MOOCs ain’t over — from christenseninstitute.org by Michelle Rhee-Weise
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Over the last month, journal headlines have been heralding the death of massive online open courses (MOOCs). You could almost hear the sigh of relief from the academy. With Sebastian Thrun himself acknowledging the “lousy” quality of the MOOC product, told-you-so skeptics have been giddily pointing out that Udacity, in its failure to disrupt higher education, is now moving on to vocational training.
Sadly, what audiences are missing is that Thrun’s shift to workforce training is precisely what has the potential to disrupt and severely impact traditional postsecondary education. We at the Christensen Institute have already written extensively about how MOOCs were not displaying the right markers for disruption (see here, here, here, and here), but we became more hopeful as they started to offer clusters of courses. Coursera announced Foundations of Business with Wharton, while edX and MITX introduced the Xseries in Computer Science as well as Supply Chain & Logistics. These moves appeared to map better to employer needs and what we describe as areas of nonconsumption. In their turn away from career-oriented training, colleges and universities have unwittingly left unattended a niche of nonconsumers—people over-served by traditional forms of higher education, underprepared for the workforce, and seeking lifelong learning pathways.
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Udacity’s most recent offering of a Big Data and Data Science track illustrates perfectly how the company is establishing its niche in the space that most traditional institutions have been avoiding.
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If a company like Udacity can do a better job of attending to the skills gap and facilitate learning pathways for students that simultaneously build a strong pipeline of qualified candidates for companies, we will soon see that the creation of such programs to meet the demands of the labor market will put enormous pressure on our traditional institutions of higher education.
From DSC:
This is yet another article that illustrates some key points, at least in my mind:
- Institutions of traditional higher education have a shrinking window of time to address employers’ needs. The workplace still looks to higher ed in many ways, but alternatives are popping up all the time now. Either higher ed reinvents itself to become more responsive, or we may find ourselves eventually being forced to find new employers.
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- MOOCs are not done morphing — not even close. The experimentation will continue. The question is, who will be involved with these experiments?
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- As we are now into lifelong learning, K-12, higher ed, and the corporate training departments will likely all be affected by MOOCs — the lines will likely continue to blur.