Should MOOCs award credits?

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.