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Here at Athabasca University we’ve finally begun serious talk about our approach to MOOCs.
We are working through two models, trying to decipher the pros and cons of each or both. These are:
1 Run one of more of our own MOOCs, based in whole or part on our current online courses. In order to be a MOOC, the courses should be free and that creates some challenges. Obviously a revenue or substantial service model needs to be developed for sustainability.
2 Cherry-pick a few MOOCs, offered by others, and after asserting that they are equivalent to an AU course allow and promote students to challenge the course for AU Credit.
Via Peter B. Sloep
Dedicated distance teaching universities ('open universities') arguably have always been in the MOOC business even though it did not go by that name. As to massiveness, it always has been their intention to achieve economies of scale by investing much effort in the design of a course and little in their deployment (that is, lecturing, tutoring, etc.). Similarly, they always have intended to be open, though not so much in the sense of having free enrolment, but much more in the sense of eliminating formal access thresholds and leaving it to the student to decide on the pace, place and timing of their studies. And, indeed, many are also involved in experiments with Open Educational Resources, struggling with the same sustainability question that the xMOOC platform providers: if you provided the content for free, where does your revenue stream come from? And finally, although most started off with correspondence learning as their teaching model, these universities were the first to see the opportunities online learning offered and have experimented with it even before the Internet took off. However, none of them achieved the massiveness that current MOOCs do, none of them offered content fully for free. But then again, none of them could feed of the lavish kind of funding venture capital (or rich alumni) have made available to the current MOOC platforms.
In the face of the MOOC craze, distance teaching universities have also started thinking about the question of where they fit into the higher education landscape, of whether business remains as usual or they should adapt. Terry Anderson addresses this question in his blog post and comes up with tow models: keep on doing what you have been doing thus far, but relabelling it as MOOCs and making a few changes; or getting into the business of assessing and crediting prior learning. In the first case, you remain a genuine university, in the second you specialise in only one service that universities offer. Terry doesn't make a choice, wisely so, it seems to me. The two alternatives do not exclude each other, nor do they exhaust all the options. So you could do both or invent yet other kinds of responses. One would be to work with a mixed services model: the basis content is free, you may acquire access to peer tutoring for a small fee and to personal tutoring by a teacher for a large fee, you may acquire access to the exam for a fee and receive credits for a larger fee (as this requires that the exam be assessed by a teacher), etc. But there are no doubt other options to be explored.
Distance teaching universities should really seize the opportunity to advertise themselves, now that MOOCs have put online learning in the public eye. Actually, because of their historical development, they are in a much better position to address the challenges posed by the for-profit MOOCs than traditional universities. (@pbsloep)