What MOOCs Need to Build — Part 2
Tl;dr Build a curricula planner with requirements and electives
If you haven’t already, check out part 1.
Today more than any other time in modernity, your ability to add value matters significantly more than your credentials. Some of the largest companies in the world have waived their college degree requirements and every day a new great saleswoman, software engineer, and investor is scouted based on their Twitter, Medium, Github, and Substack content.
In fact, some of the highest paying and most coveted jobs of today and the future are open to anyone. Look at content creators, not just on Youtube/Tiktok/Instagram/Twitch but freelance devs, indie-game designers, Fiverr enthusiasts, Substack writers, sticker artists, NFT project leads, podcasters, Roblox game makers, Only-fans creators, character cartoon artists, long-form investment research publishers, and recently, even game players. Everybody, regardless of credentials, is eligible for these jobs.
Content consumption has already taken over the world, but as content creation becomes even more democratized, we naturally move from a credentials-based economy to a skills-based economy. This is where MOOCs, which allow you to pursue your interests and develop hard skills at a concentrated and accelerated pace, become much more important than the university name on your degree.
That being said, I’ve personally yet to see anyone who has landed a lucrative career solely through self-learning and online classes but the era is not far off. They're just a couple more aspects that MOOCs have to improve on to be able to earn a spot on a resume, alongside or in place of university education.
Curricula Planning
Already only a small sliver of enrollees ever finish (5–10%) a MOOC, but even less come back year after year, course after course. 2-year retention rates across MOOC platforms are uniformly less than 10%.
This is partly because choosing what class to take next is an extremely frustrating process. There are simply too many options with no transparent ways to identify which classes are more suitable for your learning style and goals.
Aggregator platforms have attempted to address this issue by making finding and comparing popularity/ratings across MOCC platforms easier, but they’ve ironically exacerbated the paradox of choice. If you wanted to, for example, take an introductory programming course in python, you’d need to sift through a staggering 2,566 courses from 1000s of different universities.
For most introductory courses like the one above, this is a non-issue. Highly rated and popular courses from any university or program will probably adequately teach you the fundamentals. It works best not to waste time trying to optimize small differences in teaching style and p-set offerings.
For more advanced classes though, that is not the case. Advanced (3+ year) classes, in my experience, tend to average 60–100 hours in total class time (lectures, problem sets), with the most advanced courses averaging significantly higher. To take and actually master the class represents an expenditure of time, effort, and self-motivation that warrants some research, to prevent yourself from constantly wondering whether another university, another MOOC would have had a more engaging lecturer or more robust problem set support.
Solutions Today
Right now, the best remedies to this problem are to either stick to a “career/specialization/certification track” offered by a MOOC provider, or to follow a track curated by other MOOC enthusiast communities or critics. (ie. OSSU which I introduced in Part 1.)
Career Tracks
With career tracks, decision-makers who work for MOOC platforms consult with professionals in each respective field to curate a curriculum. Yet, at the moment there is no assurance that the professionals and curators actually took a majority (or even a substantial number) of available MOOCs in the subject matter, weighed the pros and cons of each class against a uniform metric, and curated the track according to strict continuity of material. There’s little given in rationale as to the classes picked (and not picked) and they’re rarely updated, so users miss out on new classes that are better alternatives.
Community Curated
This is why I tend to prefer critic/enthusiast curated curricula. In the case of OSSU, you can access a history of all curriculum updates since inception (many of which are quite recent) and view the curating group’s rationale behind each subtraction to the curriculum. Any user can submit pull requests and issues (small edits and large tickets) to change the curriculum which are then reviewed and implemented by the founding committee. The curriculum also adheres to strict guiding principles while outlining subject prerequisites by groups of knowledge and providing a bank of advanced application courses that one can pick and choose from according to their interests. There is little time spent wondering what course to take next, whether the course is optimal at your level of understanding, or whether there are any better taught, more robustly supported classes.
MOOC platforms should adopt a community curricula strategy
MOOC platforms should continue their consultations with professionals to curate “career” and “certification” track classes. But they should also take in the input of class users and transparently publish additions and subtractions as well as rationales for any change to their curriculum for all users to audit. They should help build confidence that the curriculum remains relevant today, with the best-in-class MOOCs for each subject matter and without any redundancies or gaps in the curriculum. Like existing community curated curricula, they should strive to constantly iterate these to be the best they possibly can with the help of people who actually take the classes.
A Page for Planning
MOOC platforms should also provide a page for self-curriculum planning based on available community curricula. This is a page where users can input their learning goals, pick a subject “major”, a “career track” or third-party curated curriculum from which they can construct for themselves a self-curriculum based on their particular educational needs and expectations (think Trello for school or the first page of your college orientation booklet you probably didn’t use.)
Introductory classes that have been identified as foundational prerequisites may be auto inserted into the curricula planner, and the student could view various suggested tracks based on her interests, add or remove electives and courses based on her previous knowledge and comfort level. As the learner ventures onto the more advanced application courses, the provider can give choices that can be taken with the foundational knowledge she’s built up through her previously completed classes within the curriculum, and/or classes she’s marked as completed. These can be suggested based on the particular interests that she inputs onto the planning page or extrapolated from her data.
By making third-party (enthusiast, critic) curated curricula available to input into this page, platforms can harness the valuable hard-to-quantify information of which courses fit whom, and allow the community to help others who are in earlier stages of their MOOC learning process. Much like how we might curate a Spotify playlist according to our particular music preferences, which then comes to be widely appreciated due to our impeccable taste, this will allow those who have invested significant time in taking various classes to produce content directly on the platform that is helpful for other users.
Part 3?
MOOCs still have a long way to go before they can fully displace the university. On the other hand, it is unimaginable that another generation, especially one that experienced the power of work from home and online education, one that intimately understands the skills-based economy, would fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that is available online for free in its entirety. As soon as platforms can provide a community, build sticky alumni networks and drive engagement, we’ll see a new era of innovation in online education.
I have full conviction that in 50 years online education will be the norm. We’ll have fully immersive virtual reality courses on schools in the metaverse, we’ll have interactive learning interfaces alongside video lectures on Project Starline. We’ll have a truly distributed army of learners interacting on platforms who are also part of virtual learning communities with their own sub-cultures, clubs, traditions, alumni, student networks, houses in the metaverse, gather.towns, and unique digital merchandise. We’ll be able to place our online university/cohort banner within our digital avatar name tags and wear merch on virtual spaces. We’ll have startups that come out not from Stanford and Berkeley but from Coursera CS specialization Cohort 431, Online University (for lack of a better name) class 314.
In Part 3, I’ll round off with a speculative discussion of the intersection of crypto and MOOCs (keep the skepticism at bay for now!) to provide a completely new solution to the issues I’ve presented in these past two articles.
