With an increasing number of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the popularity of MOOCs is rising. A MOOC is an online course with an open character, which supports lifelong networked learning. Unlike the fixed position of a school, a MOOC is built for everyone with internet access. Hence, MOOCs give everyone the possibility to learn.
MOOCs provide flexible, accessible and high quality courses at low cost (or even for free) for people that are interested in learning, which is disrupting the education industry. Higher education institutions and private investors have shown great interest for the rising popularity of MOOCs. Both parties want to either expand their existing brand or enter the education market. Therefore, it is highly likely that in the future the number of traditional courses will decrease, while the number of online courses will increase rapidly.
Coursera, EdX and Udacity are a few big players in the MOOC industry. Coursera’s, which is market leader, value proposition is to provide global access to the world’s best education. They use peer assessments to grade the student’s performance. Coursera sells certificates to students who successfully pass for their courses. They also offer learning programs at universities which combines traditional offline teaching methods with Coursera’s online platform. Coursera was one of the first to enter the market, resulting in a first-mover advantage.
The second largest player is EdX. This firm is founded by MIT and Harvard, which strengthens their market position. EdX is an open source tool, which allows others to create courses to make education available to a wide range of people. The open-source element of EdX is what distinguishes them from the others. EdX makes revenue by opening their platforms to universities and receives a part of the profit from the partner. Moreover, they provide help to universities by producing courses for them.
Udacity, which is developed by Stanford University professors, is trying to position itself on the rightside of the tail. They collaborate with corporates to further develop employees’ skills. Udacity focuses on computer programming courses. They currently offer free courses, but invite students and partners to pay voluntarily. Their revenue model has been shown to be their weakness. Currently, they have 4 million registered users and 11,000 paying students.
Considering those three competitors, we can see that the long tail effect applies to the MOOC industry. The long-tail effect occurs because of demand-side drivers as well as supply-side drivers. One could argue that Coursera is left on the long-tail scale, offering courses to a large audience. Udacity is on the right side of the curve, offering a smaller number of courses to a niche market. EdX is in the middle of the two. In this light, the future of MOOCs are quite interesting. We foresee a more dispersed market, where niche products become widely available due to the increasing customer demand. This would result in a longer tail. It is up to the firms who offer these courses to monetize them.
Technology of the Week – MOOCs are disrupting education
17
September
2016
Thank you for introducing an interesting topic like this. I believe MOOC’s are going to gain a bigger share in the education industry in the near future. But do you really think MOOC’s are going to take over the education industry? In my opinion there are also some disadvantages of MOOC’s compared to real classes. For example, there are fewer discussions between the professor and the students when they cannot interact at real time. Also when students are watching a MOOC and they have questions about it, they cannot get their answers immediately. Furthermore, you state that Coursera sells certificates to students. But what is the value of a certificate like that, when you have the possibility to search for the answers to the exam questions online while you’re making the exam? Please let me know what you think about these drawbacks and how they can improve the online learning experience with MOOC’s.
Hi Tom! Thank you for this insightful article about the rising popularity of MOOCs. It was an interesting read. I would like to make the list more extensive.
Some other platforms which might be useful to mention for our BIM community are called Udemy and StackSkills. Although these two are similar to the ones you brought up, they differ on a couple of points.
Firstly, Udemy and StackSkills are truly peer-to-peer online learning platforms, where literally everyone ranging from coders and designers to photographers and other specialists can offer their knowledge in the form of an online course. Most courses come with a price. OLPs such as Coursera and Udacity take a more curated approach where courses can only be taught by certain people, such as professors from MIT or Harvard. Both approaches have their ups and downs.
Secondly, Udemy and StackSkills differ in the sense that they cater to a target market of people that are, in general, looking to improve specific skills such as building an SQL database. Coursera for instance is an excellent choice when you want to take a course that is similar to a college course like Information Strategy and Designing Business Applications – where you don’t per se learn the technical skills right away.
Some of the courses that I’ve gone through this summer on StackSkills and definitely recommend to others are: “Build professional websites using HTML5 and CSS3 from scratch”, “Python tutorial: Python 100% hands-on-learn by coding”, and “The complete Ruby on Rails developer”. Always handy to learn the basics of coding when following a Master like ours.
Hello Tom! Thanks for the interesting article. I think MOOCS are indeed the next big thing and want to add my experience with an online course I just entered. Currently, I take part in the digital marketing course From Google at the following website: https://digitalewerkplaatsvoorstudenten.withgoogle.com. This website gave me an insight how easy to use MOOCS are. It bassicaly shows you a video about a subject and asks you some questions about it. When you answered all the questions correct you get permission to enter the next chapter. With this website it is possible to get your digital marketing certificate from Google which can be nice for your CV. I became very enthusiastic when I saw it for the first time. Now it is possible to do this kind of course at home and this one is even for free! I am currently at the begining stage of this course but it is very user friendly and I think everyone can do it. Hopefully they add more courses in the future!