EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Openness – who owns MOOCs?
The modulations of the original MOOC concept described in this paper are also likely to impact the first O of the MOOC – for open: this concerns the point that students would pay no fees, which can no longer be taken for granted, but also the right to use and adapt MOOCs. The 2008 c-MOOC concept of the open-university world strongly emphasised the “free to use”, with reuse and adaptation of materials for other purposes and contexts, as its very principles. Therefore criticism is voiced from the open educational resources fraction towards the development of restrictive licensing.
There has been a debate recently about FutureLearn’s licensing policy. This blog, for example, notes: “Users may not copy, sell, display, reproduce, publish, modify, create derivative works from, transfer, distribute or otherwise commercially exploit in any manner the FutureLearn Site, Online Courses, or any Content.” FutureLearn also reserves an unrestricted right to use any content users submitted, and in some cases when learners did subtitles or translations these would become the property of FutureLearn. It has been remarked that this very much resembles the conditions that Udacity sets. edX has made its platform open source. Asked about its position towards course content and material, the edX representative at the Madison University workshop stressed that edX, in principal, was in favour of the widest possible open licensing, but that individual universities participating in edX (e.g. Harvard) would have their own position on these issues. Universities signing up with Coursera grant the company a “non-exclusive worldwide licence to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, perform, enhance, modify, adapt and translate content provided by the University”.
So far, Coursera has not used this clause as an income source – with the exception of its contracts with a number of state universities that use an entire MOOC for on-campus teaching (Chronicle of Higher Education, 03/09/2013); institutions have been allowed to use parts of a MOOC (e.g. the videos) free of charge. This can obviously evoke all kinds of legal issues, on academic freedom and intellectual property rights, and how faculty and university relate to each other, and also, who is actually responsible for the content and, possibly in the future, will award credits. For example Stanford University stated that – while it will sign up with edX – its faculty may continue using Coursera. The University of California’s faculty union has challenged contracts that the university leadership signs with Coursera, on the grounds that the courses are the intellectual property of the individual teachers.
But these developments also bring up the question of whether there is a key opportunity for a European open learning initiative. In most European countries, higher education institutions are to a large extent funded by public money. Tuition fees are generally low to non-existent. Therefore, an attempt to build a business model relying in the first instance on fees for online courses – beyond the offer already provided by open universities, the universities’ lifelong learning departments and private for-profit providers – might not be very strategic and bear a high risk of failure. But could universities contribute to further underpinning and strengthening the European Higher Education Area and the Erasmus exchanges through collaboration in MOOCs and e-learning, for example, by granting each other use of MOOCs at no to low costs? This is of course not only an issue for European universities, as an initiative of the New American Colleges and Universities Group shows, which plans to establish a “code-sharing” initiative allowing their students to take courses for credit at their home institution.
The idea of openness of MOOCs is advocated by the European open-learning community. Fred Mulder, EADTU, UNESCO chair for open education, makes the point that the courses and the materials should remain open, but for teaching and services, there should be no charges. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Should MOOCs award credits?
Credits are probably – next to the business model – the most contentious issue with regards to MOOCs. One cannot quite understand how MOOCs are supposed to change higher education, if they do not award credits, be it in blended or in distance-learning mode – unless they imply new ways of validation which either complement or compete with existing credit systems. A report of the rating agency MOODY’s on income prospects of US higher education institutions points to MOOCs as an additional income source – provided they would award credits.
On the other hand, if institutions that deliver MOOCs do not award credits, does that not indicate that they do not consider MOOC as teaching?
While most universities in the first instance excluded awarding credits, there seems to be a trend towards this. As reported, the American Council for Education (ACE), very much in line with its longstanding mission of awarding credits for programmes (ACE CREDIT) to service men and women and other lifelong learners, has accepted 11 courses, five from Coursera, five from Udacity and one from edX, for credit, and will continue to review and externally quality-assure them.
This is very much in line with the prediction that MOOCs will morph into MOCCS – Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses that would either provide learning support, assessments and credit for a fee, or be delivered through licensed provision in the context of a university, such as the example of Antioch University where students participate in selected Coursera courses supported by a staff member of the university. Georgia Tech in collaboration with the telecom company AT&T is offering a MOOC Master’s degree programme in computer science as from January 2014, via Udacity. Geared “to professionals by focusing on applying advanced knowledge in the workplace”, it will cost US$6 600, a fraction of the cost of the on-campus course which is research-based and requires one-on-one interaction.
The pilot phase is limited to 600 participants, which might also be part of the aim to assess the workload that MOOC degrees would imply for instructors, teaching assistants and administration. But while a complete online degree appears to be a novelty for such an exclusive institution like Georgia Tech, others in the same league are not too far away: the University of Harvard, for example, has a longstanding distance learning strand, Harvard Extension, which offers associate degrees and Bachelor degrees with an eight and 16 credit on-campus study requirement, respectively.
There has been some speculation on whether higher education institutions will lose the monopoly on degree and credit validation, as other education providers have started issuing badges and certificates, which are accepted by employers. This process – often referred to as “unbundling” – has been well described by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy:
“What if we were to separate the teaching and credentialing roles of universities? What would happen if regardless of where (or whether) you went to college, you could take rigorous, internationally recognized assessments that measured your understanding and proficiency in various fields – anything from art history to software engineering. With our hypothetical assessments – microcredentials, if you will – people could prove that they know just as much in a specific domain as those with an exclusive diploma. Even more, they wouldn’t have had to go into debt and attend university to prove it. … In short, it would make the credential that most students and parents need cheaper (since it is an assessment that is not predicated on seat time in lecture halls) and more powerful – it would tell employers who is best ready to contribute at their organizations based on metrics that they find important.”
One “open” way of doing this could be via peer review and assessment, by which through feedback (voting) from an open peer community an individual would gradually build up a reputation and get his/her level of knowledge and expertise attested.
Another approach are initiatives that provide systems and portfolios for credit-similar validations awarded by institutions and organisations. This is obviously a very interesting domain for companies active in education and media.
“Open badges” is a development spearheaded by the software company Mozilla, which has been developing a software package that allows registered users to collect badges from all types of learning. Among the organisations and institutions that award badges are museums and scout organisations, but also some universities.94 While the awarding of degrees and credits is still with the higher education sector, some companies take a parallel approach in ensuring the best recognition of their learning programmes. For example, Pearson, which according to its website is the only FTSE 100 company offering degree courses, awards a Pearson Higher National Diploma at the Pearson College. But these courses are also validated by Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.
For England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Pearson Edexcel is one of the official examination boards, which started off as a charity, and became then a for-profit venture. It examines secondary school degrees and is the only body to offer the BTEC vocational/work-related qualifications, some of them giving access to or being equivalent to higher education degrees.
Strikingly, on the European side, there has not yet been a real discussion on whether MOOCs should earn credits, and whether they could be related to the instruments of the European Higher Education Area (ECTS, recognition of prior learning). As reported earlier, there seems to have been at least one individual case in which a German university recognised MOOC learning. As mentioned above at least one of the European open universities offers ECTS award, and the Berlin-based MOOC platform iversity is exploring ECTS award with two of its participant institutions. It will be interesting to see the future developments on this issue. So far, according to ACE, demand for credit award has been slow, but it is not excluded that this might change. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Teachers
Staff at San Jose State University felt under pressure to use the edX JusticeX course of Harvard scholar Michael Sandel, which SJSU bought, and wrote an open letter to the author. Faculty protested against what they perceived as a push “to replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities”. The letter, while acknowledging Michael Sandel’s scholarship, makes some remarkable points: for example, it refers to the fact that students would read less books, and also questions why the diverse student body of SJSU with its own relation to justice should listen to the discussions of predominantly white upper-class Harvard students. It also criticises, apart from economic considerations, that there was no pedagogical or academic reason to prioritise the course over the teaching provided by SJSU. (Note that the Governor of California had publicly declared MOOCs a means to save education costs.)
We do not know whether Michael Sandel responded to the letter, but he wrote to the author of the Chronicle of Higher Education article, clarifying that his course has been online for free for several years, and has only recently been redesigned for edX, and that he actually knew “very little about the arrangements that edX made with San Jose State University” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 02/05/2013). This sparked off a debate, and Sandel’s position has been echoed and supported by other professors, and apparently also by the American Council on Education (Chronicle of Higher Education, 25/05/2013). The point being made is that knowledge should be made available to a broad public, and MOOCs could be compared to other publications, such as books, in this regard.
This is obviously another aspect to be considered: scholars are aware that their books can be used for various purposes in various contexts, which is of course their key function and the reason for their success. But admittedly, the idea that the word would be separated from the scholar and would travel around the world raised considerable concern around 2 000 years ago. Is the critical question the “depersonalisation of teaching”? Does a MOOC teach – or just circulate knowledge? MOOC companies insist that it is teaching; people like Anant Agarwal of edX called upon teachers to rethink teaching and stated that it is time for them “to join the revolution” (Observer, 15/06/2013).
Interestingly, the changing role of teachers, which is central to other forms of e-learning, is addressed very differently in the MOOCs context: rather than redefining the teacher as facilitator and enabler of learning, MOOCs are suggesting a scenario in which a few are becoming star teachers and gain international fame and visibility – whereas others would end up in rather subaltern and uncreative positions in assisting the implementation of MOOCs. Many MOOCs are restating the traditional concept of a professor – albeit in a contemporary fashion: shorter lectures, more pictures, quizzes and riddles. The absence of women in teaching MOOCs has been noted.
But in the US context at least, there is a more mundane and material issue about MOOCs and teachers: Mitchell Duneier, a colleague of Sandel at Harvard and a “Star MOOC Professor” (Chronicle of Higher Education) declared that, despite the fact that teaching MOOCs has been “one of the greatest experiences of my career”, he would – at least for the moment – abstain from any further MOOC teaching. He turned down a proposal from Coursera to license his course to be used at other colleges in a mix of online and face-to-face instruction. “I’ve said no, because I think that it’s an excuse for state legislatures to cut funding to state universities. … And I guess that I’m really uncomfortable being part of a movement that’s going to get its revenue in that way. And I also have serious doubts about whether or not using a course like mine in that way would be pedagogically effective.” He expressed concern that licensed MOOCs would give a pretext to cut higher education budgets even more (Chronicle of Higher Education, 03/09/2013).
Obviously, it is not only university staff without tenure track positions and at less reputed colleges, who feel uncomfortable about MOOCs. At Amherst, one of the top US liberal arts colleges, faculty members decided against joining edX – the official reason was to safeguard the independence and uniqueness of the institution’s approach to learning and teaching.
While staff at some institutions may be suspected of being notoriously hostile to change, including the development of online learning, there are also institutions involved in online learning that are sceptical, but retain a waitand- see position. University leadership at the American University launched a moratorium on MOOCs, given that the implications are not entirely clear (Chronicle of Higher Education 13/05/2013). But, as reported, and this might be a crucial difference to the European situation, many universities are under pressure from their governing boards to get involved in MOOCs. Media articles in the US suggest that the President of the University of Virginia was ousted in part over issues related to online learning and later re-instated following a faculty rebellion against the external governing board.85 All this also suggests that institutions and their staff may decide against MOOCs for different and sometimes even opposite motives and reasons, and that the specific political and economic situation, institutional governance and contractual issues play a major role. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Learners
Many of the reports and articles that talk about the disruption in higher education systems and institutions that will transform higher education learning, paint the picture of economic and reputational competition between higher education institutions, with masses of young people from around the globe seeking the best possible education they can get. Assumptions are that MOOCs would widen access, and allow those learners from around the globe who cannot afford conventional study, who do not have enough time or cannot attend a classroom, to have access to higher education.
As a matter of fact, little is known about the profiles of MOOC participants, about their motivation to sign up and the actual benefits that derive from MOOCs.
The participant maps show that participants come from all those places in the world which can be reached via internet, again with a high density in regions where higher education access is available for a large fraction of the population. Interestingly, cases such as the “Ulan Bator boy” – a 16-yearold who successfully completed the MIT course on electrical circuits – suggest that besides exceptional talent, institutional and family support are of great importance.
Analysis suggests that unless MOOCs have a specific social or professional target or are put into the context of institutions or organisations, the vast majority of participants are higher education students, former students or upper secondary school pupils, who are quite likely to enter higher education. The University of Madison Wisconsin and University of Edinburgh both report that around 70% of MOOC participants are university graduates. A study conducted on 35,000 MOOC participants of Pennsylvania University produced similar results, and also confirmed that participants from emerging countries usually belong to the educated and wealthy part of society, who are likely to have access to higher education. Random inquiries in the European environment over the past months suggest that MOOCs are more likely to be attended by younger people: young professionals, not too removed from the world of learning, who would also see this as a possibility either to gain additional knowledge and skills for their professional practice, or use this as a retreat from a relatively dull daily work routine that offers little intellectual stimulation. Currently enrolled students might sign up for MOOCs to gain additional knowledge, get a “second opinion” or for remedial purposes, but maybe also for intellectual enjoyment in areas far away from their actual study fields. But these are somehow anecdotal, not built on systematic research and appropriate data samples. Academic teachers should give it a try and ask their students: how many of you are doing a MOOC, and why? This could help to find out whether they sign up for MOOCs because they want the best education in the world – which is the assumption made in a number of reports: all students would prefer to study at some of the world’s top institutions. What seems to contradict this assumption is that MOOC participants often do not recall which institution actually provided the course they attended.
This and the low importance that institutional affiliation seems to play on some of the platforms (e.g. some of Udacity and many of the Udemy courses) seems to suggest that there is an audience that is focusing on themes and knowledge more than on institutional reputation. This may be true, in particular, for European participants who are educated or have been educated in national systems that have not been stratified by rankings etc. This does not mean that the quality of content and teaching is of no importance to them. Given that the MOOC offer in some subject areas is quite broad, one occasionally hears statements like the following: “I signed up for a course, did not like it, and found a better one on the same topic.” Given the opportunity, learners make choices, both in online and face-to-face education. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Blended learning and flipping the classroom
MOOCs are also considered as a means for instruction in a “blended learning” mode.
There are good arguments for this approach. Research shows that students learn more through active learning (i.e. when they have assignments or discuss an issue) rather than through listening to lectures. Students listen to lectures more attentively if they have been given a problem or task to solve before the lecture. In this regard the structure that most MOOCs have – short lectures alternating with assignments and quizzes – seems to be ideal. Of course, one could also do this in a classroom, but it would be more difficult to ensure that all students participate: some might need longer to assimilate the content of the lecture, and prefer to listen to it again before doing the assignment. Another advantage is that teacher-student contact time usually used for lectures could be used differently, e.g. for discussions, experiments, project- and group-work, working with peers etc. This concept is referred to as flipping the classroom. It has been strongly advocated and demonstrated by Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, in the context of school teaching. Teachers get time to work with students on an individual basis. This may be a good strategy provided that institutions have the physical infrastructure in place. Lecture halls are not particularly useful for anything but lectures, and student project groups might also need rooms to meet and work. Some teachers report that their students are actually quite happy listening to lectures, and this is also confirmed by research that proves that students – despite the fact that they learn more and better when they are active learning – prefer conventional lectures.
Another observation is that the discussion on innovating learning through MOOCs takes a rather exclusive focus on replacing lectures. This might give the impression that students are spending most of their study time in lectures; this is probably not the case in most European higher education institutions. The concept of “flipping the classroom” might not be so different from seminar style teaching, where students have to read books at home, and to prepare papers to be presented. If a MOOC is to replace or to supplement book reading, this might appear more animated and more appealing to some students. But it might not really solve the “one to many” problem because in blended learning at an institution only a relatively small number of learners could take part in the flipped classroom. But an advantage might be that a MOOC could serve a very diverse learning group, comprising students in the institution, in the classroom and at home, and learners outside of the institution, whether or not they will take a certificate or be awarded credits in the end. The concept of a flipped classroom is of course not a particularity of MOOCs, but is used generally by institutions working with blended learning. The question is whether MOOCs are the most suitable instruments for blended learning, as they seem to be developed for self-study, and not as a part of a blended course. Therefore, teachers may use elements of a MOOC, both for classroom teaching or for home self-study assignment. However, this is only possible if MOOCs will prove to be sustainable and remain an open source. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
MOOC = innovative quality learning for all?
Many innovative achievements of MOOCs are actually not so novel and certainly not unique selling points:
- Large numbers of learners being able to watch a MOOC? This is basically the same technology as watching TV programmes — live or recorded — on the internet.
- Being able to respond to exercises and quizzes? Being able to join a discussion or working group? To get peer support? There are rather common technologies used in online questionnaires, games, in social media and many online portals, and they have been for a long time part of online learning. It clearly depends on the development of software and eplatforms, which is of course very important and useful for further progress in interactive mass communication and collaboration, including in learning.
A key argument in favour of MOOCs is that they promise to provide high-quality learning opportunities to a very large number, or even unlimited number of learners for free or at low costs. The economic side of this argument, i.e. business models that would allow MOOCs to remain free of charge or at low cost for participants, have already been discussed above. However, longstanding experience has shown that quality and student success in online learning come at a price that is maybe even higher than for face-to-face education. The question therefore is whether MOOCs are actually able to undercut the costs of other online learning models, while offering comparable or even superior learning quality. Can MOOCs solve the problems and dysfunctions in mass education resulting from an unfavourable instructor-to-student ratio? Can MOOCs even reverse the pattern of one (instructor) to many students toward “many to one” or “many to many”? Some educationalists would see this change as necessary to revolutionise learning.
Educational scientists have pointed out that many MOOCs are just reproducing a model of traditional education provision that is already in crisis. They also challenge the claim that MOOCs provide flexible learning – apart from the fact that they can be followed on a more flexible time schedule – and point for example to the fact that Coursera MOOCs follow a very linear, fairly standardised narrative. Adaptive learning, i.e. learning material that adjusts automatically to the learning needs and abilities of learners, is making progress, driven by research, software developers and publishing companies, but still far away from allowing flexible learning phases. One may also argue of course that there are different types of MOOCs, such as a connectivist MOOC (c-MOOC). However, it seems that presently, it would not be possible to run a c-MOOC on one of the big provider platforms, as software tools would not allow for the type of interaction and collaboration among participants that characterise c-MOOCs. A question is whether this could be changed, given the fact that a purpose of c-MOOCs is that learners and groups of learners develop their own initiatives, which are unpredictable. The x-MOOC pattern, however, is a fairly linear approach with clearly defined (learning) outcomes. A c-MOOC might impede the automatic assessment approach that the big MOOC platforms currently offer, which requires rather prescriptive learning, in that all issues need to be broken down into to a dual response choice (right or wrong). It would also imply a different role of the instructor (more of a facilitator than the actual provider of knowledge), than the one in traditional teaching.
Another point made in favour of MOOCs is that they create large sets of data that may provide more robust analysis of learning styles, course programmes, etc. However, the point is also made that this is less about improving learning, and more about correcting the teaching materials, which could have been done also with proper preparation in the first instance, and some testing. This kind of assessment would also make more sense, if the students and their backgrounds are known – which is usually not the case in MOOCs. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
What is best in learning: MOOCs, classroom or open university?
What makes the debate complicated is that it combines two topics of discussion: MOOCs versus traditional face-to-face teaching, and MOOCs versus other forms of online learning. Hence, many of the arguments for and against MOOCs are actually not MOOCs-specific, but are related to the general debate regarding online learning.
Those who are sceptical about online education would identify MOOCs as the most recent and extreme representation of a type of learning provision that is not to be trusted. The classic conservative teacher’s position is that MOOCs cannot replace a teacher, learning has to be interactive, and does not allow to do laboratory experiments, clinical practice or medical simulation. However, criticism also comes from the open universities that find that MOOCs are just a resource – whereas the open universities provide real teaching with the necessary student support services, and award degrees (and hence are at least of equal quality to face-to-face teaching).
The question of whether online learning “is as good as” and whether it “replaces classroom teaching” has been the source of confrontation between proponents and opponents of online learning. Online opponents tend to describe the merits of face-to-face education in a nostalgic way that tends to ignore the realities of modern mass higher education. As MOOCs are announced as “the best education of the world accessible for anyone”, MOOC proponents may counter the arguments: How does studying a MOOC delivered by an inspired scholar from one of the world’s top institutions compare to sitting in an overcrowded and anonymous lecture hall in some unknown institution?
Besides the fact that this is – at least for the moment – hardly an alternative, as MOOCs generally do not award credits, and no degree: the point is of course that no sensible person would claim that online learning should replace all physical classroom teaching. It is clear that MOOCs and online learning forgo certain features that physical classroom teaching can offer, e.g. spontaneous interactivity, informal exchanges, cultural and social experiences in and outside the lecture hall – in particular in the case of young school leavers, for whom higher education coincides with living apart from their families, and becoming responsible for managing not only learning but also their lives. Decades of successful practice have proven that online higher education learning is possible and can be of high quality. It has also become clear that it has not replaced face-to-face instruction, but offers an alternative for learners who are not able and prefer not to attend a brick-and-mortar institution, and allows for an overall flexibility in teaching and learning.
So the discussion would be: what is the difference between a MOOC and other forms of online learning? Is it as an alternative to physical higher education teaching or a complement to it?. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Implications for learning and teaching
Many of the arguments made in favour of or against MOOCs are actually more about economic aspects (cheaper or free of charge) and the motivations for institutions to have them (such as international outreach). The issues of funding and business models for MOOCs are already quite complicated; to assess at this stage what MOOCs actually mean for learning is even more challenging. This is partly because they are a relatively new development, their use is still in the experimental phase and not much research has been published, but also because in different institutional and system environments they may have a different impact.
Principal questions are:
- Are MOOCs a means for learning, or just an information source (fancy form of textbooks)?
- Can MOOCs replace, complement or supplement higher education provision? Are they, for example, a possibility to widen participation? If so, what are the conditions to be met in terms of learning support and assessment?
- Should MOOCs award credits?
- How would MOOCs, credit-bearing or not, change the role of higher education institutions? Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities.
The full paper can be downloaded here.
Income from MOOCs
Obviously, the MOOC companies have to cover costs, and finally, if for-profit, generate revenue. One possibility to generate income is “crowd-funding”, an approach used by Udemy which charges fees under US$100 for its courses. In case the course would attract a large number of learners, this could be attractive to the lecturers, as they would receive 70% of the income.
Certification fees are frequently mentioned as the potential income source. Some institutions and providers started to certify the completion of courses for a moderate fee. But unless large numbers of learners decide to take a certificate, this would hardly become an income source. At the time, Coursera’s fee was around US$50, but it also offered fee waivers, for those who could not afford it.
For a growing number of courses Coursera is now offering a fee-based “signature track”, which awards certificates. This requires learners to undergo biometric identification verification (via photo ID and unique typing pattern) right at the beginning of the course. Coursera emphasises that the certification is a pass validation offered by the institution and Coursera, and not a credit award.64 Coursera continues to offer the course for free.
The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Spain offers under “UNED Abierta” (Open UNED) a broad range of validation options for its MOOCs, starting with a participation certificate for €15, whereas certificates which award ECTS require an exam and come at a slightly higher cost. Testing and certification of MOOC participants, who for individual courses remain low in number and disseminated widely around the globe, is also a growing domain for specialist companies, such as Proctor U and Pearson.
The latter is cooperating with edX. An edX representative announced recently the “post-MOOC” area, as its members start experimenting with SPOCs – small private online courses with fixed enrolments.66 A contested issue is still whether credits and degrees can or should be awarded via MOOCs, and what would be the implications. In this regards a MOOC Masters of Georgia Institute of Technology is awaited with a lot of suspense. The issue is not so much the feasibility – the open universities have offered credit and degree-earning online courses for many years – but whether this course will meet demand and render economic benefit. Universities – in particular in the US – are under growing pressure to secure and diversify income streams. And Georgia Tech is not the only institution that considers a digital learning offer that would either lower costs, or generate additional income. Transforming its OpenCourseWare website into a pay-per-view e-learning application was one of the approaches that apparently the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has considered as an additional income source in times of global financial crisis.
But even if Georgia Tech and a few other well-known institutions are to succeed – there is still some recollection of the failed attempt some time ago to make online learning profitable – this will not provide a general answer to the higher education sector of how MOOCs are to be financed and can even make revenue.
It would also not create sufficient return of investment for the big platforms. While not excluding the possibility of income from certification of participation, completion, credits and degrees, it is hard to imagine that this would be the only, or even the main income source, given the considerable investments that have been made. edX was established with a US$30 million investment from both Harvard and MIT. These costs are probably partly returned through cost contribution of the 30 participating universities (for example, it is known that Amherst College has been invited to join edX for US$2 million for a period of five years – given that edX has now around 30 partners), partly written off as investment, including reputational costs. edX and Coursera have developed different models of charging institutions for the use of platforms and services, and how to share any additional income, but while one is for-profit and the other not-for-profit, they have probably not yet developed sustainable business models.69 In September 2013 it was announced that edX and Google joined forces to launch MOOC.org in 2014 – a platform that would allow a wide range of course producers to be shared – including teachers and businesses to “make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform.”
Google has launched several instruments in the area of teaching and learning, most recently a MOOC course builder. There have been comments that this is a somehow unexpected alliance, a highly exclusive not-for-profit university platform and a multinational internet operator, and it will be interesting to see what the business project is going to be. In July 2013, Coursera announced that it had raised another US$43 million in venture capital, on top of the US$22 million it banked last year. Among the participants are LearnCapital, a Silicon Valley venture firm, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and also Laureate, an international operator of for-profit universities. Doug Becker from Laureate stated in an interview that he would expect MOOCs to reduce the cost of higher education by at least one third, and if they only earned 1% of that benefit, it would “still be a very nice business”.
In an interview with Forbes Magazine, the Coursera CEO Daphne Koller stated that a stock market launch might be inevitable, given the outside investments. The alternative would be selling, which she would like to avoid, as this might imply that Coursera’s goals would change.
This points once more to the question of the actual motivation for MOOCs: is it to make learning more economical, or to improve it – or both?. Download the full paper here.

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities. The full paper can be downloaded here.
Production and maintenance of MOOCs
So far, the production and maintenance costs of the actual courses are mainly with the higher education institutions and their teachers. Therefore, for an institution, the first question should be whether it can afford one or several MOOCs. In this regard the institution has to consider the costs for development, but also for delivery, and maintenance.
The costs depend on whether universities would rely on the services of the MOOCs companies or other service providers, or produce their own MOOCs, which might lower the costs, in particular if the institution were to produce more than one. The full cost might be around €200,000-€250,000, whereas the production cost (excluding work time of academic staff and probably also university technical staff) might range from €30,000-€50,000.
The production costs can vary greatly, depending on how the MOOC is produced, for example whether one professor reads a lecture in front of a camera, or whether it involves large academic and production teams. Apparently for the Harvard course on “Classical Heroes”, film shooting in Greece was one of the cost factors. But there are other ways of doing MOOCs: Jörn Loviscach, a German professor for technical mathematics, produces low-cost videos in Khan-Academy style all by himself with a webcam and computer. He has a MOOC on Udacity, but his stronghold is the Germanspeaking YouTube community (9 million views).
But stating this as an example for low cost, would obviously disregard the amount of staff time still necessary to produce these videos. Duke University has provided an example of the development of a MOOC that required 600 staff hours, of which 420 were for academic staff.
Obviously it is an issue of how to remunerate staff who contribute to MOOCs on a regular basis in order to integrate their participation in MOOC production into their working load. A critical point is also whether and how much teaching assistance an institution provides for a MOOC.
If a MOOC is run several times, cost effectiveness should increase. However, there might be limits to this, given that it may require an update to capture new developments, correction of errors, etc. A frequent argument in favour of MOOCS is that the data that results from learners’ engagement can be used to improve the course, but this again would require staff time and generate costs. Whether universities can allocate funding to initiatives like MOOCs may differ from country to country, depending on their level of financial autonomy and funding rules. For European universities, which to a large extent are publicly funded, the question arises whether they have sufficient funding autonomy to produce MOOCs. Funding rules may also influence the decision on whether production and maintenance of MOOCs can be outsourced. For the institutions and the public the question is also whether these expenses can be justified, in particular in times of financial crisis and austerity – given that they do not, or not in first line, benefit/aim at the institutions’ actual students.
Another issue is of course why universities should actually want to invest in MOOCs. In some countries, e.g. the Czech Republic, institutions cannot exceed the number of study places, regardless of whether students are studying physically in classrooms or via online programmes. A question might also be whether there will be – apart from visibility and reputation – any revenue from MOOCs.
. Download the full paper here.