Report: Four in 10 colleges to offer MOOCs by 2016


Seventeen percent of colleges currently offer MOOCs.

A few high-profile rejections have done nothing to doom the future of massive open online courses (MOOCs), according to a worldwide report. Providing access to MOOCs, in fact, is considered a necessary shift in the ever-changing higher education landscape.

Amherst College offered a firm denial to MOOC provider EdX in April. Duke faculty, a few weeks later, voted down plans for the university to offer MOOC-like courses. Philosophy faculty members at San Jose State University, where MOOCs have thrived, said in an open letter that adopting MOOCs was tantamount to watering down students’ college education.

The willingness to use MOOCs as a means of expanding higher education and lowering student costs is hardly shared by most colleges and universities worldwide, according to a report from Enterasys, a networking company that works with higher education.

Forty-three percent of respondents to Enterasys’s survey said they planned on offering some MOOC courses by 2016, marking a significant jump from the 14 percent of institutions that offer MOOC courses today. Less than half of the schools that plan on offering MOOCs by 2016 will accept course credit from those classes, according to the report.

Experimentation with MOOCs hardly signals a move to shift traditional classes to the massive courses, according to the report. Two-thirds of respondents said MOOCs will “never replace traditional, residential classes,” with 5 percent saying MOOCs would, in fact, replace traditional higher education within five years.

See Page 2 for the primary drawbacks of MOOCs in higher education…

The report explored the perceived downside to MOOCs, with four in 10 respondents agreeing that MOOCs’ “lack of consistent review and grading system” was a drawback. One-fourth said the “high cost [to] develop and implement” MOOCs was a primary drawback.

This three-year expansion of MOOC offerings is expected to coincide with consistent growth of online education, as 90 percent of schools said they’d offer web-based classes by 2016, an increase of 17 percent of the 73 percent of colleges that offer online options today.

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