What’s a MOOC?

If 2012 was loudly proclaimed to be The Year of the MOOC, the two years since then may have been The Time of Second Thoughts about Massive Open Online Courses. The idea behind MOOCs is still appealing — using the Internet to open up the lecture hall at no charge, reaching tens of thousands of students at a time from poor countries and rich ones alike. The success of the first truly massive courses triggered grand predictions of a revolution in higher education. The focus now is on more mundane matters, like getting more than a tiny fraction of students who start MOOCs to finish and figuring out how to pay for their production. A growing number of academic leaders are questioning whether MOOCs are a sustainable model at all. Meanwhile, students of all ages and nationalities continue to vote with their clicks: More than 10 million people have signed up for classes in everything from computer science to Greek mythology.

The Big Three in MOOCs are Coursera and Udacity, both for-profit companies, and EdX, a nonprofit run by Harvard and MIT. Like other media companies, their business challenge is to find ways to make money while offering their content for free. One strategy is to charge for credits or certificates and for the testing required to produce them. In 2013, the American Council on Education recommended that five Coursera MOOCs be accepted for college credit — and the company raised $43 million from investors. Udacity introduced an online master’s degree in computer science with the Georgia Institute of Technology for less than $7,000 — about a third of the degree’s on-campus cost. It’s also forged partnerships with companies like AT&T and Google to offer what it calls “nanodegrees” — industry-driven credentials that it says will qualify students for specific jobs. Many selective universities were early to invest in MOOCs, but U.S. colleges at large have shown caution — just 5 percent offered a MOOC in 2013. Meanwhile, more traditional online education — courses offered only to tuition-paying students as part of a college curriculum — continues to grow. When Starbucks announced a tuition-reimbursement plan to help employees earn college credits online, its partner was Arizona State University, not a MOOC provider.