MOOC update: a look back and a careful step forwards

7 minute read

2018 marked a significant shift in thinking about the courses formally known as MOOCs. Many in the industry have been reflecting and evaluating on where we’ve come since the venture began. We did a lot of evaluating ourselves here at Sheffield and found we’d hit some unexpected milestones during 2018.

Below I’ll summarise some of the global key figures and takeaways involving MOOCs from 2018, introduce you to microcredentials if you haven’t already had the pleasure and let you know what some think was the point of it all by ending with a look ahead at FutureLearn CEO’s vision of a university without walls.

MOOCs in 2018

I attended the FutureLearn partner forum in January at which Dhawal Shah, CEO of Class Central presented his recent report ‘By The Numbers: MOOCs in 2018’.

It showed the kind of big numbers we are used to seeing when we talk about MOOCs, but it also showed a few significant shifts, the main one being that for the first time, there is a decrease, since 2017, in the number of new learners signing up to courses.



(Shah, 2018)

Also significant was the increase in the amount of people paying for courses on MOOC platforms. The four biggest platforms: Coursera, EdX, Udacity and FutureLearn had combined revenues of over $298 million for 2018 (Shah, 2018).

In 2017, Udacity’s VP declared MOOCs ‘Dead’ and announced a focus on its ‘Nanodegrees’. EdX followed with ‘MicroMasters’, Coursera now offer ’Specializations’ and FutureLearn offer ‘programs’.

Essentially, ‘MicroMasters’, ‘Nanodegrees’, ‘specializations’ and ‘programs’ are the same thing but designed and branded differently and with different outcomes for the learner.

What they are all describing is a ‘microcredential’. 

From MOOC to microcredential

MOOC platforms appear to see these microcredentials as the next stage in their evolution. They capitalise on the large audiences attracted by MOOCs and their successful pedagogical approach which engages and captivates diverse learners with high-quality content and specialised learning design by turning (some of) them into paying customers.

They are MOOC-style short, online courses designed, packaged and taken in series that give the learner a chance to learn a subject more in-depth and earn something more valuable and more formal than a MOOC certificate.

According to Shah’s report, at the start of 2019, the four biggest MOOC platforms offered 600 microcredentials between them.

But, as he and I agreed over a pint after his talk, it’s a very confusing landscape for a learner to navigate. They all have different branding and are communicated in different ways. Most importantly, in my opinion, is they all offer something different at the point of completion.

Some offer university credit (some towards a specific course, some that are hard to work out where and how you could redeem it), some offer ‘certification’ from an accredited body and some purely offer a record of what they have learned as informal proof of continuing professional development for career advancers. Many have branded the learner outcomes as a new, branded offer. 

My concern here is that employers are never going to be able to see the value until we start to understand them ourselves and use a universal language to communicate what they mean.

Our offer at Sheffield

As Shah articulated in his presentation, MOOCs are no longer free and no longer massive. Which is probably why we here at Sheffield have joined most MOOC providers and creators in the slow death of the word ‘MOOC’.

We’ve seen our massive numbers drop steadily on our ‘open, online courses’ or ‘free taster courses’ as we now call them. After seeing results from a full evaluation of our activity in 2018, we have been changing and evolving the way we develop courses and what we consider as success.

Despite lower enrolments, we see fantastic engagement from those who do enrol. Our course completions reached the 80,000 mark and we exceeded 100 course runs (or iterations) in 2018. We are listed in Shah’s ‘Top 50 free online courses of all time 2018 edition’ as voted for independently by learners and ‘Finding Mr. X’ achieved a 98% learner satisfaction rate last year across five iterations.

Educators told us in a 2016 educator survey that they consider working with us on developing and delivering a MOOC as ‘training’ and ‘learning new skills’. Many of them reported a change in thinking and an increase in their knowledge of course design and learner engagement since developing a MOOC. We have an unofficial learning community of 200 staff who keep in touch, share practice and collectively keep their courses going on FutureLearn year on year, with most courses now in double figures for the amount of times they have run.

With our portfolio of open, online courses, we’re opening up our offer to those who may not usually have access to HE-level learning. Those who just want to learn something new for whatever reason: to advance or change their career, to be more informed about a subject of interest, to learn a new skill. Because we have 80,000 completions from all types of learners, this gives us access to learning analytics and feedback that is worth its weight in gold. It help us to see what works, how learners interact at a distance, what keeps people at a distance motivated and what learning design techniques are most successful for learning a new concept.

We have many school-leavers among our learners who take courses as preparation for their HE study. Our courses are cited in UCAS applications, in registration information and in UG course interviews, giving incoming undergraduates a base-level introduction to how they will learn here and who they will learn with.

Whilst widening access to these diverse sets of learners, we’re also seeing success in attracting potential new students.

Rather than reaching for enrolments in the tens of thousands, we aim to engage learners who want to complete, who see the value in a taster course from a top 100 university and entice them to want to know what’s available for them to learn next.

Many successful business models are built on offering something for free with the hope that if someone has a great experience, they’ll be willing to pay for more

As long as that free taster experience is of a high quality and high value, this model seems to work (think Headspace, Spotify, Netflix, Creative Cloud). It’s a way of showing how good your product is and having faith that it’s good enough for people to be willing to pay for the next step.

We’ve streamlined our systems of reporting, so that departments get short, business-like reports which show how successful they’ve been in reaching potential new customers (students) with their product (courses). They also see demographic and course rating data to show them what online teaching techniques work and who they reach.

So, in 2019 and beyond we want to slowly and cautiously develop clearly articulated new ways for this audience of learners to take a ‘next step’ with our university.
2019 and beyond: 

Rethinking online degrees

Platforms which originally primarily offered MOOCs now have 48 online degree programmes listed on their sites with most offering flexible pathways made up of micro-credentials (modules) that you can take as and when you can; degrees on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Simon Nelson, FutureLearn’s CEO gave a forward looking overview at the forum outlining their mission statement and aims for the future.

He stated that, according to EY-Parthenon’s projections, based upon current tertiary enrolment growth rate in relation to GDP, by 2030 there will be global demand for degrees from 13.9 million new students per year. This would mean building 700 new universities per year to meet that demand.



He sees universities meeting this global demand by increasing and rethinking their online distance learning offer.

FutureLearn’s advice to partners is to build degrees online by offering ‘programs’ as credit-bearing, stackable micro-credentials, equivalent to a 10-15 credit module.

My feelings on this are that creating a ‘branded’ micro-credential offer entails trying to convince your customers to buy a new and unrecognised product. Instead, creating micro-credentials that are equivalent to a module and earn credit within a clearly articulated pathway towards an award is something we already know is valuable. It’s recognisable to employers and is familiar to us too. Why create something new when credit already has a high value attached?


Add the ‘free taster’ principle as an on-boarding and marketing technique and you have a business model that is clearly defined to its potential customer.

It would go like this:


Free taster course → paid ‘program’ (15 credits MODULE EQUIVALENT)

Take all paid programs within a degree and you’re eligible for the final assessment, leading to your PG Cert, Diploma or Masters award.

Here at Sheffield, we’ll keep a cautious eye on the early-adopters of this model and consider some small-scale testing of our potential market to see if this is something we want to pursue. 

Watch this space.