Online Education: Quality Control

IMD business school, for one, just isn’t buying the hype over MOOCs, and their potential disruption to the market for advanced business education.

The Swiss school’s president, Dominique Turpin, recently lamented MOOCs for their ‘limited results’ and, as reported by The Australian, blamed high dropout rates on the lack of interaction seen in programs that tend to enroll large numbers.

And now, the director of IMD business school’s Corporate Learning Network, Paul Hunter reiterates this point in outlining exactly why he believes that the fast-paced and time-starved lifestyles of many an executive won’t sit well with the education proposition put forward by MOOCs. Hunter believes that feedback, on a personal level, is crucial in an online education environment:

“If education providers want to get serious about online learning, they need to get serious about feedback. Whether that feedback comes in writing, through a Skype call or online video chat is immaterial. What counts is that the feedback is personalized, that it comes from someone who genuinely cares about the participant successfully completing her learning objectives, and that the coach is recognized as being able to provide insightful and provocative input,” he says adding: “In many online programs, for reasons of cost or poor design, the feedback participants receive is at best worthless and at worst erroneous.”

The school’s president, Turpin, has also suggested that many schools started exploring MOOCs more out of fear of being left behind than a genuine understanding of the format’s potential and what it could offer students.

The result, in Hunter’s eyes, is that what these courses can currently offer executives is underwhelming. “In most cases MOOCs will not provide the meaningful learning executives are looking for, and indeed have often already gained in face-to-face programs,” he says.

This takes us back to the central issue of quality and the amount of resources a provider puts into a particular program. It seems clear that IMD business school believes strength in an online program requires a significant investment of time and money. It simply isn’t a quick and economical way to reach a new audience – that is, if you don’t want to trade in on quality - a point that is also made by Copenhagen Business School’s vice dean, Christian Tangkjær, in a recent interview for TopMBA.com.

Perhaps the challenge here is that the online education landscape is still described by many providers as being in an ‘experimental’ phase. Even among online MBA programs, there is certainly a great deal of variance over delivery modes, program length and course costs – making a prospective student’s decision-making process all the more difficult.

Although research into the performance of MOOCs has flagged up completion rates that rarely stretch to double digits, many question whether completion rates are an accurate measure of a course’s ability to offer something useful to its participants.   

Even so, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that payment of a course fee leads to swift improvement in completion rates. Almost a year on from the launch of the first CORe program on Harvard Business School’s HBX platform, faculty members found that the completion rate was just over 85% for a course that costs US$1,500. 

Similarly, MIT and Harvard research into their collaborative edX platform last month found that payment of just US$50 to US$250 for an ‘ID-verified’ certificate upon completion led to an upsurge from 5% to 59% in participants’ completion rates. 

Notwithstanding the debate about what completion rates can realistically say about a MOOC program’s success, perhaps the most interesting finding in the recent edX research was that a disproportionate number of its MOOC participants were already holders of college or graduate degrees, which may be disappointing news for those who believe that the MOOC’s main role ought to be as a champion of increasing access to education among those with fewer resources and opportunities at their disposal.

However, it was found that 39% of surveyed edX participants self-identified as teachers (past or present) themselves, a finding that challenges the assumptions of who it is that might stand to gain the most from MOOCs. It also underlines the point that experimenting and exploring the possibilities in online education – free or otherwise – continues to be an ongoing process.