MOOCs Three Years Later
One constant in K-12 and higher education reform has been policymakers adopting policies they say will make fundamental changes in their institutions and seeing those efforts scaled back to become incremental changes or disappear completely (see here, here, and here).
Higher education reformers, for example, touted Open Admissions at City University of New York in 1970 as a fundamental change in higher education (any graduate of a New York City high school could enter CUNY, tuition-free; the number of students entering CUNY especially black and Hispanic jumped dramatically). Yet within a few years, a fiscal crisis led to altering the program. Another fiscal crisis two decades later led to CUNY charging tuition and dropping Open Admissions.
Or consider the introduction of small high schools (or schools-within-a-school of 400 or so students) in urban districts in the early 1990s. Top policy makers and enthusiastic donors believed that small high schools would restructure large (1500-plus students) comprehensive high schools leading to improved curriculum, instruction, and student academic performance. It did not happen. What did happen is that many urban districts created portfolios of schools that included large comprehensive high schools and smaller charters and magnet schools. Small high schools became an incremental change.
Again and again, the dream and rhetoric of fundamental reform gets down-sized into smaller bite-sized policy chunks.
And that is the unfolding story of MOOCs.
Where are MOOCs Now?
On the Hype Cycle, three years after they went viral I would put MOOCs into the Trough of Disappointment but slowly inching up the Slope.
Rather than recount the history of MOOCs (see here, here, and here) since their inception in the U.S. (but earlier in Canada), I want to concentrate on one claim that has been made MOOCs Three Years Later | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: