Production and maintenance of MOOCs

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.