What MOOCs Need to Build — Part 1
Tl;dr: To disrupt higher education MOOCs need to incorporate community building as a key feature a la CS50 and OSSU
The average cost of tuition at a private university in the US is about 35,000 USD. Add to that room and board, health insurance and living costs and the total yearly education expenditure of a family paying out-of-state tuition for a private college comes out to a staggering 70,000 USD. If you are one of the unfortunate few attending UChicago or Columbia (yours truly) you can have the unique and excruciating experience of seeing a five-digit figure that starts with an 8 (an 8!) on your tuition bill.
The cost doesn’t guarantee a high quality of education. We realize pretty early on in college that a professor’s credentials are uncorrelated with her ability to teach. Here are some reviews of professors from my alma mater, supposedly ranked 3rd in the nation (admittedly 61st in undergraduate teaching).
“Classes are held in go-fish style — no one (Professor, TA’s, students) seems to have a clue of what’s going on but you can look around and hope that someone else actually does.”
This is/was the backdrop upon which MOOC providers entered the scene in the early 2010s. Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, EdX promised to topple bloated universities and to arm a distributed legion of learners with quality education from the best universities in the world at the cost of an internet connection. Proponents imagined a future where we wouldn’t have to attend (and pay for) a university degree to obtain a commensurate level of education. But as we discovered issues with retention, motivation, and content, many decried that this vision was dead.
Fast forward to today, in 2020 alone Coursera added 30.2 million new learners, a 65% YoY increase.
This and last year, students all around the world accustomed themselves to online learning. Some found that they hated it, but some (like me) either reaffirmed its utility or discovered it for the first time.
Yet the truth is, as many a former type of student has professed, some parts of online education still suck. MOOCs in their current form will never displace classroom learning. It’s still a little early to pronounce the MOOC vision dead but MOOC builders must shift their focus, learn from existing power users and build out features that address the following deficiencies in the current MOOC system to have any hope of disrupting current higher education.
1. Community
One of the central allures of the university is its community: the people that you meet during classes or club activities that become your friends, your co-workers, your co-founders, and your extended network. This includes the school’s alumni, faculty, TAs, graduate and Ph.D. students, presenters at seminars, and professionals that come for on-campus recruiting. By the simple virtue of having shared experiences, people are willing to hop on the phone with you, head to a coffee chat, or give you referrals.
The number one way people discover new jobs is through referrals from these “weak” connections within their community. Considering that 91% of college enrollees cite the primary reason for attending university as improving employment opportunities, capturing and creating a vibrant community is vital to the success of any educational initiative that seeks to disrupt current higher education.
In MOOCs today, this infrastructure is entirely lacking. Most learners have no on-platform interaction with anyone else taking the same classes. There is no access to the peer network system that supports and motivates you through your studies and (at times?) inspires and challenges you.
Alumni networks (key weak connections) are also non-existent on MOOC platforms (1). Consequently, the vast majority of students who are pursuing education for its benefits to their careers/social life don’t see MOOCs as a viable alternative to the university degree.
But … there are already solutions to this issue.
Today there are ample examples of experimental vibrant small online communities of self-motivated learners banding together to create similar experiences to classroom and university communities.
Two of my favorites have been CS50 and Open Source Society University (OSSU). CS50 is the introductory computer science course offered at Harvard University also offered for free on EdX. Aside from being one of the best designed MOOCs ever, one of the main value propositions of CS50 is its community.
On the CS50 Discord group, which boasts a membership of nearly 10,000, students from all over the world chat with each other about general topics, careers in software engineering, MOOC curricula design… There are separate channels for specific problem sets where designated mentors staff and other students, help each other out, by suggesting novel ways to solve problems and by reviewing each other’s code. The group serves as both an online equivalent of office hours, peer study groups, and a club, which help deepen understanding for both those that seek and give help and a community of similar self-motivated learners.
OSSU takes this model a step further.
OSSU is a computer science curriculum designed to teach you a 4-year bachelor's worth of material through MOOCs with support from a worldwide community. The OSSU discord has only a membership of 600 at the time of this writing but includes a designated discord sub-group for over 50 distinct MOOCs on 5 different platforms. On each sub-group, students that are taking the particular class interact with one another, asking questions about the problem sets and sharing heuristics to help understand difficult algorithms. In the general chat, people talk about careers in software engineering, book suggestions, and other random topics. There are cohorts that you can join, of individuals also working through OSSU around that world, that meet for a short period of time once a week to discuss their progress and keep each other motivated. There is even a designated TA that provides assistance in all channels with questions that students have. As you finish one class after another, you graduate through the channels, making friends on one channel that you might see and help in the next, as a shared educational experience.
This is just the beginning.
Earlier last year we saw students and professors at traditional institutions experiment with creating an online community that could replicate a semblance of normal campus life within virtual worlds.
Though none of these have stuck, we can ascertain that in the future there will be digital mediums of gathering and community building that not just replicate the in-person campus experience, but use their unique digital advantages to create a fundamentally “different” but not inferior experience for those that opt in to study independently via MOOCs.
The Future of MOOCs: Community
MOOC providers who want to improve the user experience, raise retention/completion rates should:
- Create an on or off-platform gathering for specific career progressions and popular classes that have a designated tutor and a moderator. Allow community members to freely help and interact with each other on homework problems and have informal conversations.
- Allow users to create their own clubs and sub-communities within these groups that deepen a sense of belonging and even foster alumni networks (1).
- Overall, place community (over content breadth) as a core feature in the coming decade. In the process raise retention and completion rates, lower CAC as you organically draw new members to existing communities and redefine the MOOC experience.
I truly believe that my children will never enroll in a university. I’m genuinely excited to see developments in MOOCs and MOOC providers in the coming decade.
Tune in for part 2 where I’ll explore different problems with monetization strategies and curricula design.
(1) We’ll address the issue of building sticky alumni networks in Part 3
