To MOOC or not to MOOC, is that the Question ?

The role of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in management education is growing rapidly. These developments are part of the educational communities’ response to exorbitant tuitions, tightening budgets, limited class availability, and globalization. What are MOOCs and how can they help ? Basically a MOOC, a recent development in distance learning, is a web-based course designed to provide “free” intellectual content on a global basis. A SOOC (Small Open Online Course) represents an important variation of a MOOC. Typically, SOOCs include direct instructor participation, but are still distributed on a wide-scale basis, albeit with smaller class sizes.

The involvement of an instructor is one of many ways to differentiate between these two learning platforms. As with all new initiatives, the MOOC and SOOC business models are still evolving. In the traditional MOOC students engage in the course or training program without direct instructor participation. A variation on this theme is for students to pay to have access to an instructor. Up to now, MOOC completion rates are very low. This, of course, should not be unexpected since students tend to lose interest very quickly when they do not have “skin in the game” in the form of paying for the course or receiving credit.