Abstract
Reviewed in this article is the potential for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to transform higher education delivery, accessibility, and costs. Next, five major value propositions for MOOCs are considered (headhunting, certification, face-to-face learning, personalized learning, integration with services external to the MOOC, marketing). Then, four pricing strategies for MOOCs are examined (cross-subsidy, third-party, “freemium”, nonmonetary). Although the MOOC movement has experienced growing pains similar to most innovations, we assert that the unyielding pace of improvements in network technologies combined with the need to tame the costs of higher education will create continuing demand for MOOC offerings.
Highlights
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a type of online course characterized by large-scale student participation and open access via the Internet
The growing college tuition bubble and the opportunities emerging from an ever strengthening, and expanding global reach, formed by the commodity Internet are among the factors that have led to the growth of MOOCs
You must have been deep in an Amazon rainforest studying isolated indigenous tribes not to have felt the draw that expectations of zero costs that MOOCs have created in higher education
Summary
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a type of online course characterized by large-scale student participation and open access via the Internet. The “Open” part of the MOOC acronym signifies “free” to many people—as in “free to students”. After the modern MOOC movement started with three courses at Stanford in 2011, over 500 universities were offering 4200 MOOC courses that served. MOOCs providers due to their history of early delivery during the MOOC movement, their level of market penetration, and the large numbers of MOOC participants that they enroll. Some MOOC providers, such as Udacity, are for-profit education providers, which is a challenge to the simple “open” and “free” characterization of MOOC education providers. As we assert in the remainder of this article, “accessibility over global networks” and “scale due to the technology of delivery” perhaps are better ways to describe many MOOC offerings.
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