What does a growth in MOOC learners mean for universities?

One of the things I always look out for at this time of year is the excellent end of year MOOC report from Class Central. Dhawal Shah (CEO, Class Central) has been following MOOCs very closely from the beginning and always has some excellent insight on the goings on during the year.

I see a striking juxtaposition this year, as talk of MOOCs within higher education seems to be so muted now. Many people have disregarded them as tired and essentially dead or dying.

However, this year has seen absolutely staggering growth in the number of new registered users of MOOC platforms like Coursera, edX, FutureLearn et al. Coursera has gained an eye-watering 31 million new users in 2020...it now has 76 million registered users, has raised $130 million and is weighing up an IPO.

Meeting a global demand to learn despite the cynicism

There’s so much baggage that lingers around any discourse about MOOCs, but what this growth highlights is a big global demand to learn. The people who are taking MOOCs don’t care whether the low completion rates fundamentally challenge their validity, or debates about whether university investment in them was the best use of funds. They don’t care about whether people think they are an optimal version of online learning, they want to learn.

This doesn’t in any way devalue these questions and discussions but I think it highlights how higher education can sometimes come across as tone deaf to the growing demands and needs of a whole host of people globally who want to find a way to learn something new, or develop themselves.

MOOCs are meeting a demand that obviously isn’t being met elsewhere and universities as major education providers would be wise to reflect deeply on that. In reality, there are still only a handful of UK universities strategically engaging in partnerships with MOOC platforms and this has been the case since the start.

In essence, I don’t think the reason for that is really about whether universities want to invest in more online learning or not. I think this is ultimately about whether universities are interested, deeply interested in reaching and educating new learners globally.

Are they interested in diversifying their education portfolio beyond the traditional format and offering it to a demographic of learners who are unlikely to choose to study in the traditional way?

Universities and MOOCs: A gap in strategy and engagement

Now, so far I’ve not yet mentioned the C word...and COVID-19 is undoubtedly a huge contributing factor to the growth of MOOC platforms this year, but even prior to pandemic numbers were growing. However, this growth in people taking courses on MOOC platforms hasn’t been matched by increased output from UK universities.

From speaking to different UK universities the development of new courses for MOOC platforms has had to be pushed down the list of priorities due to all hands being on deck this year. 2020 has not resulted in UK universities producing more new courses than in 2019 irrespective of growing demand. Some have even struggled to keep their existing courses running. All this is quite understandable given the year we’ve had.

There are exceptions though, as some had built the infrastructure, capacity and have made strategic investments into those partnerships prior to the pandemic. Looking at the current figures from Class Central, there certainly seems to be a growing gap between the number of online courses on offer between the top few UK universities and the rest.

Top 10 UK universities by number of courses on MOOC platforms

Coventry University - 127 courses
Open University - 110 courses
University of Leeds - 103 courses
University of Edinburgh - 75 courses
Imperial College - 71 courses
University of London - 53 courses
University of Glasgow - 45 courses
University of Reading - 37 courses
University of East Anglia - 33 courses
University of Birmingham

Data from Class Central as of 15/12/20

For seasoned observers of online education in the UK, I don’t think the hierarchy here would come as a huge surprise. Many of the universities at the top of this list have made serious and significant investments into online education and at the time were certainly in the list of universities in this article in April - that were characterised as “those with the capacity and will to develop high-quality online education”.

The benefits of past engagement with MOOCs

Irrespective of what you think about MOOCs, those universities who have made serious strategic investments in MOOC platform partnerships will have benefitted from the experience. The cynicism around MOOCs in higher education sometimes drowns this out.

It doesn’t mean that this will have necessarily had a huge impact across the breadth of university learning and teaching this year, because the MOOC platform partnerships often run quite separately to the core educational offer most associated with universities.

But it signifies a notable distinction between universities that have and those that haven’t really fully engaged with MOOC platforms. Those that have will have gained experience in many of the aspects of learning and teaching online that others have found to be new and unfamiliar territory whilst scrambling to get online this year.

These things include producing video, captioning, digital accessibility, how to write online content, copyright, curating online content from other sources, how to engage learners online, the process of designing online courses and so much more.

Online education has many moving parts and a greater degree of complexity than traditional in-person teaching. To have a group of people who are equipped and have experience to deal with that is significant.

The future of MOOCs: Universities, businesses, and beyond

As we (hopefully) start to come out of this period of emergency remote teaching necessitated by the pandemic, it will be interesting to observe if there is any change in how UK universities engage with MOOC platforms.

Will we continue to see a small number of universities surging ahead of the rest through greater numbers of courses and types of offerings (e.g. microcredentials and degrees)?

I personally think many would do well to at least give more serious consideration of the partnerships they have with MOOC platforms, as they aren’t going away, and have significant reach. Or to put it differently, seriously consider why they have invested sums of money into a commercial partnership down the years that is not meeting or contributing to a strategic objective.

If many universities continue to be lukewarm in their partnerships with MOOC platforms, then I sense the patience of MOOC platforms with universities to get involved will continue to wane. They will increasingly seek and prioritise a broader range of partnerships with companies and other providers to develop their course portfolios.

Because irrespective of where universities are headed in the future, the pandemic has also led small through to large businesses and organisations to consider and create online courses whether directly or via partnerships. There’s potential that more companies become de facto education providers to meet their own objectives and the demand for learning.

What’s clear is that there is a big demand for learning that can be met via online education and there is growing interest in providing online learning from a range of individuals, small businesses and large corporations. MOOC platforms are attuned to this but are most UK universities?

If there is large unmet demand for learning, then someone will seek to meet it - if it’s not universities, then it will be interesting to observe what that will mean for education in the future, and whether it will have any demonstrable impact on universities.