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First published on the East Midlands Learning Technologists blog.
There’s a lot of debate around at the moment about MOOC’s (Massive Online Open Courses) in all their variants. In particular, there’s the question about how they can continue with no obvious business model?
It’s the same for any “open” project, whether it’s open source software or open courses. The project must have a business model that ensures its long-term viability for people to trust that it’s worth investing time and effort into.
There are as many business models as there are open projects. What’s key is that the people developing the project are able to treat it as their “work” and not just “hobby”. This means that need to be paid for the time they invest in the project - whether that’s immediately, or at some point in the future.
One particular favourite of mine comes from a Management Consultancy in the US: Manager Tools.
Go to their website and you will find one of the best management development resources available in the English-speaking world (my opinion). Most of that is given for free, without even requiring any sort of registration. With about 85,000 downloads per week, you get an indication of how useful their materials are.
This has been going on for many years, and the resource is continually added to. It’s good stuff. High-quality. And immediately useful. They’ve invested considerable time and money into making it.
What the Manager Tools team have done is realise that generic content needs to be free. That’s just how the internet works.
But people are prepared to pay for the stuff that is bespoke to them. And, if they know it’s going to be high-quality, they’ll pay a lot of money.
By giving away their content, Manager Tools have demonstrated their capability. You know what you’re going to get from them.
More than that, the team have built up a community of over 37,000 people who have chosen to register and take part in their open forums.
Having built up a reputation for good, useful advice, the Manager Tools team have been able to realise its value in three ways:
- By hosting expensive, high quality, medium-scale, conferences where participants are able to put into practice the guidance in the materials whilst being observed by experienced coaches.
- By providing bespoke consultancy services for organisations wishing to improve their management practices.
- By creating bundles of materials that can be purchased to support the free materials.
So, what’s the challenge for our education & training organisations today (whether F/HE or workplace)?
- What are we doing to prove our capability with our target market? There’s no point just telling them what we can do, we need to demonstrate it - in the open, for free.
- What are people prepared to pay for? In education & training, I would argue that this probably consists of qualifications with a good reputation and materials & advice that are bespoke to the individual or their team. The days of costly, generic, mass-market education and training are numbered. Instead, we should perhaps be thinking about providing no-cost education & training to the mass market, and focus on selling to the long tail.
1 comment
Mark,
You provide a very thoughtful piece on MOOCs and their place in the educational landscape (or wheel or pie or puzzle - whatever grand scheme analogy works for you). I’m fairly new to contemplating these (I started teaching hybrids about three years ago and online-exclusive courses last summer), but I have been thrust into an arena in which sussing out key pieces of “good educational prospects” is important for me, my students, and my employers. That said, I attended Focus on Teaching and Technology: A Regional Conference last fall, at which MOOCs were a persistent buzz topic; I have worked with a fairly new LMS which emphasizes social networking and has started hosting MOOCs (CourseNetworking, from one of the creates of Angel); and, I’ve been reading more on MOOCs.
All of this brings me to say this “hot topic” should be embraced without fear. Initially, I understood concerns in higher education as pertain to a solid business model, but I frankly think we’re approaching this the wrong way. From what I can tell, there are three means to maximize the value of this “invention”: (1) public campaigns (informational courses to help with health campaigns and “best practices” in informal items [think of caring for babies, defensive driving, etc]), (2) community course channels that may stimulate further desire for formal education (I think not of a replacement for community colleges nor universities but of items I used to see offered through local “free universities” - often low cost courses with hobby and skill-focused orientations), and (3) the types of specialized intellectual stimuli pieces you mentioned.
You make an excellent point when you point to a good model in Manager Tools. Unfamiliar with them, I fancy from your description they offer some parallels to TED Talks. TED has, of course, gone from a few large meetings to additionally providing smaller and more specialized conferences. Perhaps more like a PowerPoint/MS Office MVPs site, some MOOCs might demonstrate tips via courses and encourage work for MVPs/consultants associated with instruction. Kudos on illustrating your perspective beautifully!
As I put MOOCs in context in the brave new world that is making online learning not just common but interesting (after all, I think part of the hype concerning MOOCs relates to “being part of” a “big project”/”cool trend”), I think back to Amy Collier’s keynote address at the fall conference: her focus was on recruiting educators to make MOOCs constructive, whatever ultimate business model they used. (Collier is the Director of Digital Learning Initiatives for Stanford University.) She urged attendees to be caring curators of information and to customize work; this is in keeping with what you suggested and what I suggested.
From the same conference, I also think back to a presentation by Michael Henry (University of Missouri-Kansas City) on “The MOOC: Educational Fad or Long-Term Solution?” and think about two key issues he discussed. The first was in his simple topic introduction: he listed off the many synonyms and variations for MOOCs, including such terms as “little open online course,” “social open online course,” and more. This, to me, demonstrates that people already accept the demand for various topics varies. Second, he - like Minding the Campus essayist Peter Sacks (and Collier) - points out that MOOCs have low completion rates. (In the last few months, I’ve heard and read everything from 24% completion to 4% completion!) This brings up such red flags as “perhaps people aren’t comfortable learning without more personal attention” (something I’ve worked with a team at our school to ensure is not the case for our online learners) and “perhaps people don’t invest time and energy when something significant {like money invested or a prospective degree) isn’t at stake.”
Sack’s article actually focuses on identifying “how to make MOOCs work” as related to accepting them as part of the educational landscape - by accepting they are not a replacement for traditional models and instead should be respected for (as Henry mentioned at the conference) fulfilling different functions.
All of these items bring me back around to the notion that we need to put MOOCs in context as tools, rather than replacements or as fly-by-night projects to soon fade away. Your ideas helped me solidify my thinking here, and for this I am grateful!
- Angela J. Sisson
References
Collier, A. “Keynote Address.” Presented at Focus on Teaching and Technology: A regional conference, October 25, 2013, St. Louis, MO.
Henry, M. “The MOOC: Educational Fad or Long-term Solution?” Presented at Focus on Teaching and Technology: A regional conference, October 25, 2013, St. Louis, MO.
Sacks, P. “How to Make MOOCs Work,” from Minding the Campus: Reforming Our Universities, January 14, 2014. Retrieved at http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2014/01/how_to_make_moocs_work.html
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