The standards for HEI with respect to the student experience (and much else) are set out in the UK Quality Code for Higher Education. Since 2012, the standards for online learning and e-learning have been incorporated into the ‘Learning and Teaching’ section of these standards, in recognition that good practice is essentially the same across all of these contexts.
The expectation for Student Engagement specifies that “Higher education providers take deliberate steps to engage all students, individually and collectively, as partners in the assurance and enhancement of their educational experience”105. The expectation for Learning and Teaching
specifies “Higher education providers, working with their staff, students and
101. www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/highereducation/Pages/MOOCsHigherEducationDigitalMoment aspx 102. www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf
103. Why online courses can never totally replace the campus experience:
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/19/open-online-courses-higher-education
104. www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-haber/a-mooc-backlash_b_3301739.
html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
other stakeholders, articulate and systematically review and enhance the provision of learning opportunities and teaching practices, so that every student is enabled to develop as an independent learner, study their chosen subject(s) in depth and enhance their capacity for analytical, critical and creative thinking.”106 In addition, the HE sector in Wales is increasingly
buying in to the notion of students as partners, for example via the HEA ‘Future Directions’ programme107.
The quality of MOOCs will inevitably be judged against this background of incremental improvement. Prima facie it is hard to avoid the conclusion that MOOCs as currently practised do not match these quality standards. At the same time, the decision to incorporate e-learning standards into the mainstream is based on sound principles. This raises the further question “Do MOOCs belong in the Higher Education system?” If MOOCs belong partly in the ‘public’ (or ‘not for profit’) higher education system, and partly in various commercial sectors (as the involvement of Coursera and Pearson might imply), then there are indeed some large tensions in the system, which HEIs will need to resolve. One approach to doing this is to identify what elements of MOOCs may be incorporated into current practice, with due respect to quality considerations. This could lead to the incorporation of MOOC-like elements in other courses (‘blended learning’).
Jaggars (2013)108 has investigated the attitudes of students at ‘Community
Colleges’ in the US who are studying both online and in classroom
environments, to find out what motivates their choices. Students appreciated the flexibility of online delivery, but also reported that online courses had lower levels of instructor presence and that they thus needed to ‘teach themselves’ in these courses. Consequently, students typically preferred to take only ‘easy’ academic subjects online; choosing to take ‘difficult’ or ‘important’ subjects face-to-face. While this context is American, and at a slightly different level (more akin to F.E.), it may give some significant clues about how Welsh H.E. students may respond to online courses, and perhaps to MOOCs.
Aside from capturing additional business, universities clearly have a stake in supporting a satisfied and successful student body. This could perhaps be the area where there is most gap between the rhetoric and the reality. University leaders typically stress the significance of the quality of the student experience (e.g. Martin Bean109). However, Martin Hall (Vice Chancellor at
Salford University) describes his own experience of a MOOC thus: “Apart from celebrating the sheer density and volume of all this online information,
106. www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/Quality-Code-B3.pdf 107. www.heacademy.ac.uk/wales/future-directions
108. Jaggars (2013). Choosing Between Online and Face-to-Face Courses: Community College
I’m not clear how it added any learning value”110. Clearly, these are early
days and this information is anecdotal. However, it may give an important indication as to what to look for in terms of the quality of the student experience. Lecturers may see things differently: for example Keith Devlin describes his experience of online teaching as a ‘one-on-one’, but he does not say how the students regarded this experience111.
cMOOCs would be expected to offer a more complete student experience than xMOOCs, and there is certainly better (qualitative) evidence of a rich learner experience. Kop112 writes about ‘students as producers of
knowledge’, which indicates a much more complete learning experience than would be possible via an xMOOC.
The predominance of anecdotal information, or at best very crude statistics, is muddying the waters on quality to a significant extent. However, MOOCs clearly lend themselves to the gathering of much more sophisticated
analytical data, and this is presumably already happening (although not published, for obvious reasons). However, openly shared data may become more prevalent once the market has settled somewhat. In this case, the value of a range of analytics approaches to learner management and quality control may become feasible.
A significant research initiative into the quality and effectiveness of MOOCs has recently been launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Athabasca University113. Encouragingly, the funders appear to take a
broad view of what constitutes a relevant course, and considers “models of MOOCs beyond large centralized providers” and “models that blend online with in-person learning”. Preliminary results from this project are expected to emerge by December 2013, and can be expected to inform policy and strategy in this area.