Can MOOCs influence the Education Business?

The expectations from the Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs) to completely take over the higher education pattern have been entirely missed.
The emergence of the MOOCs had seemed extremely promising but, the case has been otherwise in terms of showing any concrete results as analysed by the education industry experts.
Thus, question shave been raised on the potential of the MOOCs for their affect on the education industry.

Here are some reasons for the MOOCs to have not performed as expected:

• MOOCs will have to be more engaging to ensure that the dropout rates reduce significantly.
• MOOCs are not designed as to suit all personality types and as per the needs of the students. This restricts many to take them up.
• In order to start and completely finish a MOOC, one has to be intrinsically motivated and self-disciplined. The candidate taking up MOOC needs to be self driven in order to diligently learn and benefit from the course independently.
• Second, as MOOCs cannot be used to earn an accredited diploma, they are only interesting to those who seek to learn for the sake of knowledge itself, rather than for purposes of accreditation, for example, with the aim of eventually being hired.
• However, there are numerous types of people who fall into the former group— take young entrepreneurs, for example, who can use MOOCs in order to acquire, free-of-charge, the competencies needed for opening their own businesses, thereby avoiding the need to pay ever-rising university fees. MOOCs might also play a role in executive education—indeed, most MOOC participants already have jobs. However, executives also work long hours and thus might quickly be tempted to abandon the online adventure.
• Last but not least, participation in MOOCs requires infrastructure, i.e. a computer and an internet connection with sufficiently high performance. Therefore—at least for the moment—MOOCs might not be suitable for providing education to the most rural zones of developing countries. Rather, MOOCs are more useful in areas in which technological infrastructure exists but building infrastructure is lacking. In India, for example, the pace of building physical universities lags behind the rapid rate at which the student population is increasing, and in this case MOOCs can serve as a good temporary fill-in.
• This explains why MOOCs have not met expectations so far. Successful MOOC users tend to be older than the classical student (25/30 years), are likely to already have at least one first diploma (80%), and are likely to be male (70%).

Despite the fundamental challenges outlined above, levels of initial registration to MOOCs are very impressive. However, the dropout rates are similarly high.

This is the fundamental road block ahead of the MOOCs and in order to decrease the drop out rates, these will have to take certain measures such as:

• MOOCs will need to be more engaging. This might entail integrating interactivity, including, for example, offering live chats with the professor or live video tutorials with teaching assistants, establishing dedicated Facebook groups, or creating virtual study groups. Enabling users to observe other co-participants during a MOOC might increase their involvement, by allowing them to experience being part of a larger group and potentially reducing feelings of loneliness and isolation. In addition, one could introduce a certain selection process by asking for a small enrollment fee, which might limit MOOC abandonment rates.
• Future MOOCs will need to open up job opportunities. The education platform, Coursera, for example, has begun to explore this avenue, initiating a career service in which companies and the most talented MOOC participants are introduced to one another for potential job interviews. However, while MOOC providers may facilitate the organisation of interviews, their participants will need to prove themselves to be as qualified as job-seekers who attended traditional classes.
• Ensure that the person getting a certificate and/ or diploma is the same person who finished the course work with successful exam results. One possibility is to observe and record test- takers via webcam with or without their knowledge. This is similar to the case of call-centre employees whose conversations with clients are sometimes supervised. In addition, technology enables typing styles during previous exercises to be compared with typing styles during exams, with a mismatch being a signal for potential fraud.
• Lastly, one might simply ask participants to physically come in to test-centres. Udacity and edX have already announced their intention to create a partnership with PearsonVUE, a company owning around 4,000 test centres in 170 different countries worldwide.

Once these measures are implemented and reviewed then, the chances for the MOOCs might be better in the future.