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Moocs might matter even more in emerging markets
By Karan Khemka
As some countries bypassed landlines, they could also bypass universities, says Karan Khemka
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Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first “massive open online courses”, these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers ‑– Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX – offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The “summer slump” across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India’s large youth population: more than 80 per cent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India? It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world’s lowest higher-education enrolment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians’ enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians – the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue – or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered?
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into “packages” that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets – where the majority of the world’s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments?
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.
The writer is partner and co-head of the education practice at The Parthenon Group
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