By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
LONDON — What if they held a MOOC and nobody came?
Ever since the German computer scientist Sebastian Thrun sent out an e-mail in 2011 announcing that his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course at Stanford University in California would be available free online, the education world has been both enthralled and terrified by the advent of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
The size of the potential audience was a revelation: More than 160,000 students from 190 countries signed up, prompting Dr. Thrun to quit his day job and start his own online learning company, Udacity.
Udacity; Coursera, founded by two other Stanford professors; and edX, formed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are the three big names in online learning.
Of the 248 students who received a perfect score in Dr. Thrun’s course, not one came from Stanford, prompting some to wonder whether elite American universities were missing out on potential talent. And universities that did not have their own MOOCs worried about missing the boat.
That anxiety was on view this month at a conference at the University of London, which has been in the distance learning business since 1858, as Adrian Smith, the university’s new vice chancellor, reminded his audience. Pointing out that there are 52,000 students enrolled in the university’s international programs — who take the same exams as their counterparts in Bloomsbury and receive a University of London degree — Mr. Smith said “there has been an incredible amount of hype” about the online courses.
“However, you ignore them at your peril,” he said. “The challenges they pose to the traditional classroom model of knowledge transmission are obvious. The question is no longer whether we should consider MOOCs, but how quickly to get involved.”
While the atmosphere around the open courses in the United States resembles the early stages of an oil boom, the reaction in Europe seems distinctly cautious.
William Lawton, the director of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, the British research group that organized the conference, said that MOOCs had grown out of the movement for open educational resources.
“Originally, the ideal was about widening access to elite courses,” he said. “But can it still be about widening access when it’s increasingly about finding new business models and competitive advantage?”
Many of the delegates shared Dr. Lawton’s skepticism. John Zvereff, an administrator at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona, said that his university, which has offered all its classes online since 1995, thought the rush to the open online courses was premature.
“Europe is desperately playing catch-up,” he said. “The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities is pushing for a European MOOC platform. This seems to be all about the business model.”
“I think we should be responding to challenges to the learning model,” Mr. Zvereff said. “At U.O.C., our philosophy is based on accompaniment — each student is assigned a tutor who stays with him or her all the way through till graduation. None of the MOOCs I’ve seen offer anything like that.”
Drummond Bone, the master of Balliol College at Oxford University, told the conference that his university “was very strongly associated with face-to-face, and very expensive, one-to-one learning,” and was unlikely to change.
But for other European universities, even well-established ones, the temptation to jump on the open-course bandwagon has been irresistible. The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, may be young compared with Oxford. But with 12 applicants for every place, it has no shortage of students.
According to Sarah Gormley, the director of distance education, Edinburgh’s first six open online courses went live on Coursera on Jan. 28. A week later, 295,000 students had signed up for courses that included philosophy (60,000 students) and equine nutrition (20,000).
The effort has so far cost “somewhere in six figures — less than seven figures — mostly in faculty time,” she said.
For Edinburgh, the initial investment has paid off handsomely, if only as a marketing exercise. But that has not always been the case.
As Dr. Lawton noted in a paper distributed to participants, Fathom, an $18 million for-profit online learning venture started by Columbia University in New York in 2000 — with partners like the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, and the British Library — was dissolved in 2003 because of a lack of interest.
In Britain the government put £20 million, or about $31 million, of public money into UKeU, a platform that had managed to sign up a grand total of 900 students when the plug was pulled in 2004.
A more recent stumble at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which only a few days before the conference had to withdraw a Coursera MOOC that was, perhaps coincidentally, titled “Fundamentals of Online Education,” aftertechnical problems prevented students from gaining access to course materials, also underlined the risks involved.
As several conference participants pointed out, whether a university is trying to broaden access, advertise the quality of its lecturers or identify potential fee-paying students, the appeal of the open courses relies on actually generating a large response. Anything less risks public embarrassment and financial loss — which may be why schools seem to prefer to join existing consortiums.
Veronica Campbell, the dean of graduate studies at Trinity College Dublin, said her school had no open online courses, nor plans to offer them, but “there is a fear of being left behind, so we are considering what to do.”
There was widespread interest at the conference in Futurelearn, a British entrant backed by the Open University in London, which has experience in both distance learning and open educational resources, but whose MOOC effort so far consists of little more than a Web site and a press release.
Along with interest there is also suspicion. European universities moved relatively quickly to join the open courseware movement, putting thousands of lectures and course material online free. The Web site of theOpenCourseWare Consortium has versions in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean and Spanish; there are 22 institutions in Spain alone that belong.
But for some Europeans, the big online courses represent a step back from the idealism of open courseware to the values of the marketplace.
Udacity is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, early investors in Skype and Twitter. And though Udacity courses remain free, the company recently announced a partnership with the education company Pearson to give students the option of paying $80 for a proctored exam. Coursera, which like Udacity is a for-profit company backed by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, in this case Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, could generate income by licensing its members’ courses to other schools.
The day after the London conference, the American Council on Education approved five Coursera offerings for college credit.
For Hugh Starkey, a professor at the Institute of Education, University of London, the talk about access was just a bait-and-switch.
Open online courses, he said, are being promoted by “corporations like Pearson who want to bust open the monopoly universities have always had on accreditation and put in their own feeble multiple-choice tests.”
“I don’t think anyone at Pearson would agree with that,” said Jeff Borden, Pearson’s director of online learning, who gave a talk on innovation that drew enthusiastic applause from the delegates.
But it was Dr. Campbell of Trinity College Dublin who spoke for many of the institutions trying to decide whether this was a movement they could afford to join — or to miss. “If everyone jumps into MOOCs, will MOOCs still exist?” she asked.
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