When is a shark officially jumped? Another take on the Coursera announcement
Ah, I love the smell of punditry in the morning; it smells like...uninformed bs.
(Disclaimer: what follows are my own opinions and speculation and are not representative of my institution nor my overlords and masters in Albany. Professional driver on a closed course; do not attempt. Your mileage may vary. The Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Mr. Phelps)
Higher Ed punditry is focusing on what the "second tier strategy" announced last week by Coursera really means. A sign of the coming Higher Ed Apocalypse? The inevitable MOOC Meltdown? Or , more simply, has Coursera jumped the shark? None of the above, methinks...
It's been fairly well circulated that Coursera was interesting in expanding their portfolio, specifically in terms of attracting large state systems. Are they trying to nudge Blackboard out of existing u-wide contracts? Not in the sense that you might immediately think. After all, have we had even one little peek inside their kimono to suggest that large scale student analytics are in place to support persistence? If so, then why do MOOC persistence rates continue to...how shall I put this-suck?
Instead, let's imagine a different scenario that isn't based on displacement of entrenched commodity services. Picture instead a programmatic need by a large scale system that's seeking to achieve it's own economies of scale. Let's further suppose that Big State U inventories it's catalog and discovers it has about 30 or so localized delivery instances of a fairly generic Gen Ed course. Let's say Big State isn't keen on redundancy, likes the idea of sharing common resources, and heck, I don't know, maybe is interested in large scale data collection and analysis of learning outcomes. Hmm, now, does a centralized scalable platform make sense? Could it even be integrated into a blended delivery mode?
Crazy talk, I know. Remind me not to bring it up in tomorrow's cross-institutional meeting to explore development and delivery of shared curriculum.
