A 2012-2013 study conducted by MIT and Harvard revealed an overwhelming 95% of students drop their online courses before completion. I hate to admit that I am complicit in that statistic. I currently have three courses that are pending completion and I have no motivation whatsoever to log back in.
If online courses, or MOOCs, have such dismal completion rates, why did universities once feared they would render them irrelevant? This week in The Global Tiller, we take a look at the open education movement that led to the wide availability of free online courses, what have they evolved into and what does their future promise.
MOOCs, or massive open online courses, became highly popular in 2011 when Stanford University began offering its courses online for free. In just one year that number grew to more than 250 free courses offered by more than 40 universities — leading to The New York Times calling 2012 as the "Year of the MOOC".
The idea of offering free online courses had noble origins, stemming from what is known as the open education movement — a growing philosophy that educational resources and experiences should be available to everyone regardless of their geographical location or income background. This movement encompasses a wide range of initiatives, such as copyright waivers or removal of expensive textbooks from courses. But perhaps its most global claim to fame is MOOCs.
At its onset in 2014, a total of 16 to 18 million people enrolled in MOOCs across the world, by 2019, this number had risen to 120 million. You won’t be surprised to know that the Covid-19 pandemic proved to be yet another boost to this industry. In April 2020, the three biggest MOOC providers registered as many new learners as they had done in all of 2019, reaching a total of 126 million new users. That number exploded to 220 million in 2021.
With somewhat missionary aspirations, early MOOC advertisements presented them as the best solution to ending global inequality in education access, with images portraying students of colour in rural villages on their homepages. The MOOC mania was led by computer science professors and their faith in the salvational potential of technology but it led them to establish online learning platforms, such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, which were for-profit organisations. Fast forward to today and nearly all of these learning platforms have introduced paywalls with the best course offerings reserved for paid subscribers.
At around the same time as American universities were panicking that MOOCs will drive them out of business unless they jumped on board, their European counterparts focused more on the 'open' part of the acronym. Besides UK's Future Learn, which only offers paid courses, European higher education institutions had government buy-in early on and did away with patents and copyright restrictions. As a result, most MOOCs were adapted into diverse languages and taken up by students across the globe.
Asia has been a growing market for MOOCs since its onset and the concept has been embraced wholeheartedly. By late 2020, China had more than 30 MOOC platforms hosting 34,000 courses taken by half a billion students — including 150 million university students. India launched its own online learning platform, called Swayam, which is now considered among the top five platforms worldwide. This movement has also helped many professors in the Global South follow online courses offered by some of the best teachers around the globe to improve their own pedagogy, while many students are opting to learn from them when their own universities fail to provide good quality content.
However, it isn’t people of colour sitting in rural towns who are making up the current clientele of these online education resources. A majority of the users come from affluent countries or neighbourhoods, are those who already have high levels of education, and are employed in highly skilled professions. MOOCs are no longer a tool to uplift those who couldn’t access education, but a way for those who have made it to continue to 'upskill'.
As the target audience changed, so did the strategies to encourage retention. Some argue that charging students for the courses ensures that they complete the course they begin, but that has not been the case. It is, in fact, face-to-face interaction that makes students more compelled to finish a course. Future MOOCs are likely to be structured around live teacher engagement. A recent example of such an endeavour is WizIQ which democratises both ends of the teaching process. Any professor can use this platform to offer online courses but how the platform streamlines the quality of education material is unclear.
The shift in audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it begs the question: what about the values on which this system was imagined? If the goal was to make education accessible, why did universities and learning platforms drift towards exclusivity?
The hype around MOOCs may have died down but it has evolved into a resource that will continue to find relevancy as more and more people seek professional development. What remains to be seen, however, is whether or not its original aspirations of making education accessible will make a comeback.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
…and now what?
I’ve been a strong consumer of MOOCs since 2012 now. I mostly used Coursera, one of the pioneers of the industry, and accomplished 21 trainings, including one specialisation, failed in one and never finished three others.
I always enjoyed the system and mostly the ability to access great trainings from reputable universities from my terrace on my remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It helped me build new sets of skills as I was developing my business. Of course, I could have done through a regular course of studies, but this would have required to leave the island for a university and scholarships are not so easy to get.
For me, MOOCs represent indeed open access to education. Although I’ve witnessed the evolution of the concept focusing now on upskilling more than basic training. Why? Probably because among the many universities that attract students and proposes courses on those platforms, most of them are in countries where education is not only expensive but also a business.
So MOOCs had to adapt to fit this business model. The evolution of this concept, and how it turned its back from its initial vision, is not just disappointment in those platforms, but mostly disappointment in the inability of many to consider that education should be more open, if not completely free.
Of course, this raises many questions on how to make sure classes have access to the best professor, the best equipment and stay up-to-date with the needs of the students (not only in pedagogical but in terms of health, wellbeing, comfort…). So it’s not an easy circle to square. And many governments are reluctant to sustain this on their own as well as citizens are unwilling to pay more taxes to fund free schools (it’s so much easier to ask people to pay taxes to increase military spending for some reason…).
This is the state of most of our world today (as even the countries where education is mostly free, such as France, it is slowly evolving towards a business-oriented system). But should it remain like this? Maybe it’s time to realise how much money we’re losing by making education so hard to reach for many. It may be hard to put numbers on it.
But you probably have people around you who have been through higher education and become game changers, change makers or simply just very productive, engaged, passionate people who achieved a lot. And probably, some of them came from modest backgrounds who had the chance or managed to access to enough funding to get their education paid.
Now multiply this by the strong belief all of us probably have those people with great potential all around us and then you can start to envision how much is missed in this system.
Where to now? MOOCs on their own won’t solve the issue but they may be part of the solution if used properly, if they go back to their initial purpose. But that would require every actor to play their part in the game. And, most importantly, it will require governments, educators and taxpayers to play the long-term game and think about what they can benefit from by not profiting immediately from their investments.
But this may be a lesson we will not learn online, nor in the classroom. It’ll be a lesson hardly learned through the losses that are adding up every day and will, one day, deprive us from the ability to adapt to the challenges of our times and of tomorrow, cause that’s what education is about.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury