  Nevertheless, for autodidacts, lifelong learners and students looking to supplement their academic classes, OCW opened up MIT’s course content to the world.

    There is general agreement that MOOCs as they exist today began about 2012 when Stanford University offered its Computer Science course.  Here was an organized course offered for free to whoever had internet connection.  The concept of a free course from an elite university was very different from the monetization of programs that had been promoted with a for-profit motive, like Columbia University’s Fathom project in 2001 that failed in light of other institutions offering free content online around the same time.

       “Disruption” is an often-used word for anything that causes change, creates risk and exposes opportunities. Justin Fox in The Atlantic quotes Dick Foster, a management consultant at McKinsey, as describing a similar phenomenon called “ ‘technological discontinuities’—moments when the dominant technology in a market abruptly shifted, and the expertise and scale that the companies had built up suddenly didn’t count for much”¹.  These discontinuities were either sustained or they faded away. If they faded away, then value to their market or community no longer existed.  But if they survived and even grew, then they had become disruptive,  and so attracted some attention, which could in turn precipitate even more discontinuity.  So the distinction between disruption and mere change is one of sustainability – truly disruptive phenomena can withstand the test of time and of new entries into the same spaces they exist.  It’s up to future historians to determine whether and to what extent MOOCs have disrupted educational and delivery of content.

1. Fox, J. (2014). The disruption myth. Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-disruption-myth/379348/

MOOCs at Ohio State

Ohio State is one of the largest universities in the world.  MOOCs offer content to the world. The scale of each is massive;  the content of each can be transformational. One content delivery method is fairly expensive and the other method is usually free. At this time there is an intersection of these two institutions, and the impacts of that intersection are just beginning to emerge.  Ohio State can benefit from the additional exposure and branding that their MOOCs can bring.  Universities that offer MOOCs are usually those interested in enhanced student experiences,  and MOOC participation is just beginning to be studied for its impacts on student learning.

Some MOOC titles

 Tom Evans,  Program Manager for the Open Learning department, graciously agreed to an interview about MOOCs at Ohio State.

I asked Tom several questions about the recent history of the platforms that offer MOOCs and many other questions (see the interview below). Ohio State’s MOOCs cover a wide range of subjects – journalism, health sciences,  agriculture and calculus,  and no two are alike,  yet they share some common features.  Lecture videos are the predominant form of instructor presence and Ohio State’s MOOCs clearly state that the student shouldn’t have any expectation of instructor presence beyond those videos. Lecture notes, low-stakes assessments like surveys and feedback are also included, optional resources that provide a way for the learner to test how much knowledge has been gained.

1. Why are there different platforms for MOOCs (iTunes, Canvas)?
2. How did Open Learning begin here at OSU (and your role)?
3. Can you describe the MOOC development process?
4. How many MOOCs are created in a year,  and is the pace accelerating, decelerating, or staying the same?
5. What kind of feedback do you usually get from students and professors?
6. And, of course, what do you think the future of MOOCs will be here at Ohio State?  How about MOOCs in general, thinking here about certification,  microcredentials, etc.?

     There has been a change in emphasis in MOOCs.  Moving away from free, open content toward a fee-based model has been more lucrative for many institutions. This movement is usually toward credentialing (obtaining a certificate for passing a course), the certification series (offering several courses that share a common skill, and requiring a fee to take one or all the courses in the series); MOOC consultation, assistance with course design and other fees. Credentialing, online course offerings, micro degrees and increased interest in assessment are exerting pressures on the classic “open” concept that has always been a hallmark of these courses. As a result, MOOC growth is leveling off to a more-sustainable pace- courses may still be massive and online,  but some are no longer open in the sense of free access to all content.

      Occasionally participants in MOOCs consume content like they do movies – by watching many modules/units at a time.  This “binge learning” is made possible due to online content being released simultaneously,  not sequentially as content has historically been delivered.  MOOCs provide a way to participate in this “binging” – unstructured yet rigorous study for short periods of time. This type of intense but brief bursts of study is just beginning to be studied – and the findings show that “binge consumption leads to higher customer lifetime value”, that could possibly be translated to education. There are two types of binge learning:  studying done in quick succession,  which is called “temporal” binging; and another type that is one-subject intense binging called “content” binging (Kronk, 2017).  Unlike procrastinators in formal educational settings who likely skipped classes and waited until the last moment to try to fit a semester’s worth of studying into a few late nights,  binge learners take advantage of MOOC content arranged in modules, which makes content more easily absorbed.  And the voluntary nature of MOOC learning may contribute to the motivation for real learning to take place.

     MOOC particpation has been compared to crowdsourcing,  where “problems and opportunities are broadcast to the public at large through [information technology]” (Prpic, Melton, Taeihagh, & Anderson, 2017).  Both crowdsourcing and MOOC participation “defy easy categorization” (Prpic, Melton, Taeihagh, & Anderson, 2017).  We don’t know the future of MOOCs but their impact will continue to be watched.