Et tu, MOOCs?
In the late 2000s, a group of people in MIT and Stanford figured that instead of thousands of colleges and universities around the country all teaching the same classes to small groups of students, you could get one brilliant professor to teach the best course material to the whole world at once via the Internet.?They invented what we now call Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
“Fifty years from now, there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education”. —?proclaimed Sebastian Thrun?(the founder of Udacity, the 4th largest MOOC in the world)
Seven years and billions of dollars since then, the gold rush is still on. But ironically, the “leaders” in this space have only managed to alienate themselves further from the real problems plaguing the sector.
Tucked away in a tiny corner of the internet is a report on?the current state of MOOC’s. Their finding —?the MOOC promise never materialized. Instead, what we see now is a push by these MOOCs to fortify an existing business model i.e. helping universities outsource their online master’s degree for professionals.
The study shows that growth in MOOCs has been primarily driven by participants in the most affluent countries (>80%). And that low completion rates have not improved in the last six to seven years. But most interestingly, it found that the vast majority of MOOC learners never returned after their first year.
Where do these people go, once they give up? And why did they signup in the first place?
In Durham, North Carolina, far from the hype, the non-profit Goodwill Community Foundation and the 16 employees keeping GCFs Learn Free initiative running, seem to have a much better answer to exactly those questions. And, unbeknownest to most,?GCFLearnFree.org?also happens to be the second biggest MOOC (and still growing) in the world. They do so by focusing on job based skills. And this is where Goodwill separates itself from the pack.
In the 1960s and 1970s, you could pick up a skill and live out your life on mastery of that skill alone. And universities served that purpose well. But today, based on estimates, the half-life of many skills is close to five years. Goodwill understands this trend very well.?It understands that the world of work requires a commitment to lifelong learning. As a result, instead of traditional classes digitized for massive consumption, they focus on ever-evolving curriculum, that enables people to maintain relevant skills needed for emerging future of work. Skills that are not available in regular classrooms and course materials. And knowledge that is tacit and ever changing.
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How does a traditional university function in an atmosphere where the time taken to earn a Ph.D in a subject is approximately as long as it takes for a skill, technique or algorithm to become irrelevant in the real world?
Maybe they need to start thinking about?learning spaces as platforms and not as products. Universities through their fixed knowledge assets provide products. And products do not adapt as quickly as platforms do. Capabilities are no longer determined by what one owns or controls, but what one can access. The knowledge networks that may matter more tomorrow are the networks where knowledge is used and evolved, as opposed to the institutions where knowledge is taught and debated.
If we look around, we see an already complex learning ecosystem — schools, universities, home, after-school, community sources, online networks, libraries etc. The building blocks of a true learning platform have always existed. The first ever knowledge networks were guilds and apprenticeships and not the universities we know today. Maybe they got something right?
How do we take this broader ecosystem and create such a network of partners facilitating learning by doing?
Left to us, we broadly agree with?John Seely Brown’s idea?of empowering libraries to act as the new nodal agency in this participatory learning network.?Libraries are already fundamentally invested in engaging and educating the local community at a low cost and building their knowledge / literacy, with no strings attached. In their modern avatar they also are very efficient at being a gateway for discovery of interesting opportunities to learn and work. Librarians today, are also trained to think of themselves as playing an important role in integrating people into the local community network, and further, integrating the local community into larger national and international networks.
It’s hard to believe that the universities are unaware of whats happening “out there”. That they truly believe that re-packaging their 500-year old traditional model online through their MOOC’s is the best they can do. The world is currently going through a crisis of an oversupply of people with outdated degrees on the one hand, and the ever-changing nature of “jobs” and “work” instigated by technological progress on the other hand.
The colleges and universities of the world deserve our utmost admiration for enabling the progress we have seen since the Industrial Revolution.?But?their latest embrace of technology and “openness” appears instead to be a veiled attempt to refuse to give up the esteem they have (rightfully) earned in the last century, in their fight to stay relevant. By steadfastly oversupplying outdated skills and degrees to an already saturated market, they are more directly responsible for the “jobs” crisis plaguing the world than most of us have been willing to admit so far.