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Title: MOOCs Under Attack

Competencies: achievement orientation, self-development

Who benefits: those in need continuing education or interested in the future of higher education

Consultant Usage: MOOCs are changing where and how we learn and will alter some areas of consulting, especially in coaching and career counseling

What’s it about? What is that old expression?  “March comes in like a lion and ….”  Well that certainly has held true for the expanding “debate” about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).  The word “debate” is in quotes because it is pretty one-sided attack when all the smoke and mirrors are cleared away.

In today’s post I would like to begin with a personal note, then move into two crucial questions (1) Why are MOOCs being attacked and (2) who is doing the attacking.

First my personal note.  I am an unapologetic fan of MOOCs.  So right up front you know my bias.  I have completed three courses, am in the middle of a fourth course and will begin a fifth course on Monday.  These are classes I take through Coursera, currently the largest of the MOOCs.  In a sense of fair play, I would rate the four courses as one excellent, two very good and the fourth poor.

One of the four classes, a “very good” course, was Critical Thinking Skills.  One of the best parts of the class was the presentation on understanding fallacies.  One statement that the professor made that really stuck with me is to the effect that you don’t need to remember the names of the various forms of fallacies, you just need to be able to recognize them when you see them.  I am pleased to report that the class has sharpened my skills and I am better able to recognize fallacies when I see them.

Which I shall put to good use today in discussing “MOOCs Under Attack”.

So let’s begin with why MOOCs are being attacked.  I like simple, so let’s keep it simple.  The simple reason is that education in higher learning is failing.  Whether MOOCs exist or don’t exist does not change the problems inside the higher education system.  Again, keeping it simple, here are three reasons for failure:

First, economics.  The following quote is from an article by Clay Shirley’s aptly named Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken:  “Tuitions at four-year colleges have risen (up 72% at public colleges since 2000), graduates’ earnings have declined (down 14.7% in the same span).”  Something has to give.

Second, the model changed and the institutions haven’t.  Today’s college student doesn’t fit the old profile.  The model was designed on the 18-22 year-old-student going to school for four years.  Most college students today are 23 plus.  Most aren’t fulltime.  Most go to community colleges and/or nights.  Forget dorms, think commuters.  It’s all different.

Third, the business world is rethinking the value of a college degree.  The shift is on.  You may not see it yet, but the business world is beginning to change its fundamental thoughts about education.  It is moving away from “Time Served” toward “Stuff Learned”.

Those brilliant people who run Envisia Learning (ahem, my bosses) and others in the world of 360 degree feedback were years ahead of the learning institutions.  They have known for some time now that companies want employees who are skilled in certain competencies.  Doesn’t matter where you acquired them.

Clayton Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor whom I respect and admire.  I also consider him to be the #1 expert on disruptive innovation.  He recently gave a talk comparing just how much today’s traditional universities have in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M.

Didn’t some guy back in the 60s and 70s sing about “The Times They Are A Changin’”.

Let’s move to my second point.  Who is doing the attacking.  Why, surprise! surprise! it is the folks inside the institutions.  Educators are excellent researchers.  They are able to regurgitate enormous amounts of facts.  In working my way through their criticisms of MOOCs I found frequent examples of false dilemma fallacies, correlation proves causation fallacies, cherry picking fallacies, and the occasional Circulus in Probando and Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacies.  Good thing I took that Coursera course!

One of the more amusing articles in this month’s attack on MOOCs is entitled Asking the right questions about online courses.  In all fairness to the authors, the report is reasonably unbiased.  But, but, but, they asked the wrong questions!

Like so many of the other articles that are being written about MOOCs, the focus is on what MOOCs can’t do.  MOOCs did not set out to replace universities and colleges.  Initially MOOCs set out to bring education (not degrees) to those who would otherwise not have any educational possibilities.

More recently MOOCs have begun to partner with universities and colleges on classes where it is mutually advantageous.  These include classes where there are “hard” answers (such as math and some science classes) or large size lecture classes.  (My impressions of large lecture hall classes are many students not showing up, many who do show up use their laptops and other mobile devises to amuse themselves during class.)

Even the Harvard Business School is getting into the act.  They no longer offer an entry level class in accounting.  Why? If an MBA student needs the course, he/she takes a MOOC course on-line from BYU.  Harvard thinks the BYU course is better than their own.  Cheaper too.

Also more recently, MOOCs have begun to partner with businesses and other organization to bring competency based learning inside of the institutions.  This is an example of the diminishing role of the Degree.  One of the institutions now experimenting with MOOCs is the U.S. Army.

But this is the important point.  Nowhere in the literature can I find any of the MOOCs claiming to replace universities and colleges.  They tend to go out of their way to support the notion that some things can only be done face-to-face and MOOCs will never replace interpersonal requirements.

And if attacking the MOOCs as institutions isn’t enough, detractors attack the individual.  No one seems to garner more disrespect than the three times Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times foreign correspondent/op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat).  On March 5 he wrote a piece entitled The Professors’ Big Stage … and ducked.

His column was essentially a report on a conference he had just attended: Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education.  One of his more interesting statements in the article was “We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.”  My goodness you would have thought he attacked the Koran or the Bible (Oh Lord, please don’t let me set off riots for that sentence.)

He increased his controversy by saying “There is still huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs.”

Sometimes brilliance is being able to state the obvious.

But critics have cut him to the quick.  I suspect that they are oblivious to the obvious.

More later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.