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MOOCS
NEW SCHOOL OF THOUGHT MOOCs have significant marketing potential for both the institutions that host them and the individuals who conduct them, experts say BY MOLLY SOAT | STAFF WRITER
 msoat@ama.org
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assive open online courses, or MOOCs, have become part of the common higher education vernacular all over the world. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary added the acronym last year. Some see MOOCs as a passing fad, others as a major threat to the future of traditional on-campus education, but experts agree that they’re here to stay, and that their potential marketing power for their host universities and their featured speakers is undeniable.
MOOCs are run by for-profit websites and individual universities, and as nonprofit online partnerships between higher ed institutions. They are run in conjunction with tuition-based, on-campus programs or as separate educational entities apart from any traditional university setting. There are many versions of MOOCs, and many ways to incorporate them into a degree or certificate program, but they all have one thing in common: They represent the future of higher education, according to experts. MOOCs won’t replace traditional bricks-and-mortar university educations—at least not in the foreseeable future—but they’re changing how teachers teach and learners learn. The smartest colleges and professors are embracing MOOCs, and the data that can be gleaned from them, to market their insights and their modern approaches to education.
MOOCs 101
MOOCs’ origins reportedly stem back to at least 2008, but The New York Times deemed 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” as several venture- and grant-backed MOOC giants sprang up, including Mountain View, Calif.-based Udacity and Coursera, and Boston-based nonprofit EdX, founded by Harvard
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University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The typical MOOC has 33,000 students enrolled, according to a 2013 study by The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, only 4% of MOOC participants complete their courses, according to a 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Many higher ed institutions worry that MOOCs will draw away tuitionpaying students from bricks-and-mortar campuses and put professors’ jobs at risk, says Cathy Davidson, the director of The Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a Udacity board member and a member of the National Humanities Council. Davidson has taught one MOOC on the future of higher education through Duke University and its MOOC partner, Coursera. “We’re all fantastically concerned with the cost of higher education,” she says. “A few years ago, people thought it was all just going to be online and everything was going to be cheap. The implication was that suddenly, the kind of funds that people have to pay for tuition at elite universities was going to evaporate. Technology was going to solve the problem. Clearly, that’s not the case.” The smartest higher ed marketers,
Davidson says, are figuring out how to draw MOOC students into paid online or on-campus programs, using their MOOC experience to brand themselves as adaptable, tech-savvy organizations, and shoring up on-campus learning through data collected through MOOCs to remain cutting-edge.
Setting the Curve
Higher ed institutions must stay ahead of the curve as hybrid learning—a combination of online discussion boards, video lectures and in-class learning— becomes more ubiquitous, Davidson says. Universities with the most brand equity were some of the first to dive into the MOOC movement, lending credibility to the online format, and many smaller institutions have followed. In 2012, Harvard and MIT pooled $60 million in funding to start EdX, a nonprofit online MOOC provider with open source code that can be used by any university, individual or company. Marketing firms, for example, can use the source code to create an online course on marcom or SEO best practices. The site has reached 5.3 million course enrollments by 2.5 million students across the world, and offers more than 200 courses through 53 partner universities, according to EdX.
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Established universities often don’t need MOOCs to help build brand awareness or prestige, nor do they need help recruiting potential students from around the world, but they can benefit from MOOCs’ ability to expand their educational opportunities. “Harvard is a unique institution in that we have 35,000 undergraduates vying for 2,000 spots, so we don’t really see that changing no matter what we do online,” says Michael Rutter, communications director for HarvardX, a Harvard University initiative to enable faculty to build and create open online learning experiences for residential and online use, and to support educational research. “People always want to physically come here, people always want to have an education here, so in that sense it’s hard to say that we’re competing for that. It’s more that we’re using the technologies to expand pathways or opportunities to engage.”
Having leaders like Harvard operating in the MOOC space has helped online learning tools and platforms gain more credibility and traction, says Steve Fireng, CEO at Lenexa, Kan.-based higher ed marketing firm PlattForm and a career-long higher ed marketer. “When we saw very highbranded schools and very well-known faculty deliver all of the education, it opened up more of a market. We were able to say, ‘This is really an acceptable way to learn.’ It provided numerous opportunities as a marketing company because it opened up channels and programs that, in the past, schools were not completely comfortable in doing.” MOOC participation by Harvard, MIT and other leading universities has given the learning format a seal of approval from academia, allowing smaller players to leverage MOOCs’ global reach to help boost brand
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awareness and build the institutions’ credibility. Moreover, they allow smaller schools to position themselves as subject matter experts in certain disciplines, says Jeanne Gosselin, senior enrollment management and marketing consultant at Glenside, Pa.-based higher ed marketing firm Paskill Stapleton & Lord Inc., which works with small colleges and universities including New York’s Paul Smith’s College and Nevada’s Great Basin College. “MOOCs create an opportunity for a smaller institution to establish a niche in a certain area,” she says. “Even if they’re looking at online education, people are still going to be drawn to a regional or famous institution and if you’re not in their region, then you’re not a part of that conversation. But with MOOCs, because it’s nationwide, it allows you to get into a playing field you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”
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Moving Beyond the Ivory Tower
While Harvard and the other Ivy League schools might not need such assistance, MOOCs offer smaller institutions the opportunity to reach well beyond their home countries and engage students from around the world, boosting their brand awareness and perception, and potentially attracting future students and online learners. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, 78% of Wharton’s MOOC participants live in countries outside of the U.S., and nearly half of those international students hail from developing regions including India and sub-Saharan Africa. MOOCs have the potential to help schools connect with new demographics of on-campus students and online learners, says Nancy Moss, communications director of EdX. For example, she says, one of the universities
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“I don’t think MOOCs are going to solve all of the problems of continuing education, but they lead people to forms of technology and online learning that can help [higher ed institutions] be more relevant to the contemporary workplace.” – CATHY DAVIDSON, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK participating in EdX, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has been able to reach many more students who are interested in its tech-focused graduate programs by participating in MOOC programming. “[Delft] is very well-known in Europe and the Netherlands but doesn’t have that global cache that MIT or Harvard would have,” Moss says. “[Delft] has gotten a
whole lot more geographic distribution for those interested in its graduate programs since they started offering MOOCs on EdX.” MOOCs also have the potential to help schools market their paid online educational opportunities, experts say. Institutions could promote e-learning courses at the completion of a MOOC, prompting virtual students to engage
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further with the organization—or, given MOOCs’ high dropout rate, schools could reach out to virtual students when they click to end a MOOC session, offering them other educational pathways to pursue related knowledge. The University of California, Berkeley was the first institution to join EdX other than its founders, and the program is driven mainly through Berkeley’s Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). UC Berkeley isn’t yet leveraging MOOCs as a digital marketing vehicle to promote paid online education courses because the demand for certificates from paid online courses from top-tier universities like UC Berkeley already is strong, says Chris Van Nostrand, director of marketing at BRCOE. However, MOOCs are driving knowledge of and interest in online education in general, he says, because a MOOC won’t be right for every professor or student, but there are many more options within the larger portfolio of online education offerings. “MOOCs have really started a dialogue about online education because they’ve tapped into this public awareness. There’s a zeitgeist aspect to MOOCs that made it more of a topic of conversation than previous types of online education.” According to Van Nostrand, MOOCs are a great way to introduce people to certification programs and higher ed tracks for working professionals who are looking to shore up their résumés. “This expectation of customization and personalization that’s in every corner of the marketplace is true in education, as well, and online education provides an element of flexibility, especially to working professionals who can’t be on campus for a full-time program.” Adds Davidson: “I don’t think MOOCs are going to solve all of the problems of continuing education, but they lead people to forms of technology and online learning that can help [higher ed institutions] be more relevant to the contemporary workplace.”
need help building brand awareness, they certainly can benefit by hosting MOOCs, as MOOCs are perceived as a modern learning opportunity, experts say. That positive association also benefits the professors leading the MOOCs. According to a survey conducted last year by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which polled more than 100 college professors who have taught at least one MOOC, 37.9% said that their motivation for teaching the course was to increase their visibility and reputation within their discipline, 33.0% wanted to increase their reputation in the media and the general public, 14.5% wanted to avoid becoming obsolete as college learning moves online and 1.0% wanted to improve their chances for tenure. MOOC professors often are more desirable for promotions and journal publication, says Jamie Murphy,
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marketing professor and director of research at the Australian School of Management in Perth, Australia. “As MOOCs seem here to stay, a professor with MOOC experience has a leg up for tenure, promotion and job applications,” Murphy says. “In addition, a successful MOOC garners huge PR for the university, school, department and professor.” When a professor teaches a MOOC, she builds her personal brand as a thought leader, according to Davidson. “The excitement about MOOCs on the positive side, and the hysteria about them on the negative side, was important for educators to become less complacent in their role,” he says. “Until MOOCs, the rap on professors was that we were a bunch of isolated fuddy-duddies. It turns out that if we can talk in a platform that’s accessible to the public, the public is coming in droves to listen.”
Building a Professor’s C.V.
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A MOOC can allow a school to gather data on everything from student engagement to interest levels in particular subject matter, all of which can help enhance on-campus learning. “If you think of the kind of data that we have access to, it’s research at a scale that education has never seen before.” – NANCY MOSS, EDX MOOC professors are able to get more eyeballs on their research projects. For example, Michael Goldberg, a venture capitalist who currently is working as a visiting assistant professor of design and innovation at Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University, taught a MOOC through Case Western and Coursera called “Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies.” The course attracted 23,000 students in 183 countries. Goldberg, a relative unknown in business academia and a newcomer to traditional university teaching, says that getting in on the ground floor of the MOOC movement created buzz for his work. “People around the world are really interested in this topic, and instead of publishing an article or book on it, I took the MOOC route,” Goldberg says. “It was a great platform for me and I was glad to get in early. Now that I’ve done it, I have additional insights and expertise in my field, and with the entrepreneurial aspects of MOOCs, specifically.” Goldberg’s MOOC generated earned media for his topic and for the university, as well. The course inspired a six-installment feature in Entrepreneur magazine, and Goldberg has appeared on CNBC and MSNBC, and has written for The Huffington Post. “It’s been great for raising awareness for the topic, and about me and my university,” he says. “My administrators are really excited about the publicity, as well.”
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Gaining Insight
Along with expanding a university’s educational reach and boosting its brand awareness and prestige, a MOOC can allow a school to gather data on everything from student engagement to interest levels in particular subject matter, all of which can help enhance on-campus learning, says Nancy Moss, communications director of EdX. Harvard and MIT’s goal in starting EdX was, among other things, to “provide and conduct research on teaching and learning so that institutions, faculty and students can understand how best to teach and how people learn,” Moss says. “If you think of the kind of data that we have access to, it’s research at a scale that education has never seen before.” HarvardX synthesizes the data collected through EdX MOOCs to distribute to the other universities in the EdX network, Rutter says. “We’re not competing with Stanford’s physics course or MIT’s physics course. Rather, we’re trying to figure out which aspect of each one is the most successful and how we might each learn from that. With all of the data you have with students, there’s an ability to do a lot of interesting Big Data work on things like educational outcomes and assessments, and all of that can be shoveled back into classroom learning as well as online learning.”
UC Berkeley’s BRCOE has a MOOC lab designed to address questions in teaching and learning that can be informed by MOOC data, such as the best ways to create discussion boards and online forums. BRCOE is experimenting with using MOOC lectures to disseminate background information to students before class so that on-campus discussions can be much deeper, Van Nostrand says. “Our MOOC lab is designed to address important questions in teaching and learning that can be studied by having access to these enormous data sets that MOOCs provide,” he says. “We’re doing research into, for instance, the best ways to facilitate discussion forums, and that has implications for on-campus and online courses. MOOCs really allow this kind of research because of their size and scale. In thinking of educational channels on a spectrum, there are opportunities for innovations in one area to affect other areas, as well.” Today’s consumer—in this case, today’s student—is changing, demanding that content and information be delivered anywhere at any time. MOOCs address students’ changing demands and needs, and by incorporating MOOCs into a comprehensive on-campus and online curriculum, universities place themselves at the cutting edge of higher-ed teaching and learning methodologies. Higher ed marketers must embrace the MOOC, not hide from it, to show that their institutions and professors are competitive. “For 20 years, we’ve had a stereotype that college is outdated, professors won’t change and higher education hasn’t changed since Socrates,” Davidson says. “Actually, universities are trying many different things, among them MOOCs and individualized online learning, and students creating multimedia as part of projects, e-portfolios, digital badging. … MOOCs are addressing a need for change, not as an ultimate solution, but as an example of the kinds of things higher education is willing to explore.” m
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