The Long Tail
MOOCs and the Long Tail
Moocs and the Long Tail transcript
Sources:
https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/
Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), pp. 16–32.
An interesting reflection on MOOCs and the long tail. The espoused revolution or disruption of higher education hasn’t really happened. Arguably, MOOCs represent an incremental development of converging and longstanding trends within higher digital and distance education. From the participant perspective, MOOCs have provided access to mainly low level higher education (most of this University’s MOOCs are at the level of a first-year undergraduate course) but without the credit (nor the assessment). The point about revenues is important and it’ll be interesting to see how these play out over time. One key issue will be the cost-benefit analysis by universities allowing their courses to sit on the long tail – will they want to withdrawal outdated courses on the basis of MOOCs being a part of their marketing efforts, and will the costs of new MOOCs begin to be seen as not worth it? From the certificates, Coursera generates about $120m annually and I understand the revenue split is usually 50/50 with the contributing university but that’s not entirely clear.