The MOOCs are coming! Are they here to stay?

The proliferation of MOOCs has been one of the more pivotal trends in higher education.   Fittingly, MOOCs were a prominent topic of discussion at AACRAO’s recently held Annual Meeting. 

Michael Burke, Registrar of Harvard University, offered a quick update on the growth and direction of MOOCs.   The rise of MOOCs is potentially transformational for higher education, but it presents a number of practical challenges to registrars and admissions officers such as rationalizing, reconciling and reimagining practices for records management, student privacy, transfer credit, admissions and identity management between traditional student information systems and MOOC platforms. 

"We hear that MOOC’s are a challenge to the traditional, tried and true, methods of classroom instruction that we’ve all grown up with, and therefore need to be considered from a very critical perspective. But in truth, MOOC’s are a symptom of how technology is revolutionizing higher education," observed attendee Andrew S. Hannah, Senior Associate University Registrar at the University of Chicago.

Burke’s session addressed a number of interesting questions.  For example:

• Who owns the lectures after they are hosted as a MOOC?  
• How should faculty test/grade the courses taken over MOOCs and consider identity management during the course delivery?
• Who is truly the audience being served? 

Statistically speaking, of the students taking HarvardX courses 59 percent are male, 68 percent already hold a  BA degree or higher, and the median age is 28.  Despite the low completion rate, HarverdX in two years produced the equivalent number of alumni as 22 graduating classes at Harvard College.

The large scale of MOOCs and their attractiveness to those with degrees has been noted elsewhere. As Andrys Onsman noted in Inside Higher Ed, Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at Wharton’s U Penn Business School, found that one of its MOOCs had an initial enrollment of more than 130,000 students.  In addition, more than 40 percent of the people enrolling in another offering already held masters, professional or doctoral degrees.  This, he says, gave him the feeling that a lot of the people who enroll in MOOCs are adults who want to know something specific, or continue their life long learning. 

MOOCs could also serve as a way of providing foundational training to students, for free, or perhaps for a fraction of the cost if you wish to be assessed and credentialed for having learned the session content.  How does this fit into the business model of a college or university? How does it fit into the structure of traditional brick-and-mortar-schools?

The MOOCs business model and the treatment of credits earned are still evolving.  The HarvardX model, like many others, has been to make the course free on the front end, but charge a fee for the assessment, and with that, carrying a record through a student’s academic life. According to Burke, ACE is certifying certain MOOCs to provide transfer credits for prior learning.  

Institutions are figuring out what MOOCs mean to them and how to integrate them into their curricular offerings. Some MOOCs might be more academic while others might act more like labor-market credentials. Schools will come to understand their target markets and begin to categorize their courses accordingly. They will become currency, in much the same way as other academic credits become currency.

The learning outcomes of Michael Burke’s session offered attendees an important and useful perspective on recent MOOC developments and the emerging debate about pedagogy, use of resources, sustainability, and impact.  A copy of the Power Point can be found here. 

"There is a paradigm-shift underway, and registrars are experiencing this not just with MOOC’s but the LMS’s, flipped classrooms, distance ed., etc.," Hannah added. "Traditionally,  we (registrars) compiled our academic records from the inside-out, starting with a course and establishing that whoever was registered for that course—was TAUGHT that course—was defined as a student, and conferred credits and full-time status and all the privileges of being a student.  But with MOOC’s and the other technologies, the records flow from the outside-in, with the emphasis on what has the student LEARNED.  Registrars will need a very different tool-set to compile these records."