Moocs are free – but for how much longer?

Source: Alamy

Hard sums: a Stanford professor said no university could keep funding free courses

Few institutions are as closely associated with the massive open online course movement as Stanford University. But could monetising Moocs, particularly in professional development courses, be the next step for the California-based institution?

Two of the best-known US Mooc platforms, Coursera and Udacity, were formed by Stanford professors, and the university’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley places it in close proximity to many of the world’s leading tech companies.

John Mitchell is vice-provost for online learning and overseer of Stanford’s Mooc programme, which has delivered more than 240 online and blended campus courses to about 2 million people since 2011 – more than 50 of them for free.

“Moocs have started out as a free opportunity – and free is a great way to get people interested,” he said. “But traditionally, students in the US pay tuition to go to college or university and I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask people to pay a little bit for education activities that help them to move forward in their careers.” Professor Mitchell, who is an instructor on a computer security Mooc offered by Stanford on the Coursera platform, said that professional development courses offered universities the best opportunity to grow the income they generate from online courses.

“I think [Stanford] will have low cost, high volume, but non-free courses online that will help make our online programmes sustainable,” he said, adding that no college or university was able to continue funding free courses without finding a way to cover the costs.

This, Professor Mitchell continued, was despite the fact that free online courses helped to make the expertise of his university more visible to the general public – something that was, he said, in itself valuable to the institution. “If someone has an idea that’s useful to the world, spreading that idea is part of our mission,” he said.

“From a business point of view, I think many of the projects in that area will be supported over time in the same way that our research projects are supported: through external research grants, gifts from foundations, and so on.”

Until then, he said, universities would need to explore ways of charging for large online courses, even though doing so reduces the “openness” of any so-called Mooc. “One of the issues we have with Moocs is that it can be very difficult to set up successful group projects when people keep leaving the course,” he said, referring to the fact that completion rates for free online courses are typically very low.

“Maybe if there’s payment or an application process or courses targeted at a particular community we will have less attrition and more cohesion in the group.”

chris.parr@tesglobal.com