Massive Open Online Courses – Towards an Open and Global Digital Higher Education World?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Welcome to my talk on massive open online courses, MOOC, in which I would like to focus on the question whether MOOCs have fulfilled the high hopes and great expectations of a global and open digital higher education world.
00:24
I don't need to introduce MOOCs as such here. You're all familiar with MOOCs. They've been around for about 10 years now. I just want to remind you of the MOOC hype that took place in 12, 13 and 14.
00:42
And during this hype, these great expectations and high hopes loomed. On the one hand, MOOCs were supposed to democratize higher education and open it up to the whole world. On the other hand, they were supposed or the assumption was there that they might help
01:02
reducing costs of higher education, which is particularly important for certain higher ed systems around the world. And in this situation, in this hype situation, many universities worldwide have begun to offer these MOOC courses and also many providers for these MOOC courses have been established.
01:25
You see some examples of the MOOC providers here. Coursera, edX, maybe FutureLearn, maybe among the most well known and other more regional ones. Not that well known, but this is just an example. And this example shows what I'm focusing on here in this talk.
01:46
My talk will be basically on the development of these MOOC providers and not on the classes itself, on these providers and how the providers have developed in the past years.
02:01
And the results I'll be presenting are from a research project that we recently finished. We finished it last year and just last month, our final project report came out, which you see here on the slide. You can access it online here at Hanover University at the library.
02:22
And this report actually has four empirical layers. And in my talk here, I will focus on the second layer on the data and on the development of MOOC providers across the globe. To finish my introduction, I would like to give you an outline of my talk.
02:42
What are we presenting in the next half hour? So I will continue with definitions about MOOC and providers to have us on the same page. And then I will turn to introducing our data collection and our dataset before I present two types of results. First, some basic quantitative descriptions and a survival analysis of the providers.
03:06
And then second one, a more nuanced and detailed analysis of the development of large platform providers. And of course, there will be some sum up and a conclusion and some sorts for discussion.
03:22
Let me begin with definitions and data. What is important? You have the definitions here on the slide. What is important about our definition of MOOCs is that we were only focusing on massive open online courses that are devoted to higher education. So the content, as you see here, must be based on some
03:42
kind of scientific knowledge and higher education institutions were involved as content provider. This is a type of MOOC we were focusing on. And on the other hand, our definition of the provider. We, of course, focused only on providers that offer courses with higher education content.
04:04
And for us, a provider is an organization that basically provides a technical infrastructure for the MOOC courses. And the indicator for us was that this organization handles the sign up process to the MOOC courses. Then we took this as a provider. On the next slide, you see our data.
04:26
We first collected data about potential MOOCs and we took this data from to itself. Very interesting websites, MOOC List and Class Central, which are listings of MOOC courses and interesting market making devices.
04:45
And we identified roughly 400 potential MOOC providers and then checked whether they still fit our definition. And from these 400, 155 fit our definition. And for these 155, we then collected data
05:03
and we created a panel data set for the years 2012 to 17 for 88 variables. And you see the categories for which we have variables here on the slide. It's market entrance and exit, organizational key characteristics, founding characteristics, content characteristics and also
05:24
website visitors to have an idea about the outreach of the courses and the provider. This is our data set. So let me now turn to the results. And I would like to start with a basic description and survival analysis. So first of all, how many providers do we have here on the slide?
05:45
You see the active providers per year and you see it started with only four providers in 11, but it grew quickly. And the number of providers in a way has stabilized from 2015 of about 111, 12 active providers that offer higher education MOOCs around the world.
06:08
When you look at the development of market entry and exit, you see it's been pretty volatile. Many providers have been founded early on, but others also left the market or exited the market early on for different reasons or in different ways.
06:26
Some of them just closed down the business operations completely. Others turned away from offering MOOC and went back to the business they were involved with earlier on. Or higher education institutions tried to offer a MOOC and then and establish a platform, but
06:45
then left the market and decided that they don't want to be involved in that business anymore. On the next slide, you see that or you might assume that most of the providers are for profit providers.
07:01
But here you see that only one third actually are for profit providers and two thirds are nonprofit providers who are out there in the market. And what you also see is that almost 20 percent of the currently existing providers have been established with the help of state support.
07:21
And state support could mean that state actors actually provided funding for this endeavor or that they just provided conducive regulations or some kind of conducive conditions. You find more on that in our report.
07:42
I would like to focus also on the size of providers. So what you see that we have about 25, almost 25 percent of large providers in the market that offer more than 100 courses. And among them are actually many providers with more than 1000 courses.
08:01
This amount has increased while the really small providers, typically higher education institutions, this number or the share here has decreased. But we still have them out there even in 2017 providers that offer only one to 10 courses.
08:21
On the next slide, you see the focus of the course offer and we differentiate between specialized and non-specialized providers. For us specialized means when a provider offers courses only in a certain scientific or social science or humanities area. Let's say, for example, it only offers courses in engineering or in computing only in one area.
08:47
And then it's specialized for us as opposed to non-specialized providers that offer courses in all types of scientific areas or disciplines. And you see we have 40-60 split between specialized and non-specialized providers.
09:08
And let me turn now to the types of providers, because this is important for the survival analysis that I'll be presenting in a minute. So we differentiate between platform and single providers, but actually also
09:21
the single providers, of course, need a technological infrastructure, so a platform. But what we count as a single provider is our providers that offer the course content and the technical infrastructure. So that would be typically a university like Hanover University could offer massive open online course content and set up its own platform to provide them.
09:47
These are single providers. On the other hand, platform providers like edX and Coursera. They do not offer their own course content, but they work with higher education institutions worldwide as a partner.
10:00
And you see there is an almost still in 2017 and almost even split between single providers out there and platform providers. And in our survival analysis, we were focusing on the likelihood of survival in this market for the platform and the single providers.
10:21
And what you see here in the figure is that the likelihood for the platform providers to survive has been much better. Overall, there is, of course, the risk to die out or the risk not to survive decreases over time. So the longer you are on the market, the more likely it is that you survive.
10:44
But it's even more likely or the platform providers had a better chance or survived better in this market than the single providers. What you don't see here from the figure, but what you find in the report is our analysis of explanatory factors.
11:06
And you find our multiple regressions in the report. And you would find there that there are actually two variables or factors that are significant. On the one hand, it's specialization. On the other hand, it's size. So specialization actually decreases your survival likelihood and size increases your chances of survival.
11:32
So the larger, the better the provider survived, the more specialized, the more difficult it was or the less they survived in this market.
11:44
So large non-specialized platform providers. These are in a way the winners of this development here. And in the second segment of the empirical results, I would like to focus on these large platform providers.
12:03
So the first slide of the segment of results shows you their location, headquarter and their market entry year for actually we have 23 large platform providers that offer more than 100 courses. So you basically can see two things here.
12:23
On the one hand, it started in the US and we have a few providers or concentration of these large providers in the US and another concentration in China. So it started in the US and moved in a way eastward to Europe and later on to Asia.
12:43
And you could ask what's going on in the Middle East. Why are there no mooc providers in the Middle East? There are mooc providers in the Middle East, but there are mid-size. So they are not included in this type of analysis or the analysis that I'm presenting here.
13:02
But there are mid-size providers in the Middle East. So but it's been moving east. And what I would like to show you on the following is actually I would like to introduce you to three different layers of this provider landscape or market that we found.
13:23
So first layer that we see is that what I call here the global players. The global players are mooc providers that have higher education institutions as content partners from all over the world, among them the most prestigious universities.
13:42
They offer courses all over the world, all places, and they have users or website visitors from all over the world. And they also offer courses in many, many different languages, oftentimes more than 100 different languages.
14:02
So there are global players out there. So what I would say is there is an emerging, one layer is an emerging global market as it's been expected by the public discourse and in the idea that there will be a digital global revolution.
14:20
So there is one segment of the market consists of these global players. But there are two more. And in the second segment, the second segment is what I call the national local layer. And there are two aspects to it. What you see here underlined in red are providers that have been established with the help of state support.
14:47
And you see them in Europe, but you see them also in Russia and in Asia and in Indonesia. Providers that had state support to be established and these providers were established partly to help solving certain
15:06
problems within the higher education system, whether it's a cost problem or a quality problem or a problem. In the amount of provision, like in China, where there is the demand is higher than what universities can provide.
15:25
So these providers, these massive open online course providers were supposed to help solving these problems. And this national local layer also contains a very, very localized layer. And you see this localized layer circled here.
15:43
The providers in this area have website visitors. Their courses are used by website visitors, which come to more than 90% from within the country. So this is an indicator for us that these providers offer a very locally focused offer.
16:04
And this is an expectation that you could have when you focus. And we had this expectation and the results are as we expected when you focus on globalization theory, for example, on Roland Robertson or on Marjanson and Rhodes.
16:21
Robertson coined the term globalization and Marjanson wrote glonacalization, which means that particularly in higher education, there is decisive impact of the national level. And we find this dynamic, this impact of the national level clearly here.
16:40
And also the local adaptation and niches that you could expect was Robertson, who described globalization as double movement, globalization forces or enforces actually localization and local niches. And we see both in our results. But there is also a third layer, which I would call regional cultural layer.
17:05
And you see it on this slide here. There are certain providers in this landscape or market that, whether they have been founded with state support or not, are very special in a way that their MOOC courses are not just neither offered fully global nor local, but rather regional.
17:28
And there is something cultural to it. For example, the French provider fun offers MOOC courses to a large extent to the African continent, to countries in Africa.
17:44
Or the national platform of open education offers MOOCs to former Soviet republics. Likewise, Miriadax offers courses to South America, or Vduka, the Brazilian provider, offers courses in Portuguese language to Portugal.
18:02
So there is this cultural dimension to it. And in some cases, this cultural dimension also has is related to some kind of soft diplomacy, like in case of fun or the national platform of open education that have additional soft diplomacy mission involved here in their MOOC offer.
18:23
And this is a result that we also found according to our expectation, according to certain expectation based on nested organizational field theory. We have assumed that there is a segment in this market here where we find an overlap between national, global and more regional spatial fields or market, as we would term it.
18:48
And so we see an additional more regional and cultural dynamic. And let me turn to an aspect that I haven't mentioned yet for all three models.
19:02
For all these three layers of the market, we see that the providers are still searching for viable business models. This plays out differently in the three layers or levels. But what we see on the one hand, we see MOOC based degrees that certain universities offer on platforms.
19:23
It's not the platform itself. It's a certain universities that offer fully MOOC based degrees. And we see corporate courses. On the one hand, we see universities going back to blended learning online while on campus courses, incorporating MOOC offers into their local course offers.
19:45
And what we see that particularly among the fully globalized providers, there is a lot of experimentation with revenue sources from certificate fees. There are these courses basically started free and open in 12 and 13. But very quickly, a certificate fee has been introduced.
20:08
There is an open segment still to it. But if you want to have a certificate for these MOOC courses, then there is a fee. They are experimenting with paywalls for specific content, test fees for quizzes and graded tests, certain micro payments, very
20:24
small payments for certain term extensions or a support fee for selected courses and so on and so forth. There is no stable or fully viable model yet. And what we also have to keep in mind, we're talking about platforms here and we have to keep the platform logic behind it in mind.
20:44
That these providers also might make might try to make money with the clicks and the traces that the users actually leave on the platform and with their data. But this is basically business. This is kept in secrecy. And this also goes beyond the research that we did in our project.
21:08
So let me sum up and conclude what I've presented to you here. So what I presented in the first part with the empirical result was that large platform providers had a better likelihood of chance to survive and survived better.
21:25
And then I have described these three different layers, the global, the more national, local layer of the MOOC market and the regional culturally layer of the market.
21:40
And I talked a bit about the business models that are not stable yet, particularly not for the global layer where we have this dominance of the US providers. That's why we call this layer particularly unstable, because this is the for profit layer and they need to find a way to make revenue.
22:07
So when I look at the results and I come back to the question I raised at the beginning, whether MOOCs have fulfilled the high hopes and great expectations of global and open higher education world.
22:22
I would say we see a mixed picture. We have this global layer, which opens up courses to the world and connects universities and learners from all over the world. But we also have more regional and national niches in the market.
22:40
So mixed picture on the aspect of the global, but also a mixed picture on the aspect of the open, which I tried to emphasize when I talked about the business models. There is certain still open aspect, but of course, many providers try to make some money and add the price sticker and costs label to the MOOC courses.
23:08
So that's what I presented as empirical results. And I would like to emphasize that I think that we need to investigate in future as a platform organization and logic of these providers more.
23:23
And please allow me to present two more slides to stimulate or some discussion at the end. And I would like to remind you that the predictions in 12 were, in a way, went overboard.
23:42
For example, here on the slide, you see the Bastian Zrun. He is the founder of Udacity. And actually, he was one of the teachers of the famous introduction to artificial intelligence, AI, with the course from Stanford, the MOOC course that spurred the hype tremendously in 2011.
24:05
And from him is a quote that in 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education. And of course, he added Udacity will be among them. So his idea was there will be a few prestigious universities and then
24:21
these platform providers that will survive and all other universities will die out. Of course, this did not happen. But what also didn't happen is what was predicted in 12 after 12 and 13 and 14 when the public discourse but also researchers declared MOOCs dead because we saw that high retention rates and students didn't succeed in the courses.
24:53
And we saw that these MOOC courses are not that effective and didn't work that well. So MOOCs were declared dead.
25:02
But as our results show, MOOCs have neither raised the landscape of universities, nor are they dead, but rather the providers stabilized on a certain level. And actually, the MOOC courses are growing.
25:20
And now, particularly the situation might have particularly changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And what you see here on my last slide is actually recent news from Class Central. I mentioned Class Central earlier as one of the MOOC courses listing websites. So just a few days ago, I read on the last Class Central news that Class
25:46
Central, you see that here on the left side, there has been a surge in traffic. And in just one month, we received more visits than during the whole of 2019. And the stats here on the right side are from Twitter, from the CEO of Class Central, Davalt Shah, who presents the stats behind this sentence.
26:10
And of course, COVID might change the whole situation. And I hear a lot of my colleagues saying, why do we have to offer the same introduction to so and so and so on?
26:23
And my university and the eight neighboring universities, why can't we have just one massive open online course and then small discussion groups? And actually, that was fear in 2012. So in a way, the arguments are circling back in 2012, when I was a visiting scholar in the Bay Area.
26:43
And this MOOC hype loomed many scholars and it's been a heated debate. Many teachers and lecturers were afraid that they might be replaced by massive open online courses. And the state of California actually experimented with massive open online courses a lot.
27:05
So the arguments are circling back. The pandemic clearly will change the situation. And what we clearly see is that it's in a warped drive into digitalization, particularly here in Germany.
27:24
And MOOC are not dead at all. And this is a quote from an article that came out just a few days ago. MOOC are not dead. But what we actually see is a second generation of MOOC courses. And these MOOC courses, again, are neither fully open nor really massive, but rather small and supplement local higher education offers.
27:48
So for me, it would be highly valuable to continue this discussion. What actually the current situation does to digital higher education and about the future of digital higher education.
28:02
But I'll be closing for now and thank you for your attention.
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