Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Entrepreneurial Instruction or the Death of Traditional Education

Dr. Brad MehlenbacherDepartment of Leadership, Policy & Adult & Higher EducationNC State UniversityRaleigh, North Carolinabrad_m@ncsu.edu

SpeedCon 2012November 17, 2012

MOOCs: Outline Your Experiences as Learners The Year of the MOOC MOOCs: Acronyms Everywhere MOOCs Defined: A Crib Sheet MOOCs: A Beginning MOOCs: The Media Attention MOOCs: The Money Fischer Black, Ben Nelson, & Richard

Lanham: On Learning & Higher Education

Students as Consumers: Appeal, Problem, Inflation

New Work & Economic Realities Higher Education on the Edge Higher Education & Global Economic

Collapse Digital Teaching & Learning

Potentials.*

*To download this presentation, see http://www.slideshare.net/bradmehlenbacher/

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On Your Experiences as Learners Name a course in college that

influenced your thinking in important ways?

Name a task or project that influenced your learning?

Name an instructor who made a difference in your life?

Name a job that was particularly instructional or that influenced your direction in life?

Name a group project you worked on that was particularly positive?

Name a place or time that seems instrumental to your definition of self as a learner?

Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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The Year of the MOOC* “... one of the hottest subjects in

education has been MOOCs, otherwise known as Massively Open Online Courses…. MOOCs have been pegged by some as representing the future of the educational system†, democratizing education, bringing quality learning content to people of any age, in any corner of the world for a small fee—if not for free.”

Brooks, D. (2012). The campus tsunami. The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, May 3. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/brooks-the-campus-tsunami.html Empson, R. (2012). 2U one-ups MOOCs, Coursera, now offers online undergrad courses from top schools for credit. Techcrunch.com, November 15. Available online: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/2u-one-ups-moocs-coursera-now-offers-online-undergrad-courses-from-top-schools-for-credit/ †Leckart, S. (2012). The Stanford education experiment could change higher learning forever. Wired Science, March 20. Available online: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/ *Pappano, L. (2012). The year of the MOOC. The New York Times, Education Life, November 2. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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“What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education….”

MOOCs: Acronyms Everywhere

Masters, K. (2011). A brief guide to understanding MOOCs. The Internet Journal of Medical Education, 1 (2). Available online: http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-medical-education/volume-1-number-2/a-brief-guide-to-understanding-moocs.htmlWatters, A. (2012). The language of MOOCs. Hackeducation.com, June 7. Available online: http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/06/07/the-language-of-moocs/ *Wiley, D., & Green, C. (2012). Chapter 6: Why openness in education? In Diana G. Oblinger (ed.), Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies (pp. 81-89). Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE. Available online: http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/chapter-6-why-openness-education

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M for Massive: Define massive? How many students? Duration? Retention?

O for Open: Open enrollment? Openly licensed content? Open source platform? Open-ended classes? Is anything free?*

O for Online: Can there be offline versions? Study groups?

Course: Or connection, connectivism, community, credit, certificate?

MOOCs Defined: A Crib Sheet

Shaffer, J. (2011). MOOC crib sheet. Workshop at ISTE 2011. Available online: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/

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Features of a MOOC: Wiki or blog for course materials, open enrollment, readings or audio/video recordings, networking between students, activities, sharing knowledge, student-driven assignments, participation, content production, auto-grading and/or peer review and assessment.

MOOCs: The Beginning

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MOOC coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier (U of PEI) in response to online course designed by George Siemens (Athabasca U) and Stephen Downes (NRC Canada, mooc.ca)

First MOOC: 25 tuition-paying students at U of Manitoba and 2,300 general students who took Connectivism and Connective Knowledge class for free

RSS feeds, Moodle discussions, blogs, 2nd Life, synchronous online meetings.

Connectivism 2008. (2008). Extended Education and Learning Technologies Centre, University of Manitoba.. Available online: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism_2008#Week_9:_What_becomes_of_the_teacher.3F_New_roles_for_educators_.28November_3-9.29 Massive open online course. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#History

MOOCs: The Media Attention

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Stanford U launches set of free online courses

Sebastian Thrun’s Stanford U AI MOOC attracts over 160K users (25K complete the course) from over 190 countries

Thrun founds Udacity, a for-profit start-up based on the course

Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng at Stanford spin off Coursera (16M venture funding).

Coursera. (n.d.). MOOC start-up. Available online: https://www.coursera.org/ Lewin, T. (2012). Beyond the College Degree, Online Educational Badges. The New York Times, March 4. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/beyond-the-college-degree-online-educational-badges.html Lewin, T. (2012). Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls. The New York Times, March 4. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/moocs-large-courses-open-to-all-topple-campus-walls.html?pagewanted=all Simon, S. (2012). Startup aims to rival Ivy League online: Elite Internet university to see top students from around the globe. Edmonton Journal, April 6. Available online: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Startup+aims+rival+League+online/6420373/story.html Thrun, S., & Norvig, P. (n.d.). Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Available online: https://www.ai-class.com/ Weissmann, J. (2012). Can This “Online Ivy” University Change the Face of Higher Education? The Atlantic, April 5. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/can-this-online-ivy-university-change-the-face-of-higher-education/255471/

MOOCs: The Money

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MIT OpenCourseWare announced in 2002 with over 2K courses online, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT (edX has $60M MIT and Harvard funding)

Salman Khan starts the Khan Academy in 2009, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google

Ben Nelson secures $25M in venture capital from Benchmark Capital in 2011 to start an online university, Minerva Project.

Khan Academy. (n.d.). The team. Available online: http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team Kolowich, S. (2012). How will MOOCs make money? Inside Higher Ed, June 11. Available online: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/11/experts-speculate-possible-business-models-mooc-providers MIT OpenCourseWare. (n.d.). Unlocking knowledge, empowering minds. Available online: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm Weissmann, J. (2012). Can This “Online Ivy” University Change the Face of Higher Education? The Atlantic, April 5. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/can-this-online-ivy-university-change-the-face-of-higher-education/255471/

Fischer Black: On Learning “Why are we talking about

school so much? What you learn on the job is nine to 11 times what you learn at school. I don’t know the exact number, but that seems a reasonable estimate.”

Fischer Black, a Goldman Sachs (GS) partner, legendary quant, and co-creator of the famed Black-Scholes option pricing model, Quoted in Farrell, C. (2012). Our (work) education crisis: Send in the MOOCs. Bloomberg Businessweek, September 18. Available online: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-17/our-work-education-crisis-send-in-the-moocs Marks, J. (2012). This is the real revolution of MOOCs. David Murphy’s Occasional Blog, October 22. Available online: http://opob.edublogs.org/2012/10/22/this-is-the-real-revolution-of-moocs/

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Ben Nelson: On Higher Education

Is this a good industry within which to start a new company?

Here are the industry characteristics. Here is a multi-billion dollar industry providing a service that’s doing gross margins of about 80 percent or so. There are a couple dozen competitors in this industry, the most recent entrant of which will turn a hundred years old next year.

The industry provides a service that has grown in price three times the rate of inflation in 30 years. So the service has become substantially more expensive. And for the privilege of buying that service, this industry serves approximately 10 percent of market demand…

Nelson, B. (2011). Taking on the Ivy League. TEDx SF: Independently organized TED event, December 5. Available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEv8g80lcjo

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Ben Nelson: On Higher Education Another 10 percent approximately is serviced by people

outside of that industry and substitute goods and about 80 percent just don’t get that service, they just can’t buy it, even though they have the means and the ability to take advantage of the service, they just can’t buy it.

Now the last characteristic of this industry is that the service that it is delivered by service professionals who not only have no training to deliver the service but, in the course of their evaluation, their promotion, their compensation, etc., not only are not monitored in how they deliver the service, they’re not trained in how to deliver the service, but there’s absolutely little to no, and mostly no, penalty or reward for providing this service well….

Griffith, E. (2012). Ben Nelson is Building a Virtual Harvard. It’s Ambitious—Just Don’t Call it Disruptive. Pandodaily, April 3. Available online: http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/03/the-minerva-project-lands-25-million-for-elite-virtual-university-ambitious-yes-just-dont-call-it-disruptive/ Sumagaysay, L. (2012). GMSV Q&A with Ben Nelson, CEO of planned ‘elite’ online university. MercuryNews.com, April 4. Available online: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_20324886/gmsv-q-ben-nelson-ceo-planned-elite-online?source=rss

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Richard Lanham: 10 Assumptions that Organize Higher Education

Assumption 1—The ideal education is face-to-face, one-on-one education

Assumption 2—Higher education, in its ideal form, proceeds in a setting sequestered in both time and space

Assumption 3—The education that every university offers should be generated in-house by resident faculty employed full-time for this purpose

Assumption 4—The ideal pattern of employment for a university faculty is one that combines a maximum of narrowness and inflexibility in job description with a maximum of job security: the tenure system

Assumption 5—The purpose of the university administration is to protect the faculty from the outside world

Lanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Richard Lanham: 10 Assumptions that Organize Higher Education

Assumption 6—University faculties are animated by a purity of motive different from, and superior to, the world of ordinary human work

Assumption 7—Universities are unique institutions. As such, they cannot be meaningfully compared to any others

Assumption 8—Inefficiency is something to be proud of Assumption 9—The new electronic field of

expression does not change what we are doing but only how we are doing it

Assumption 10—The university lives in the same kind of economy it has always lived in (pp. 160-176).

Lanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Students as Consumers: Appeal 21M teenagers between 12-17 use the Internet and 78

percent primarily at school (16M) (Hitlin & Rainie, 2005) These students want

To complete their education while working full-time A curriculum and faculty that are relevant to the

workplace (vocationally oriented) A time-efficient education Their education to be cost-effective (and public

support has decreased while costs have increased) A high level of customer service (and class sizes have

grown) Convenience (Biggs, p. 2; De Alva, pp. 55-56).

Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does. Buckingham, England: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.De Alva, J. K. (1999/2000). Remaking the academy in the age of information. Issues in Science and Technology, 16 (2), 52-58.Hitlin, P., & Rainie, L. (2005). The Internet at School. Report of the PEW Internet and American Life Project. Available online: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2005/The-Internet-at-School.aspx

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Students as Consumers: Problem

The learners-as-consumers model of educational interaction is problematic because If universities are able to maintain their altruistic goal

of serving the public good, learners may not be satisfied with the workplace preparation offered by some institutions;

Although customers of financial institutions expect high returns on their investments in limited amounts of time, the business of financial institutions does not allow this promise to be made; so too are learners subject to the complexities of resources that are brought together to provide them with rigorous and useful courses and programs;

Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Students as Consumers: Problem

The learners-as-consumers model of educational interaction is problematic because Universities serve many constituents, not simply

learners, and are therefore going to be continually faced with decisions that require trade-offs between satisfying one customer base versus another; and

Convenience, which presumes agreement and a “good fit” and frictionless programs, is not the responsibility of higher learning institutions (i.e., many more applicants would like to attend MIT or Harvard than are admitted, which is, again, similar to the situation with financial institutions).

Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Student Consumers and Inflation The learners-as-consumers model has inflated grades,

producing a generation of unquestioning achievers: Students who receive awards for contributing and for

competing throughout their K-12 educations; “Two out of five students have a grade-point average of

A- or better, almost six times as many as in 1969, and 60 percent of them nonetheless say their grades understate the true quality of their work” (Lewin, 2012, interview with Arthur Levine).

Universities have inflated tuition to account for reduced public support: Since 2001, tuition fees at 4-year public colleges in the

U.S. have risen an average of almost 6% annually.

Leonard, A. (2012). Tuition is too damn high. Salon.com, May 11. Available online: http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/ Lewin, T. (2012). Digital Natives and their customs. The New York Times, Education Life, November 2. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/arthur-levine-discusses-the-new-generation-of-college-students.html?smid=tw-share

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Higher Education on the Edge Our problem situations are unstable,

demand flexibility and a creative ability to organize across similar but always different problems and demand that we understand, argue, and evaluate our work both conceptually and pragmatically (Schön, 1983).

Our understanding of knowledge and expertise have changed: … knowledge is contingent, framed by higher-order and changing structures, publicly distributed, and drawn from multiple, emergent sources (Resnick, Lesgold, & Hall, 2005).

Resnick, L. B., Lesgold, A., and Hall, M. W. (2005). Technology and the new culture of learning: Tools for education professionals. In P. Gårdenfors and P. Johansson (eds.), Cognition, Education, and Communication Technology (pp. 77–107). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York, NY: Basic.Sternberg, R. J. (2003). What is an “Expert Student?” Educational Researcher, 32 (8), 5-9.

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New Work and Economic Realities Work is characterized by downsizing,

automation, flattening of work hierarchies, increasing numbers of relationships between companies, continual reorganization, the breaking down of silos or stovepipes in organizations, and the increase in telecommunications.

March 2012 unemployment rate of 16.4% for American youths under 25.

Globalization: number of students from Lithuania who took Udacity’s 1st course exceeded student body of Stanford.

Shierholz, H., Sabadish, N., & Wething, H. (2012). The class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim. Report of Jobs Wages and Living Standards, May 3. Economic Policy Institute: Research and Ideas for Shared Prosperity. Available online: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp340-labor-market-young-graduates/ Spinuzzi, C. (2007). Introduction to TCQ Special Issue: Technical communication in the age of distributed work. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16 (3), 265-277.Wildavsky, B. (2012). Who won the great recession?: Higher Ed. Foreign Policy, 196, 60-61.

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Higher Education and Global Economic Collapse Expansion of American universities in 1940s connected

to enormous expansion of world economy Reduction in monopoly of socioeconomically

advantaged in 1970s Global economic stagnation results in reduced state

investment and investment in external funding During 1980s and 1990s, universities increasingly

privatized, the professoriate stabilizes, creation of adjunct (contingent) culture

Today, universities under attack for serving student population poorly (in the light of scarcity) and under attack from anti-intellectual consumer culture of the U.S.

Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NY, NY: NYU Press.Edsall, T. B. (2012). The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity will Remake American Politics. NY, NY: Doubleday.Greer, J. M. (2011). The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.Heinberg, R. (2011). The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.Wallerstein, I. (2012). Higher education under attack. Energy Bulletin, March 1. Available online: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-02/higher-education-under-attack

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Digital Teaching and Learning Potentials

Coppola, N. W., Hiltz, S. R., & Rotter, N. G. (2002) Becoming a virtual professor: Pedagogical roles and asynchronous learning networks, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18 (4) 169–189. Crotty, J. M. (2012). Distance learning has been around since 1892, you big MOOC. Forbes, Tech, November 11. Available online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/11/14/distance-learning-has-been-around-since-1892-you-big-mooc/ Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robinson, A. J. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. An Occasional paper for digital media and learning. MacArthur Foundation. Available online: http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/{7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E}/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

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Current strategies for integrating MOOC learning into existing educational spaces

Online education is always changing (non-stable), instructionally and professionally.

Questions? “… the current rate of state budget cutting

does not appear to be sustainable for the country as a whole” (Bowen and NationalScience Board, 2012).

Entrepreneurial instruction or the death of traditional education? An argument for thevalue of education in a democratic country.

Basken, P. (2012). NSF raises alarm over falling state support for research universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Government, September 25. Available online: http://chronicle.com/article/NSF-Raises-Alarm-Over-Falling/134626/ Caceras, Z. (2012). ‘A classroom of thousands’: Disrupting entrepreneurial education with Massive Open Online Courses. Radical Social Entrepreneurs, August 1. Available online: http://www.radicalsocialentreps.org/2012/08/a-classroom-of-thousands-disrupting-entrepreneurial-education-with-massive-open-online-courses/

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