Image: Alan Levine

Image: Vivien Rolfe

Take one traditional online learning course add robo-marking hyped as “artificial intelligence”... peer marking (poorly implemented)... re-invent the VLE wheel (again!)... stir in some “education is broken” hype... $$$ venture capital... And you’ve just been MOOCed MOOC – the taste of a new generation

“The Year Of The MOOC” “Higher Education: the MOOC is our mp3” “Two decades to take out the 'trash', Mooc- style” “The Big Idea That Can Revolutionize Higher Education: 'MOOC‘” “How MOOCs will wipe thousands off the value of YOUR family home” Yes! It’s the MOOCopalypse!

MOOCs Ate My Hamster “FutureLearn has the potential to put the UK at the heart of the technology for learning agenda by revolutionising conventional models of formal education.” “a transformational new partnership in online education.” “Higher education is broken with increasingly higher costs for both students and our society at large.” "Higher education is ripe for innovation: it is too expensive and limited to a few" “Education is broken, somebody should do something”

Where there’s MOOC, there’s brass $16m Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byres $15m from Andreesen Horowitz & others $2m from Google $5m from O’Sullivan Foundation $10m FirstMark Capital & others

Image: M. Branson Smith

MOOC found under council carpark cMOOCs - Connectivist - Canadian - Collaborative - Crazy? I have no idea what is going on!

Traces of MOOC found in lasagne xMOOCs - EXtensive - American (X) - EXtremely Didactic - Organised EXessively Yay capitalism! Wow – personalisation makes me feel so special Wait... I’m doing this for free??

“diyU” “RLO” “commons” “education is broken” large scale replacement of current structures. start-ups disruptive techno-deterministic automation standardisation new tools, platforms open web freedom licences, sharing. using existing tools.

diyu rlo commons The “open education” movement xMOOCs social sharing iTunesU marketing open practice PLE learning analytics rethinking HE repositories cMOOCs

“And then one day you find Ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run You missed the starting gun...” Dark Side of the MOOC

Image: David Kernohan

“I quit three weeks into the course. The videos were distracting. I felt disconnected from the professor, as if the face I saw on-screen was a detached third party serving up neatly packaged bits of information for massive consumption. It felt sterile.” Rachelle DeJong, MOOC student “155,000 students registered for the course when it opened in February, but only 23,000 earned a single point on the first problem set, and 9,300 passed the midterm. When the course ended, 8,200 students took the final. Just over 7,000 earned a passing grade and the option of receiving an informal certificate from edX.” Data from first EdX course education-online-business-model-open-and-non-profit/ hy_i_dropped_ou.html

“Report on survey responses from 2,350 students who enrolled in a Massive Online Open Class (MOOC) titled “Computational Investing, Part I” via coursera.org in Fall The responses represent 41% of the students who completed the course and 2.6% of those who initially enrolled but did not complete it.” /mooc-student-demographics/

Image: Giulia Forsythe

Coursera has begun to move into paid learning certification, and has partnered with ProctorU to provide paid proctored examinations which may lead to university credit. Income streams are limited to the purchase of additional premium services by students. But its primary assets are a bespoke teaching platform and the range of user data generated by its students (the latter may be monetised by selling to future employers, though this is not yet a proven market) UK HE offers a huge range of courses at undergraduate, postgraduate, pre-university and professional development levels – both on and offline, along with a range of free courses aimed at community outreach. It has a substantial estate, which is used to generate income via event hosting and management, and is also active in research and development – winning contracts from private and government sources. Primary income is from tuition, and numbers and investment remain steady despite recent funding method changes.

Image: David Kernohan