The slow death of the MOOC continues

This morning, I checked my email like I always do, and Coursera were plugging their latest "specialization" -- one for so-called cloud computing.

Coursera specialisations were originally launched as a single certificate for a series of "signature track" (ie "paid for") courses, but there's always the free option alongside it.

So I was very surprised when I clicked on the link for more information about the specialisation, then clicked through to the course, and it was only offering the $49 paid-for version. Now I did go back later and track down the free version of the course by searching the course catalogue, but the notable thing was that you can't get to the free version by navigating from the information about the specialisation.

It's there -- it is -- but by making click-through impossible, they're actively trying to push people into the paid versions. This suggests that the business model isn't working, and it's not really much of a surprise -- there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.

Some of the universities seemed to be using the free courses as an advert for there accredited courses, but it's a very large and expensive way to advertise -- teaching thousands in order to get half-a-dozen extra seats filled on your masters programme -- and so really the only way to get money is to get more of the students to pay.

Is it worth it for the student?

Cloud Computing costs £150, and going by their time estimates, that's between 120 and 190 hours of work. The academic credit system here in Scotland says that ten hours of work is one "credit point", and there are 120 credits in a year. Timewise, the Cloud Computing specialisation is then roughly equivalent to a 15-point or 20-point course -- ie. a single "module" in a degree course. A 15-point module costs £227.50, and a 20-point module costs just over £300, so £150 for this seems like a pretty good deal. Of course, this is only the cost to students resident in Scotland to begin with, and it is controlled by law to stay artificially low -- in England, the basic rate would be £750 for a 15-point course or £1000 for a 20-point one, but many universities "top-up" their fees by half again: £1125 and £1500 respectively. And English universities are still cheaper than many of their American counterparts.

So the Coursera specialization could be half the price of a university equivalent, or a tenth, or even less, depending on where you live. Sounds like a good deal, right?

Sadly, though, the certificates are worthless -- almost all the institutions offering courses through Coursera (and EdX, and FutureLearn) are allowed to accredit their own courses for university credit, but they choose not to. If they accredited a £30 course as university-level study, they'd be competing against themselves, and they'd kill the market for their established distance courses, and perhaps even their on-campus courses.
If they can run a course for £150, is there any justification for their usual high prices? Well... yes. Coursera is on a freemium model (free for basic use, pay for "premium" services), but in reality everything on Coursera is still the "free" part of the freemium. The online-only courses are not viable for universities for a number of reasons, so it's the fully-accredited courses run by the universities themselves that make it possible for the universities to offer the cheap courses "on the side", using repurposed versions of their existing course materials.

Technology and knowledge sharing can and should be used to reduce the cost of education. When I studied languages with the Open University, I looked at the cost of the course I was taking, vs equivalent unaccredited alternatives -- I could have bought equivalent books and spent more time with a one-on-one teacher than I did in group tutorials, and still only spent half of the money I did with the OU. If I hadn't wanted to get the degree, it would have made no sense at all to continue with them, but I want to teach in schools, so I need the degree.

So yes, there is undoubtedly unnecessary expense in education and there's a lot of "fat" that could be trimmed away, but the Coursera model won't do it, and for now it remains something of a distraction -- a shiny object that draws our attention away from the real problems and solutions.

Unrepresentative representation

I've heard it said that with a local councillor, a directly-elected MSP, several local list MSPs, a Westminster MP and an MEP in Europe, us Scottish people are better represented today than we have ever been.  But is that the case?  Commenters have noted that as populations have grown (and as the vote has been extended to commoners, women, and then younger people) the number of people represented by any individual politician has increased.  How can one person represent thousands of very different people?

When we consider also that most of these politicians represent a handful of major parties and are in many ways mere figureheads for "party policy", in the end you have 6 or 7 manifestos representing the entire population of the UK.  Clearly, they can't serve the public will.

When Thatcher wanted to dismantle union power in the 70s and 80s, she missed a trick: if there's one thing that democracy has taught us, it's that the best way to beat collective bargaining is by granting power to a representative body, rather than by taking it away, because the more diverse a group represented by a body, the less the body is representative of the group.

So you're probably asking yourself what this is doing on a language learning blog....

Well, it's not a language issue per se, but it is an education issue.  It's an issue for universities, and for education funding.  In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to post-school education in the UK was when the technical colleges were given incentives to become new universities.  The line between vocational and academic education was blurred unnecessarily.  Do hairdressers need 4-year degree?  Few people would genuinely say they do.  And university education aims to build learner independence, when vocational education relies very much on supervised, hands-on training.

The two things are very different, and rather than grant vocational education the respect that it deserved in and of itself, they tried to make out it was something it wasn't.

Who is there today to campaign for a reversal of bad decisions?  No-one.

Why?  Representation.

University teachers' unions represent university teachers in all types of institution, and students' unions represent students in all types of institutions.  This means that neither the students' group or the teachers' groups are able to stand up and point at one group of universities and say "they shouldn't be universities".  It's pretty much impossible for these bodies to argue against any government policy (except across-the-board budget cuts) as any change will be beneficial for some of their members, and it's pretty much impossible to campaign for any new policy as it would likely be detrimental to some of their members.

The unions have therefore been given more and more representational power, leading to them rendering themselves powerless, and the government is free to do whatever they like.  Even where protests have led to changes in policy, this usually on delays matters by a year or two and the changes happen anyway.


So you may be wondering why this topic came up all of a sudden.

I recently received an email from a university advertising a couple of new CPD certificates they were offering.  For those of you who don't know, CPD stands for "continuing professional development", and is essentially means "job-related training courses".  It is all right and proper that universities should be seeking to earn additional income from the professional training market, and I have no problem with that.  These CPD certificates were built on modules in the university's degree scheme.  It is all right and proper that universities should be seeking to reuse existing material in new ways, and I have no problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is the fact that these modules were priced at the standard cost of a Scottish Higher Education module.  Presumably, then, the university is offering professional training, but putting it through the system as higher education and claiming government funding for it.

I contacted the student president for the institution to express my concerns about this, and he leapt to their defence.  Everyone has a right to an education, he told me.  Now I agree with this, but everyone should have the same right as everyone else.  Why should certain people get government funding for their CPDs when other people don't?  All in all, this seems like fiddling the books to me.

But in the end it doesn't matter what he personally believes, because he is duty-bound to represent all matriculated students at his institution.  (I did point out to him that the CPD students aren't students until they actually sign up, but that's not the main point.)

What we have here, then, is a situation where a small group are benefitting from special treatment at the cost of an education budget with a specific goal, but no-one is able to raise an effective protest against the misuse of funds because everyone represents someone who benefits from it, even though it is to the detriment of most of the people they represent.

How can we defend free education when we aren't able to denounce those who harm the system?