MOOCs are created in a complex, fast-moving global open market, and design decisions are made as much through influence of partners, collaborators, competitors and so on, as by the individual goals of educators. How can we best understand this network, and use it to inform design of excellent MOOCs?
A decade ago, the emergence of provider pluralism was predicted (Meyer & Rowan, 2006), and with the open online learning movement now firmly established as an option alongside formal learning pathways, students are able to study not only with universities but also with corporate providers (Pearson, Microsoft, Google), with professional online and face-to-face providers of tutorials (Lynda.com, Khan Academy) and workshops (General Assembly), and with open courseware providers (Coursera, edX, Futurelearn). Self-selection of education from among open and branded options is now common, as students become accustomed to seizing learning opportunities ‘any time and from anywhere’ (Flavin, 2012, p. 109). In this context, the development of portfolios of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by universities since 2012-13 has offered new perspectives on organisation of online learning for this more fluid learning environment, but it also presents new organisational design needs to our institutions.
MOOCs can be a catalyst for targeted redesign of education services, which may include pragmatic and transitory ways to organise resources and people in service of open learning development, as a precursor to broader redevelopment of educational offerings which more fully integrate open elements. In a university that is seeking to overcome challenges associated with attracting non-traditional students across geographical boundaries, MOOC-making is a valuable activity alongside whole-of-institution approaches to organisation for learning.
By entering into MOOC-making, it is possible to see that universities are seeking to avert one of the risks that Christensen and Eyring (2012) have described in disruptive markets – where a previously mainstream provider finds itself hemmed into the prestige high end of a market because a disruptor offers cheaper but alternatives which consumers adopt in preference to more expensive offerings, even if they previously valued those offerings highly. Christensen and Eyring call this ‘performance that customers in the mainstream market can absorb’ (2012, p. 48), the risk being that in a future education market, customers may become accustomed to free, open online learning at an acceptable quality and with an acceptable impact on their learning outcomes, careers and lives; and may come to consider higher commitment, fee-paying education models less favourably. Ultimately, in this model, the high-end provider finds that it must either adjust its business model to serve a more specialised market which will accept their higher price, or decline, since the dominance it once enjoyed in the lower reaches of the market has faded away. It can be argued that universities entering the massive open market, with its informality, lack of cohesive learning pathways and uncertain financial returns, are effectively seeking to avert this fate by actively engaging in and exploring this emerging education market. More positively, it is possible that universities will obtain opportunities for newly energised development of valuable educational offerings with the arrival of a worldwide MOOC community. MOOCs bring with them many challenges, but also the opportunity for universities to cater for many non-traditional university learners, from working professionals to career-changers to later-in-life learners, and to enrich learning for their own enrolled students by exposing them to learning in a global community much different to the geographically constrained communities which form on campus.
This paper explores emerging organisational forms for MOOC development in this context, and explores the proposition that one contribution of MOOCs is that they provide impetus for the creation of new organisational forms which can contribute to building greater institutional capacity for agile education development. They may be seen as part of universities’ preparations for a future in which students not only demand but expect fully flexible online learning, both within informal learning contexts and as a highly valued component of higher education. With this in mind, what organisational forms do universities need to initiate and sustain MOOC creation activities, and what interorganisational networks are emerging from the early years of the MOOC movement?
In terms of organisational form, HE services multiple ends and there are now many change initiatives under way—as such, universities are dynamic and complex systems. HE institutions have been described as systems which also produce ‘multidimensional outputs’ to the benefit of society (Vila, Perez & Morillas, 2012, p. 1635). That is, graduates emerge from university with multiple skills and knowledge sets, relevant to multiple sectors, with multiple impacts on society, over short and long terms. At the same time, an informal learning sector has grown to some 35 million MOOC students worldwide (Class Central, 2015), studying courses from 500 universities. The MOOC environment is better understood as a constellation of loosely conceptually connected study opportunities accessed via a network of multiple providers, rather than an organised sequence from one institution. In this context, it’s possible that universities that adhere strictly to their conventional ways of organising—what Scott (2013) calls ‘unitary forms serving cohorts of late-adolescent students’ (p. 9)—may miss opportunities to reach out to future students in the open education market who are now more visible to, and reachable by, universities, and yet whose interest in future study must be encouraged and built upon if universities are to maintain the new relationship. To build future study pathways to retain MOOC students in further open study or to attract them to formal learning, we need deeper adaptive organisational capacity to design solutions which enable open and university study to blend. Importantly, design will need to encompass iteration and re-specification as (a) we come to better understand how open learning communities at scale impact universities, and (b) the expectations and demands of open learners change with the emergence of more new products and services in the education technology space.
This conceptual paper will review the organisational design literature, specifically work on the organisation of education, to demonstrate applicability and insights relevant to organising and designing MOOCs. Activity-based models for institutional organisation of learning (Kember, 2009) will be assessed for applicability, leading to a proposed model for MOOCs. The University of Adelaide’s MOOCs program will be explored, as a current example of a university which has (a) an explicit transformational change strategy, (b) a highly active MOOCs program, AdelaideX, delivered through (c) a newly developed organisational unit targeted at building agile capacity. We will show how we are using insights from our network to inform design decisions at program and course level, and bring out key messages for educators seeking to do the same in their own contexts.
In summary, the audience will learn:
- how MOOC-making is a networked design activity with multiple design influences both inside and outside the academy;
- why MOOCs are a timely and relevant activity for universities which are acting within a market characterised by rapid change and increasing competition;
- how universities around the world are using MOOCs programs to catalyse educational innovation and reform;
- how educators and designers can draw insights from the global open learning network to better inform design decisions about their own MOOC.
Christensen, C. & Eyring, H. J. (2012). The innovative university: Changing the DNA of higher education. Reprinted in Forum for the Future of Higher Education, Forum Futures, Educause.
Class Central (2015). MOOC Report 2015, classcentral.com. Accessed 24 July 2016.
Scott, W. R. (2015). Organizational theory and higher education. Journal of Organizational Theory in Education, 1(1), 68–76.
Flavin, M. (2012). Disruptive technologies in higher education. Research in Learning Technology: ALT-C 2012 Conference Proceedings [supplement], 102–11.
Kember, D. (2009). Promoting student-centred forms of learning across an entire university. Higher Education, 58, 1–13.
Meyer, H.D. & Rowan, B. (2006). Institutional analysis and the study of education. In H.D. Meyer & B. Rowan (Eds), The New Institutionalism in Education (pp. 1–12). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Vila, E., Perez, P.J. & Morillas, F.G. (2012). Higher education and the development of competencies for innovation in the workplace. Management Decision, 50(9), 1634–48.