Sunday Posts

With EdX's announcement that they have finally decided to search for sustainability by limiting the access to their online courses, the much awaited moment of normalisation of MOOCs has arrived. The euphoria that accompanied the launch of Coursera and EdX - that these 'free' lectures from professors of world's best institutions would completely transform learning in mediocre institutions and particularly in developing countries - is finally and truly over.  Its contemporaries have long abandoned the road: Udacity turned itself into a paid platform of profitable ambition long time ago, and Coursera, the most popular, have limited graded assessment to paying students (along with verified certificates) almost three years ago. Futurelearn, the late-coming British counterpart, in keeping with 'shop-keeping' culture of British universities, never indulged much in world-changing rhetoric, but rather kept itself to the promotion of 'brand Britain' with...

There is some sort of consensus that Higher Education needs to change, but the shape of it is hotly contested. One key idea that has got some traction is that some sort of unbundling is both inevitable and desirable. This model of 3- or 4-year Undergraduate degrees, focused on one or few disciplines, is too costly and too closed for our time. Unbundling, which rests on recognition of various ways of earning college credit, through various channels and activities, would reduce the costs and allow the students flexibility in terms of time and location to complete their degrees. All sorts of experimentation has followed: From the launch of college credit bearing (as well as non-credit) MOOCs to variation of the structure of college degrees, including shortening of the time required, have got under way.  But, it has also gone the other way, as Chris Mayer argued (see the article here ). The Higher Education community in general, accepting that a transformation is necessary, is ar...

The MOOCs did not save the world or changed Higher Ed, as promised. But Coursera's new round of funding point to a redefinition of sorts for MOOCs, and perhaps a firmer founding. It seems Coursera has found a new strategy in Professional Development, as did Udacity with their nano-degrees earlier. Instead of changing the Higher Education and emerging as replacements of college, Coursera, along with its partner colleges, have become an attractive place for people who already have degree level education and want to keep developing their knowledge and skills. This is a new perspective in the Education Innovation conversation. The initial investor interests, which picked up around 2011, were driven by some sort of apocalyptic death-of-the-college thinking. Looking back, the trigger for this may have been the Great Recession, which brought out the middle class employment crisis in sharp relief, and made the US student debt look dangerous. However, in many a sense, that moment has ...

Institute of International Education's (IIE) Rajika Bhandari writes about the roles Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) can play in education of developing nations ( see here ) and highlights five key questions regarding infrastructure availability, relevance in the context of non-formal education, impact on gender gap, impact on the role of the teacher and local relevance. I feel these questions are extremely relevant, but ones that the MOOC enthusiasts often lose sight of. In fact, the biggest danger for the MOOCs is not that it may not work, but rather one puts expectations on it that can't be satisfied, and this becomes another bubble that bursts in time. The questions, as raised here, can help focus the discussion and understand what the MOOCs can and can not do in the developing countries. 1. The Infrastructure Gap Most MOOC advocates have a limited view of the developing country higher education infrastructure. The reason for such limited perspective is this: ...

How much should one pay heed to cultural issues when planning to deliver education globally? This question has assumed renewed significance as global education is now a reality. Technology has made it possible, financial liberalisation made it desirable. Now, even the last barriers, which were there for mostly political and cultural reasons, are also coming down. Even a country like Bangladesh, which is forever at war with Western influence at home, has now allowed overseas universities to set up shop ( see story ). With a broad global consensus slowly emerging about a regulatory easing of Higher Education, the global online providers never had it better. The technology of delivery has reached a tipping point, the access to computing, through cheap tablets and smartphones, have reached even the remotest parts of the world, and the groundswell of middle class aspirations have far outstripped the traditional modes of supply.  Indeed, there are big hurdles to cross. Chin...

Raphael's painting of Plato teaching is a popular PowerPoint item for Higher Education conferences these days. This is to be seen in the context of today's classroom, somewhat like the MIT's in the other picture here. The point is not the architectural contrast and the drab predictability of today's windowless classrooms, but rather the similarities between the two - indeed, the speakers use these pictures to emphasise that education has changed very little - and the fact that it is still the students in conversation with each other and with the teacher that make education. That, announces the PowerPoint crusaders armed with incontrovertible visual evidence, needs to change. However, one may indeed be able to point out several differences in the two spaces, which directly points to the changes happening in education. To start with, the humble table must not be overlooked, as well as the pen and paper, all pointing to a writing culture to replace the Oral traditi...

The US Government's decision to stop Coursera (and presumably other MOOCs) from delivering the courses in Syria, Iran, Cuba and Sudan is astonishing, if not outright misdirected. Indeed, I come to know of this as I am doing a course 'Constitutional Struggles in The Islamic World' from University of Copenhagen, and the notification tells me that the students taking the course from the above-mentioned countries will be stopped from taking the course. The act of sanction, therefore, appears completely counter-productive in the context. The mail from Prof. Dr. Ebrahim Afsah that bore the notification states: "Let me reiterate that I am appalled at this decision. Please note that no-one at Coursera likely had a choice in this matter! At any rate, rest assured that these are not the values of the University of Copenhagen, of its Faculty of Law, and most assuredly not mine!" The point made in the notification, appended to Professor Afsah's mail, is th...

If 2012 was the 'Year of the MOOCs' as proclaimed by New York Times, 2014 started on a downbeat note, with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur talking about 'MOOC Bust'. It is difficult to understand what accounts for such fickle sentiments, except that current pessimism is just a correction of the hype. There were indeed talk of low completion rates - only a handful of students who register for a MOOC ever completes a course (Times Higher Education reported a figure of 7%, but that seems way too high) - but then completion rate itself is such an old economy model out of sync with Long Tail thinking: Kevin Carey wrote a fairly persuasive piece on why the completion rates of the MOOCs is simply the wrong measure ( 'Pay No Attention to Supposedly Low MOOC Competion Rates' ). There was also the Fast Company article on Udacity founder, Sebastian Thurn, the Stanford Professor whose Stanford course on Artificial Intelligence may be claimed to have started it all. ...

You can love or hate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), but you can't ignore them. This is my cliched response to the equally cliched ritual that has become a feature of conferences about education: The designated speaker about education technology almost always seems to start with the sequence of questions: "How many of you have ever joined a MOOC?" and a few hands go up. And, then, almost invariably, "How many of you have completed any?" - almost no one responds to this one. Almost no one, because I am getting used to being the only one in the room who has completed a  MOOC. In fact, I have completed five now, and enjoyed immensely the ones I completed. But, I raise my hand not proudly, but hesitantly, because I expect no kudos for completing courses that almost no one seems to bother about: I don't get any, expect a dismissive "well done" before the speaker moves on to make his/her point. Which is, essentially, no one completes a MOOC...

I have been going through a Conference Season, attending different conferences discussing the future of Higher Education with the most inevitable discussion on Technology in Higher Education. It is somewhat amusing to hear so many different views somewhat converging on the same answer: That it would change education, but contrary to what some of its most radical proponents say, it won't make the traditional structures of Higher Education obsolete. So whether a speaker launches into a revolutionary manifesto or a conservative soul-searching while speaking about technology, in the end, it is always the establishment message that returns - that Higher Ed isn't going to wither away. This view, however, is more of a reflection of the people in the room than the possibilities of technology. The discussion about technology in education always start with the somewhat patronising and now cliched question about how many people have started a MOOC and how many have completed it. In t...

Last few weeks have been quite difficult for the MOOCs: After the initial flurry of change of the world rhetoric, suddenly some setbacks dampened the momentum. This started the usual I-told-you-so chatter, that MOOCs are just a passing fad. On the other end of the spectrum, the very usual optimism continues to persist: The balance has invariably tipped and will continue to tip, regardless of the fate of one or two companies. And, as in many other things in life, the sensible stance to take is somewhere in the middle, to consider the issues but not write off the phenomenon altogether. To be clear, what we are dealing with isn't any reversal of fortune, but slowness of progress. And, despite the slowness, new things did indeed happen. Coursera raised another, bigger, sum, and new services, like NovoEd , did indeed launch. Some of the older services, like Alison , got eyeballs and traction, somewhat because of the general media enthusiasm about the MOOCs. The balance did indeed s...

Education Marketing is less about education and more about marketing. It stands almost external to the process of education, a discipline that seeks to import 'best practices' from famed marketers such as P&G, the guerrilla tricks of the trade, the manufactured love of relationship marketing, from consumer goods to education. The underlying belief is that educators don't market well and they need to take lessons from the more 'sophisticated' product and service companies, which have been marketing for scores of years. On the educators' side, some people are revolted by the practise of marketing. Particularly the people who studied or worked at the top institutions, which sit with centuries of well-earned reputation, can't really see the point: For them, education marketing is something for gate-crashers, the For-Profit pretenders. It is indeed true that For-Profits spend an unusual amount of money on sales and marketing: However, this is not just becaus...

There are lots of people who think MOOCs are game-changer, and others who think it is just a passing fad: I just like the classes I am doing on Coursera and Udacity, and believe this is a good thing. But, lately, I have discovered that there is more than just access to great learning through these platforms: They represent a way to meet great people. And, more than ever, this community is global: I am doing a course on Small Business Growth, and the community has over 60,000 people from all over the world, including a handful in London and the Home counties. And, I would like to believe that this is indeed something unique, and need to be celebrated. If there is one defining thing about our generation, that is our faith in human progress. Everyone, right or left of the political spectrum, seem to have accepted that human history will move forward, and we would find our way out of even the most intractable problems, such as global warming and worldwide recession, through human inge...

MOOCs are taking big strides towards becoming accredited, but is that the right thing to do? As some of the Coursera courses get recognition for college credit, the mood for MOOC enthusiasts is definitely celebratory. The idea is gaining traction, they say, and here is proof that it is no longer a fad. The MOOC will now challenge college education, bemoan its detractors, pointing out that it is surely the inferior alternative.  The full college degree, as everyone is expecting MOOCs to get to some day, is a far cry from sme college credit. MOOCs will have to change their essential character to do full college degrees, as their major challenge, assessments, will become central in that game. Without the massiveness and the openness, MOOCs are not much of a phenomenon; Open and Distance learning existed for a long time. Russian engineers were training themselves by the Radio in the 1950s, as around the same time, earning diplomas. The game-changing possibility of MOOCs is whe...

Open Courses have arrived, with thousands joining in from all over the world, and that does not make everyone happy. Depending on who one speaks to, it is described as anything between a fad, soon to disappear into irrelevance, and a game-changer, something that will soon render our great universities useless: Both of these views are indeed extreme, and it is fair to assume that the truth is somewhere in the middle. However, the extremities of these positions indicate that the advent of open courses generate strong passion and heated arguments, and surely its enemies can match its adherents, if not by number, but certainly by strength. Open Courses are indeed upending an industry, though it is not higher education and the universities. If anything, I shall argue, Open Courses are saving the universities and helping them to re-establish themselves with a more democratic credential and connect with a large number of people; the universities are regaining, through these courses, a so...

Let's face it: Higher Education needs a different business model. What we have now is what has been handed down to us from previous generations. This is a model based on reputation, based on the demand for the aspiring classes to be like the previously (and still) privileged classes. But this is snake oil in a sense as no such pathway exists anymore. And, besides, one can't mass supply exclusivity: The more education there is, the less special degrees are. So, we have had an onward and forward arms race, and sadly, this was mostly about things which matter less for plain old teaching and learning. There were things about research, which creates knowledge and informs teaching, only if it is humanly plausible to do a full year's worth of teaching and maintain high research productivity: More often than not it proved very difficult. And, then, the features race descended, or should we say ascended, into absurd - heated swimming pools, professional athletics facilities...