(To continue with the bad analogy, the dinosaurs have died out and we're in the diversification phase: Coursera's the birds, edX's the mammals, OpenEdX's the metatherians − closely related to placental mammals but different − Udacity's the crocodylians, FutureLearn's the bony fish, etc.)
Sooner or later, the number of platforms will go down as “the industry” converges to a handful, sort of like happened in the social network space: gone are the Orkuts, LiveJournals, and MySpace of the past; only Facebook and Twitter (and Baidu in China) remain, and the two are sufficiently different to not be frontal competitors.
Listing the MOOC platforms out there is something many people have done, so I won't replicate for replication's sake. Safe to say there are many. They are subtly different, though in reality, the variability of individual MOOCs is often greater than the variability in the platforms hosting them.
If we take a cursory look at the megafauna in this landscape, we have two major beasts competing frontally, a third player which is different enough to carve its own niche, and a slew of minor players. A full review isn't what I intend to do here (I do mean to do a writeup of edX vs Coursera at some point, though), I'll just give some highlights on the platform types out there.
Coursera and edX are the big beasts, very similar in terms of structure. Between them, they must hold down a massive proportion of the MOOC market (70%, 80%? I have no idea.) Universities create courses with a mix of video lectures, text resources, homework and exams; students enroll to specific sessions of a course, on pre-set dates, and if they pass a certain threshold, they get a certificate. For certain courses, students may opt for a “verified” certificate (for which the platform takes minimal steps to ascertain the student's identity, for instance by comparing webcam images with a picture ID like a passport). There are even a handful of “sequences” of courses leading up to an overall certification in a specific field (they are called “Specializations” in Courserese and “XSeries” in EdXian). The similarity is sufficient for there being cross-talk: Caltech's Principles of Economics with Calculus course ran once on Coursera then migrated to edX.
There are differences between the two (Coursera's more mature overall, edX's more flexible) but switching from one to the other is mostly transparent for students − it's the actual course that's important.
Udacity has a different model. First off, it's a for-profit business (Coursera's one too, but less obviously so as they're at the gain-market-share-lose-money stage of startup development; edX's a non-profit); the focus is much more clearly on paying customers. In terms of content, it means the courses tend to be more oriented towards building specialized professional skills than towards acquiring general knowledge of a field − Udacity teams up with businesses to offer classes on specific products, for instance. (There are also more general, less immediately “useful” courses, but they do seem a bit lost in there.) The classes themselves are self-paced: students may take them whenever they want, over as much time as they need. To access the “full learning experience” (which I understand means access to TAs and certification) one can pay a monthly subscription fee.
Then there are national endeavours such as the UK's FutureLearn, France Université Numérique (actually built on top of edX software), Australia's Open2Study, etc. I am sort of confused why these are actually needed, and indeed some universities hedge their bets (it looks like most Australian universities have courses up on either edX or Coursera). I guess the point is to integrate into the national higher-education system, so that a − say − French student can mix and match courses for her local university and FUN[2] and still gain credit for both? We're not there yet; if that is indeed the point then that will be an exciting development, but in the meantime the national platforms look like something very unnecessary indeed.
There are differences between the two (Coursera's more mature overall, edX's more flexible) but switching from one to the other is mostly transparent for students − it's the actual course that's important.
Udacity has a different model. First off, it's a for-profit business (Coursera's one too, but less obviously so as they're at the gain-market-share-lose-money stage of startup development; edX's a non-profit); the focus is much more clearly on paying customers. In terms of content, it means the courses tend to be more oriented towards building specialized professional skills than towards acquiring general knowledge of a field − Udacity teams up with businesses to offer classes on specific products, for instance. (There are also more general, less immediately “useful” courses, but they do seem a bit lost in there.) The classes themselves are self-paced: students may take them whenever they want, over as much time as they need. To access the “full learning experience” (which I understand means access to TAs and certification) one can pay a monthly subscription fee.
Then there are national endeavours such as the UK's FutureLearn, France Université Numérique (actually built on top of edX software), Australia's Open2Study, etc. I am sort of confused why these are actually needed, and indeed some universities hedge their bets (it looks like most Australian universities have courses up on either edX or Coursera). I guess the point is to integrate into the national higher-education system, so that a − say − French student can mix and match courses for her local university and FUN[2] and still gain credit for both? We're not there yet; if that is indeed the point then that will be an exciting development, but in the meantime the national platforms look like something very unnecessary indeed.
Saylor Academy deserves a special mention. They don't actually create course materials, but rather use the wealth of material that's out there (from OpenCourseWare to YouTube videos via freely-accessible textbooks) to package coherent courses and full curricula, going a full step further than Coursera/edX's “sequences”: by mixing and matching existing resources, you can actually get the full equivalent (content-wise) to a traditional US college 16-course major. Saylor does the packaging, exams, and certification.
Possibly what is missing (or which I haven't found) is a “MOOC navigator” site, something that will suggest pathways through MOOCs (e.g. for a biology education, “take edX's 7.00x for introductory biology, then hop on to Coursera's Useful Genetics, pick up a couple of biochemistry courses here and there, a stats course here…”) − that is to say, go above the level of individual courses and establish curricula, taking into account things such as starting dates, etc. Actually, a “skill tree” as in many MMORPGs might do it. Kind of a metaplatform, really. Hmm. That might be an interesting side-project for when the days finally decide to last 36 hours to give me time to actually do stuff.
[1] What I am not so certain about − and that's the exciting part − is the impact the MOOC “movement”, if you want to call it that, will have on both the educational system as a whole, and the workplace. Speaking from a French, occasional recruiter point of view, one of the first things I look at when looking at a resume is the school the applicant graduated from. It's not the only thing and it's not discriminatory, but it's a better-than-null-hypothesis proxy for the overall “quality” of the applicant, especially if they graduated less than five or ten years ago.
That said, the French system is intensely competitive, with a lot of engineering schools (204 are officially allowed to deliver a diplôme d'ingénieur, not counting universities), often quite small (most have classes in the ballpark of 50-100 students a year), admission to which is based on a handful of nation-wide competitive examinations. Specialized (and not-so-specialized) media maintain a nationwide ranking of these schools, updated on a yearly basis. By this system, the “better” schools (i.e. better-ranked) naturally attract the “better” students (i.e. those that are better than the rest at taking gruelling exams they have spent the previous two or three years preparing for).
All in all the French system is exclusive − only the very best go to ENS or Polytechnique, the next best go to Mines or Centrale, etc. It makes a decent guarantee that a graduate from a toppish-tier school is a very clever person with a great capacity for hard work. This is fine and dandy, but what it doesn't do is guarantee that graduates from a lower-ranked school or a mainstream university are not good and indeed many very apt students are excluded (in technical terms, the sensitivity is decent but the specificity is awful; there are few − though not zero − false positives but a great many false negatives.)
MOOCs by nature are inclusive. I tend to believe that people who are willing to stick to the sometimes heavy schedule of a MOOC − and even better, many MOOCs − show themselves to be highly-motivated individuals which may be of great interest to companies. But that's a gut feeling; only time will tell, if and when MOOCs go mainstream (I've only once seen a resume mentioning a MOOC).
[2] I wonder whether the “France Université Numérique” name was picked specifically to bring a little FUN in the university system?
[2] I wonder whether the “France Université Numérique” name was picked specifically to bring a little FUN in the university system?
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