Free school: Thousands of students are signing up
In 2008 university lecturer Dr Karsten Oster Lundqvist logged onto an online course about learning theory run by the University of Manitoba in Canada. He followed the course on the web and discussed the content with fellow learners. Little did he know that this would be the start of something big in universities.
The course creators coined the term massive open online course, or MOOC, to describe what they were doing. The course has since triggered an avalanche of activity in universities worldwide, and higher education may never be the same again. The concept of a MOOC is simple. Academics create an engaging course using videos, interactive content assignments and community discussions. The content can be accessed by people all over the world for free via the internet.
Five years on and Lundqvist, from the University of Reading, now has his own MOOC. The course teaches software engineering and is one of the UK’s first. Lundqvist’s MOOC was fully subscribed with 10,000 eager learners within 24 hours of being announced. “We got a bit too successful,” he says. People are still signing up even though the next run of the course will not begin until 2014.
Hundreds of other universities have now got involved and hundreds of thousands of budding online learners have signed up (see timeline box on page 46).
It is easy to see why MOOCs are appealing. Learners can log in at their leisure and from the comfort of their own homes to engage with educational content and other students. The courses provide insights into interesting subjects that they may not have had the opportunity to study before at no cost. But the courses do not yet count towards any qualifications and it is not yet clear whether they will be recognised by employers.
Nevertheless, in September FutureLearn, a company owned by the Open University, was launched to host MOOCs from partner universities. Lundqvist’s MOOC is one of 20 available on the platform. The MOOCs cover areas as diverse as forensic science, sustainability, linguistics, psychology and the causes of war, and have been devised by prestigious centres of learning including the universities of Sheffield, Edinburgh, Warwick and Nottingham. Initially course numbers are limited as the platform is operating in a pilot mode.
Speaking about the initiative, science and universities minister David Willetts said that it was an “exciting development” for learning in the UK.
He added: “FutureLearn has the potential to revolutionise conventional models of formal education. This will keep the UK ahead in the global race to deliver education in worldwide markets.”
But with high-quality teaching material from renowned academics available free of charge online, where does this leave the bricks and mortar of today’s university engineering departments? Commentators in the US predict that the university campus as we know it will be obsolete within decades. Could the same happen here?
Professor Matthew Harrison, director of engineering and education at the Royal Academy of Engineering, thinks not. “In the UK things are different. It’s a small, densely populated island so the distance between the university of your choice and where you happen to live when you apply is smaller,” he says. The history and culture of higher education in the UK are also a part of the offer, he adds.
According to Harrison, education researchers say that much of what engineers pick up is tacit knowledge learned from other people when an engineering activity is taking place. “Engineering education is a very social sort of learning. Yes, we learn from books and online platforms but we also learn a lot from problem-solving with teams. That is such a powerful part of the day-to-day life of an engineer.” Based on this, he predicts that engineers will always see a proportion of their training taking place alongside others.
But MOOCs are a source of competition for universities, and Harrison says that this can only serve to usher in new techniques that can push up the quality of higher education in engineering.
“My instinct is that we will sharpen our act to respond competitively to the arrival of MOOCs,” he says.
He adds that over the past 40 years, satisfaction surveys have “comprehensively” shown that students do not learn well in traditional lectures. Discussions have centred around how to make the learning experience more active for students. Instead of listening and taking notes, students should be debating and discussing the material and working with their peers to solve problems, he says.
Universities challenged: Interactive learning is more effective than traditional lectures
MOOCs could offer a benchmark for tutors to start working on the flipped classroom concept, where students turn up to classes well-read and prepared to engage with academics and the material.
“MOOCs set the challenge for academics of all disciplines to respond,” he adds.
Practical skills are one facet of an engineering education that may be more tricky to teach using interactive online content. But innovative teaching materials and techniques born out of the funding limitations that many departments face could offer insights into providing this aspect.
Many universities face constraints on how much time that students can get in laboratories doing practical work. Laboratory time is squeezed by the lack of available space, timetabling issues and funding for practical equipment. The cost of some engineering laboratory equipment can run into tens of thousands of pounds.
This has led to the rise of a virtual laboratory in subjects such as control engineering. This offers computer-based laboratory sessions that give students the chance to build circuits and investigate automatic and digital control in their own time. The resources complement, or in some cases replace, traditional hardware lab sessions and could work in MOOCs.
Dr Anthony Rossiter, reader in the department of automatic control and systems engineering at the University of Sheffield, has been developing virtual laboratories for his students to offer practical learning in spite of the issues with timetabling and equipment costs. His virtual labs cover feedback and dynamics in scenarios such as cruise control, suspension systems, tank filling and temperature. “The idea is interactive so it helps them relate their learning to real life,” he explains.
He can see the potential of virtual labs in MOOCs as working on such tasks online replaces the need for access to university hardware laboratories.
But there are issues. Online learners trying the subject for the first time are unlikely to have access to software that could be needed to run the laboratories. Rossiter designs his virtual labs to run on Matlab software, which students can access on any university computer.
“Expecting people doing a MOOC to have access to Matlab is probably unrealistic,” he explains. To get around this, academics would have to develop bespoke programs that can run on the internet. Rossiter says this is very time consuming, and requires a lot of expertise and cash. “Universities don’t really have much money. They certainly don’t have as much as a commercial institution when it comes to software development.”
The University of Sheffield is committed to developing a number of MOOCs for FutureLearn. But Rossiter, like others, is sceptical as to whether there is a business case for MOOCs.
“Universities believe that they are good things to do but at the same time they are not making any money from them,” he says. He adds that the cost of developing a MOOC is around £30,000.
How MOOCs can make money in the future is still up for discussion. North American giant Coursera began in January charging students between $30 and $90 to earn a verified certificate for each MOOC they complete. By September it announced that it had reached $1 million revenue. Coursera is also exploring developing a careers service that gives students opportunities to connect with potential employers.
Last month FutureLearn announced its first business sponsor in the form of telecoms company BT. It says that this marks an important step towards adding career-enhancing subjects to its MOOC course list, and a commitment to work with industry to support the take up of science, technology, engineering and maths subjects among learners.
Simon Nelson, chief executive of FutureLearn, says that the work will “establish MOOCs as a real way to enhance career prospects”.
Under the partnership, BT and academics from FutureLearn universities will develop MOOCs for the company’s engineers and technologists for training and continued professional development. BT hopes to inspire school and university students to aim for a career in the technology sector as well.
The courses will initially focus on information and communications technology, and telecommunication networks, and will be open to all.
Clive Selley, chief executive of BT technology, service and operations, says that it is vital for business and the wider economy that the workforce has the correct skills. He adds: “MOOCs provide a unique opportunity to open up learning to the next generation of scientists and technologists and give everyone the opportunity to benefit from some of the world’s best academics.” BT is the first in what could become a long list of engineering and technology businesses to use MOOCs to provide continued professional development for employees. The impact that the online courses could make in this area remains to be seen.
The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Harrison is confident of the potential. He says: “My strongest instinct is that professional engineers will welcome the opportunity to sharpen their skills in particular areas.” He adds that, after taking an in-depth campus-based degree in a specific area of engineering, MOOCs give engineers the chance to top up their technical knowledge in areas that are becoming increasingly important to firms.
“If you have never studied statistics, for example, then taking a Coursera module on statistics is a great thing to do. It would improve your working performance and get rid of that gremlin in the back of your mind that you don’t know much about statistics when other people do,” he explains. He adds that employees can do the courses at home, part time and for free.
Things are changing across the labour market. People are working for a longer period of time as retirement ages creep up and the proportion of young people entering the jobs market with degrees is at an all-time high. Online learning can help engineers to compete for the best positions by developing their skills, education and qualifications throughout their careers.
“Enabling more people to access higher education over a longer span of their lives makes a lot of sense in a knowledge-based economy like ours,” says Harrison.
MOOCs could also play a part in plugging the skills gap by widening the pool of potential engineers to recruit. Demand for engineers outstrips supply by a significant margin and industry harbours real fears that a lack of suitably skilled professionals could hamper growth in the decades ahead. “The only rational response to that is to widen the talent pool wherever we can get it,” says Harrison.
Enter the MOOC, to teach those mid-career workers in other occupations the specific engineering skills that could help them to make a career move. “If we can identify those folks, we can help them migrate over to engineering through a masters course or a MOOC,” he explains.
MOOCs still have many issues to overcome. Tests to verify learning could be plagiarised, for example, but they are definitely something to watch out for.
Students take an online trip to Java
The UK’s first engineering massive open online course (MOOC) teaches Java programming. The course lasts for seven weeks and students must dedicate three hours a week to learning. By the end they will be able to code a simple game that runs on a computer, tablet or mobile.
It has been developed by Dr Karsten Oster Lundqvist and colleagues at the University of Reading. The course has no formal certification or exam at the end, but students can monitor their progress with a series of multiple-choice questions.
Lundqvist says that they have a wide range of people signed up to the MOOC, the oldest being an 80-year-old. It has been designed to appeal to three sets of people: teenagers who are interested in making games, people who have a degree in a different area who are finding it difficult to get a job and want to know more about coding, and people with relatives working in coding.
Lundqvist says MOOCs offer prospective students the chance to try out subjects before deciding what to study at university. A decision has not yet been made as to whether those applying to study programming at the university will be looked on preferentially if they complete the MOOC.
Timeline: Innovative web learning methods started Stateside
2008: Term MOOC is coined.
2011: Stanford University offered some of the first MOOCs open to the public. One was a course in artificial intelligence that attracted more than 160,000 people from 190 countries.
2011: Academics from Stanford spin out two companies to offer MOOCs: Coursera (courses: 531; learners: 4 million) and Udacity (courses: 25; learners: 400,000).
2012: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology join forces to establish edX, a not-for-profit MOOC provider (courses: 67; learners: 1 million).
2013: FutureLearn launches in the UK (courses: 20; learners: not released).