Q: Are MOOCs going to change the college/university system?
A: No. The system exists partly as an educational tool, but also as a credentialing mechanism. Until MOOCs are offered for credit, they are essentially the equivalent of books or those eight-CD “History of Jazz” sets you could listen to in the car. The revolution in higher education will happen when universities start offering MOOCs for credit, allowing them to become MOCCs: massive online courses for credit. When that happens everything will change.
Q: Why?
A: Right now there are about 4,100 universities and colleges (including two-year colleges) in the United States. You can figure that most of these places have at least one person who teaches advanced algebra. In twenty years there will be maybe 200-400 left, because if someone figures out how to do a MOCC for advanced algebra, there will be absolutely no reason for many universities to offer their own courses. A good MOCC is like a good textbook. You don’t need 4,000 textbooks; you need four or five.
Q: So why will you still need 200-400 people?
A: Because education with humans will be offered at a premium cost point. We all believe (and I think it’s true) that education with humans in a classroom is better than online learning. People who can afford it will still send their children to schools with human teachers. The elite small liberal arts colleges will probably come through this revolution largely unscathed; so will the top private universities. I’m guessing that there are 200-400 of those around. Maybe it’s fewer.
Q: Will everyone else be educated by MOCCs?
A: Yes and no. You can predict that there will be an entire hierarchy of human involvement, setting up tranches designed to market and offer courses to the maximum number of people at the maximum number of efficient price points. So for instance the cheapest possible offering will be a MOCC with completely automated grading and crowdsourced discussion. Slightly above that you might have moderated discussion, or even live online chat (which is now offered for language learners by companies like Rosetta Stone); for grading you might have human-graded essay exams, or even human-graded writing assignments, with human feedback. (I do not believe that writing assignments will be machine-graded in the near-future.) Obviously “live” versions of any of this will cost more than online ones, and synchronous ones more than asynchronous ones.
At that point you can basically imagine that the cheapest offering will be the all-automated MOCC, and the most expensive one will be the algebra seminar with 15 students offered by a full professor. Costs will array themselves accordingly.
Q: Which courses are most likely to end up as MOCCs?
A: Anything that is being taught now as a large lecture with little or no discussion and machine-graded exams will become a MOCC in the next five to ten years (Alexander Halavais
agrees). This includes a huge variety of general education courses at public universities, from the humanities to the sciences and everything in between. Similarly anything that has exams that can be largely machine-graded risks becoming a MOCC sooner rather than later. I don’t know much about accounting, but I am guessing that much of an accounting degree could be placed online, for instance.