Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 13

University of Nottingham, when he is in fact now employed by Futurelearn (and was
at the time of the reports publication). Such is the immaturity of this rapidly growing
area, information comes so fast that these are minute details in a much bigger
picture, highlighting that it is too soon to say that MOOCs are ‘disrupting’ models of
education, but that it would be more reasonable to suggest they are having an
impact on campus based education.
The wave of enthusiasm for MOOCs and adoption by mainstream Higher Education
providers has been rapid since 2011, when Stanford offered three of its popular
Computer Science courses (Artificial Intelligence, Introduction to Machine Learning
and Introduction to Databases) as MOOCs, attracting over 300,000 enrolments
(Hyman, 2012). We will see how these have been used for on campus education,
later within this study. This led to two spin out companies, Udacity, headed by
Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig and Coursera founded by Daphne Koller and
Andrew Ng. MOOCs are not restricted to Computing subjects and there are
MOOCs now for many Humanities subjects. The Humanities and other more ‘essay
based’ disciplines are using Peer grading, or ‘peer calibrated review’ for their
assessments. One successful MOOC that employed this was Daniel Duneiers ‘Intro
to Sociology’. Although there have been long established essay marking systems
(Balfour, 2013) at the time of Duneiers Coursera MOOC, automatic grading within
the platform was very new so he MOOC employed teaching assistants to check the
grades and provide their own assessment grade for over 1,000 essays. It has
provided them information about how to develop their rubrics (Lewin, 2012). This is
extreme and totally impractical for the massive numbers that are expected on a
MOOC. It most certainly wouldn’t be cost effective and until the scoring system for
automated essay marking is made more reliable and robust, there are limits to the
value of this kind of assessment.
There are some issues around MOOCs that whilst they are appealing to proponents
of Open Education Resources and Open Access (which is what they are) there still
is no clear business model. Variants of the MOOC have been appearing in order to
try and find a way to monetize these MOOCs, but these models are in their infancy
and are not an urgent priority for platform providers whilst they have millions from
investors (The Economist, 2013).

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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