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What lurks beneath the tip of the MOOC iceberg?

In case you haven’t heard, things are really heating up this summer in higher education circles concerning Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, for short). Some universities had been offering a handful of MOOCs, but recently some have begun to offer complete degree programs -- masters-level graduate work where all courses are taught using MOOC principles. Some observers have condemned and some have wholeheartedly supported the development. Is this just the tip of the iceberg for what will amount to a major transformation of higher education?

2013-07-20

By Michael Goul, Chairman, Department of Information Systems July 20, 2013 - In case you haven’t heard, things are really heating up this summer in higher education circles concerning Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, for short). Some universities had been offering a handful of MOOCs, but recently some have begun to offer complete degree programs -- masters-level graduate work where all courses are taught using MOOC principles. The media, public institutions and philanthropic foundations are scrutinizing these programs. Some of these observers have condemned and some have wholeheartedly supported the development. Many say that this is just the tip of the iceberg for what will amount to a major transformation of higher education. One analyst recently blogged that outsourcing MOOCs to organizations like Coursera is akin to what universities do when they sponsor sports programs and align them with the NCAA. Blogger John Lombardi believes the NCAA relationship serves as precedent. The university delivers a product, the NCAA repackages it, and, as in the case of many MOOCs, the university gives up at least some control over the presentation and delivery of content. Both the sports and MOOC models represent a type of franchising arrangement with a third party. It’s interesting to look at what’s under the visible part of the iceberg: the franchising agreements. In many cases, beneath that water line are contracts between industry and universities that some say amount to a corporate takeover of public higher education. On the other hand, some proponents say that what’s underneath represents a trend that has been growing for some time – that higher education needs to be and will be reinvented. One of my colleagues calls it the “higher education bubble.” Experimental stage Before getting into details, I’ll offer my opinion on the current status of MOOCs. I believe we are still in the experimental stage. In a case I wrote recently about eBay’s approach to innovation through experimentation, I noted how everyone coming into the ecommerce auction site is actually participating in a business experiment. eBay leverages the experiments to innovate. Its approach to experimentation is to fail fast and focus on how to rapidly transfer successes into their production website. Why do I refer to eBay? Today’s MOOC experiments are tomorrow’s higher education innovations. Failing fast and getting real successes into wider-scale production is a strategy that makes sense. Talking in terms of today’s MOOCs as experiments is the most logical way to frame this whole debate, and I am not alone in this assessment. Jonathan Haber of the Huffington Post recently discussed experimentation and how there is disagreement on how to assess success and failure of MOOCs. Assessing success and failure is tough because of accessibility, financial and learning goals. Another complexity is the nature of partnerships with the companies that specialize in MOOC delivery. Good experiments should build on prior research. They need to be transparent in terms of processes and data collection procedures. The identification and management of variables must be carefully considered, and there must be sound methodologies. Controls and sample size must be appropriate, the experiment needs to be replicable and the design respectful of human subjects. With MOOCs popping up at different universities, for different types of courses and with different teaching approaches and pedagogical styles, there is significant confusion. It’s not like there are MOOC lab rats. Today’s MOOCs beg the question of how to best fragment the processes associated with the building blocks of degree/credentialing programs – what we usually call the “course.” By referring to fragmenting a course’s processes, I mean laying bare the very core elements of what amounts to conducting a course – and note that I am choosing that word “conducting” very carefully: planning the content, developing the syllabus, designing the content transmittal approach, delivering the content, supporting understanding and comprehension as part of the delivery, assessing what was learned and so forth. For a MOOC, this dissection of processes uncovers opportunities to reengineer using new technologies as enablers. For example, delivering engaging content via video, through mobile devices, within learning content platforms, etc. become important options when scaling to massive class sizes. This concomitantly requires a new category of highly trained personnel to support content design that necessarily takes into consideration best practices for delivery, follow-up assessment and content reuse. This new category of employee will include individuals with specialized skill sets to perform tasks they are uniquely trained to do. Those skills include decomposition and then final re-integration/assembly of disassembled course parts into something coherent and very different than a traditional course. When some of these new personnel are employed in the university, others are employed by a third-party MOOC partner and even others by a specialized content production company or network provider, complex contracts are required to glue the team together. It’s easy to get caught up in what proponents say the end result should be – a more accessible, better, cheaper education. But good experiments need to have more transparency surrounding the who’s, why’s and how’s. Below the water line Take for example Georgia Tech’s plan to offer a $6,630 online masters degree beginning in fall 2014 to 10,000 new students over three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. The costs to offer the degree will be one-sixth of what it costs today. That’s the visible part of the MOOC master’s degree program iceberg – accessibility, costs savings, scale, growth, etc. What’s underneath? It appears that Georgia Tech is partnering with a Silicon Valley company named Udacity, Inc. and AT&T. AT&T is supporting the venture with $2 million in the start-up year. But’s what interesting here is an amendment to the contract between Georgia Tech and Udacity, posted on the Internet after an open records request by Inside Higher Ed. Assuming the posting is genuine (we all know of Internet postings that aren’t the real thing – and even if real, this contract may not have been executed), my reading of part B to the contract amendment is that both parties (Georgia Tech and Udacity) will co-develop the courses, Udacity will share know-how to build the courses, and Udacity will have the authority to subcontract the proctoring of examinations to one or more third parties. Section 2.4 (k) of the amendment seems to suggest that Udacity can teach the co-developed courses to non-registered students using the same content (except for Georgia Tech exams), and that Udacity can itself award certificates – as long as those certificates do not relate in any way to Georgia Tech’s certificates, credit or degrees. The revenue sharing agreement for the non-registered student offerings of Udacity courses gets a bit confusing. Here’s what it says. (Georgia Tech is running the program though its Research Corporation, hence the abbreviation GTRC for Georgia Tech.)

“… Revenue from non-registered students who pay Udacity, Inc. for participation in the Masters Degree Courses shall be shared with GTRC utilizing the Udacity Monetization Model in the Online Course Hosting Agreement (Exhibit A …) except that for Udacity Courses based on Master Degree Courses, Udacity, Inc. will pay GTRC 20% of any gross revenue actually collected by Udacity, Inc. for the Udacity Course while the Udacity course is offered by and hosted on the Udacity, Inc. Platform plus an additional 20% of gross profits on the aggregate set of the Udacity Courses provided by GTRC to Udacity, Inc. …”

Section 2.4 (j) discusses how Udacity will offer course assistants (if needed) who will interact with students. The Inside Higher Ed article discusses how Georgia Tech will also hire a new category or classification of university employees to complement faculty. This new staff will be service professionals and will work with faculty and the course materials. Some professors believe a move away from relying on graduate teaching assistants is a good thing. Other professors and schools are shying away from MOOCs and their associated contracts with third parties. Harvard and MIT created a non-profit company, edX, to provide MOOCs, but Amherst College saw fit to not join them. Fifty-eight Harvard professors recently sent a letter to their dean asking for more oversight, including a set of “ethical and educational principles to govern” their area’s involvement. In Haber’s Huffington Post article, it is no wonder he stated: “The MOOC experiment is playing out in one of the messier corners of the already messy world: academia.” De-composition One current development in the area of MOOCs appears to be that we are learning ways to de-compose course processes in such a way that employees possessing specialized skillsets can contribute where it matters most. Methods can be repeated and there can definitely be high quality learning outcomes. Another aspect of this is not so easy – there are complex contracts that serve to glue together de-composed and often outsourced processes and parts. While the outsourcing model applies to universities elsewhere and perhaps to other units within ASU, we are fortunate in the W. P. Carey School of Business to have an in-house team to assist faculty. It is called Online Academic Services (OAS). OAS Executive Director Sher Downing helped me with my research for this note, and she pointed out that, “OAS supports faculty initiatives through the design and planning phases, providing systematic approaches for showcasing subject matter expertise through the most appropriate delivery method.” She said, “eLearning provides an extension of the W. P. Carey brand, which broadcasts our award-winning faculty to our student clients; our focus is on how to best reach and engage the audience.” This philosophy leads to a strong partnership with faculty to deliver highly successful online programs like our Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) The school hasn’t experimented too much with full-blown MOOCs – yet. So what’s under the MOOC iceberg that we can’t see yet? It might well be that MOOC companies will compete for a while until a clear winning platform emerges. If that is the case, another NCAA analogy might apply. In 1986, the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia Athletic Association sued the NCAA because the NCAA controlled television broadcast rights to college football games. When some universities tried to negotiate the sale of their own television rights, the NCAA threatened to ban them from all sports. The Supreme Court ruled the NCAA television plan violated the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. If MOOCs are university products akin to sports teams with courses for broadcast, regional and/or state-based initiatives may have to duke it out with the Harvard and MIT courses that can be purchased directly – maybe through state purchasing authorities who are trained to handle complex contracts. On the other hand, consider the faculty of the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University, who wrote to Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor whose MOOC on “Justice” was being encouraged for use in their curriculum. Their last sentence held a powerful and perhaps controversial message: “Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.” In Sandel’s reply, he noted, “I know very little about the arrangements edX made with San Jose State University, and nothing about the internal discussions at SJSU… The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.” I wonder if that commitment was in his MOOC contract. I’ll suspect it was underneath the waterline, but hopefully there will be some important gains from this early round of experimentation. Given we are in experimentation mode, it will be interesting to see who will assemble and disseminate collective MOOC usage knowledge and what the possibilities will be for government and organizations to acknowledge and compensate these efforts. One thing is for certain, strategic academic leadership will be key.

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