At the University of Pennsylvania, we’ve been offering for-credit online courses for many years. However, the landscape of online course offerings became much more interesting in 2012 when the University partnered with the online course platform, Coursera, to start offering select courses as MOOCs -- not-for-credit courses that are free and open to the world.
Why would a college or university offer a free MOOC?
The University of Pennsylvania was very excited and proactive in being an early adopter of massive open online education. Why would a college or university offer a free MOOC? It's a great question and has been a very hot topic. Some of the reasons MOOCs are beneficial to universities are because they:
- Were (and to certain extent still are) a hot topic for press / blog coverage
- Highlight a university's instructors and course offerings
- Help spread and developing a university's branding
- Potentially encourage signups for a university's for-credit in-person or online courses
- Might generate a small profit from students via paid certificates of participation / accomplishment
- Enable the opportunity for innovative teaching techniques and research
- Give universities the opportunity to give back to the community / world
The Impact of MOOCs on Universities
Following the adoption of Coursera, our online course offering at the University of Pennsylvania has significantly expanded in number of students and significance. As a result of MOOCs, we’ve had classes ranging from 10,000 to 100,000+ enrolled students. The Modern and Contemporary Poetry course that I have worked on has had 144,000 total students over the past 4 offerings of the course. With such a large and global audience, the stakes are higher, the stage is bigger and the impact on reputation is far greater for the University. The biggest challenge, from my perspective, has been being on the ground to implement it.
- Most professors know the material well but the course has to be adapted and redesigned for an online space, which has its important pedagogical challenges.
- Finding staff time and studio space is quite difficult. Coursera absorbed most of our production staff’s time across the University. We’ve had to build permanent and makeshift studio spaces to accommodate the new level of demands.
- As more universities enter the MOOC space, there is increased competition and demand for technically higher quality course materials. Talking head professors recorded with their cheap webcam aren’t cutting it anymore.
- Additional money is needed to get better gear and additional staff time is needed to learn it and to develop higher quality products.
The Impact of MOOCs on Online Learning
The cool, potentially innovative aspect of MOOC platforms are the opportunity to build and nurture a diverse, geographically disperse community of learners, who are approaching the materials from different angles, motivations and so on. I say "opportunity" because not every professor, university and MOOC platform see or value that opportunity. We’re seeing many MOOC platforms focusing on teacher absence. That is, a teacher records a few videos, posts them up and it’s more or less automated from there. When MOOCs run on autopilot without real instructor presence, we don’t have innovation or engagement; All we have is YouTube. And we’ve had that since 2005. In our Modern and Contemporary Poetry course, we have found that instructor presence is key in differentiating the online learning experience and making it something impactful and special pedagogically. In addition to the prerecorded materials in our poetry course, we use weekly live webcasts as a key components in bringing the course to life. But they’re not just webcasts, they’re interactive; During the webcast, the community is given the stage to ask questions, join in with comments and participate in a number of ways. For 10 weeks during our weekly 1-2 hour webcasts, we take:
- phone calls
- tweets
- Facebook messages
- discussion posts
- voicemails
New technology enables us to be old fashioned. Though the tools (i.e. technology) have changed, the concepts behind effective teaching are the same -- MOOC platforms simply allow us to do so on a grander level. MOOC platforms become the classroom and live webcasts become an office hour -- an important ingredient in breaking down the geographical and virtual walls among learners and instructor. Instructor presence resonates with students in MOOCs. "There has been excellent content and material. But what has been even more rewarding has been the warmth exuded by [the instructor] Al Filresis and his team through the video discussions and live webcasts. I feel I know them and they have been genuinely interested in my learning experience." -Phyllis Blanck, Student "The special activities like live webcasts and Facebook interactions from the instructor and [Teaching Assistants] provide an extra feeling of connectedness and commitment.” -Anthony Kolasny, Student "They have really figured out how to engage with such a large group. It has been an incredible experience." -Wendy Mitton, Student Despite being optional and supplemental in nature, our live webcasts are a very popular aspect of the course and many students find these exciting and helpful. Some webcasts have 5 to 10% of active students tuned in. One of the most interesting and telling numbers during a live webcast shouldn’t be total number of viewers, but how many viewers are still tuned despite the webcast being off-air. Assuming the content and technical quality of the webcast are both good, it is our duty to keep our viewers engaged. If a lot of people are still "tuned in" after the webcast is over, that means they were essentially "tuned out” and disengaged during the webcast.
The Future of MOOCs
At the end of the day, the reasons a university has gotten involved in MOOCs will help to determine their value. In our poetry MOOC, we have seen firsthand that instructor presence encourages student engagement in ways where other online courses struggle. Among our students, our participation levels remain significantly higher than most MOOC courses. In my eyes, to be truly effective and to develop real pedagogical innovation, instructors must be present in their MOOCs. In many ways, MOOCs are a marketing campaign, and like most marketing campaigns, it is difficult to specifically measure the return on investment. In the words of the notable department store merchant, John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." As the number of MOOCs continue to increase and the excitement cools, I expect universities and instructors will start evaluating if they are innovators, or if they are marketers.
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