MOOCs

Type “MOOC” (massive open online course) into Google, and you get 2.7 million hits. Type in “MOOC business model,” and you get about 110,000 hits, most of them considering what a viable business model will or should be. More concretely, referring to the websites of the most popular online course providers—Coursera, Udacity, or edX—one is hard pressed to find a clear business model that works, in particular for the institutions that provide the course content.

Will residential liberal arts colleges follow the path of the wristwatch? I sure hope so. With all of the talk about MOOCs, online instruction, and game-based learning models, many of us working at residential liberal arts colleges are uncertain about our future. The reports are scaring us into conversations about fundamentally restructuring—perhaps even abandoning what we do and how we do it.

Can you believe it? I’ve been writing this column about digital marketing in higher education for seven years.

So much has happened since February 2006. Together we’ve witnessed the first blips of Web 2.0, the development—and demise—of many social networking platforms, and the rising tide of new media that later turned into the social media tsunami. Over the past seven years, we’ve also seen the end of the desktop browser compatibility war, the start of the battle for the mobile and responsive web, and growing interest for digital analytics in higher education.