Microsoft Word - Cusumano Chapter on MOOCs PPL_Wenner

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ErikdeCorte,LarsEngwall,andUlrichTechler,eds.,FromBookstoMOOCs?EmergingModelsofLearningandTeachinginHigher

Education.London:PortlandPress,2016,pp.105‐114

http://www.portlandpresspublishing.com/content/wenner‐gren‐international‐series‐volume‐88

9

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The high costs of ‘free’ online

education: some observations and

policy suggestions



Michael A. Cusumano*

1

*MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.



Introduction



Over the last few years, there has been a ﬂurry of activity and

controversy

around

free

MOOCs

(massive open online courses). The

Internet

has

revolutionized

many industries and it is now education’s turn.

Although Internet-based

learning

efforts such as with YouTube and the Kahn Academy began years ago,

wider

Internet

access and improved

technology

now make it possible to reach

many

more students at minimal costs compared with

on-campus

residential

education.

At MIT (Massachusetts

Institute

of

Technology),

we have been one of the

leaders

in free and open online learning. We started with Open

Courseware

[1] in 2002,

supported

by the

Hewlett

and Mellon

Foundations

as well as MIT funds,

with

a cost of over US$3 million a year. It offers a variety of syllabi, videos,

lecture

slides and other course materials. More than a dozen other universities now

also

contribute

content. MIT followed up with more ambitious online course

efforts:

MITx for internal use and then edX in 2012 [2], a US$60 million joint

venture

with

Harvard

University [3]. The other major

MOOC

platform is

Coursera

[4],

a

for-proﬁt

company formed in 2011 by two Stanford University professors

and

initially

supported

by US$33 million in venture capital [5].

In the future, free

MOOCS

will continue to grow and educate

millions

of students, with various degrees of effectiveness. They may also force

universities

and colleges to control their costs better and lessen the steep rise in tuition

rates

and student debt (now some US$1.2 trillion) that have become an obstacle

for

many families. So free and open online education should be good for

everyone,

right? Maybe, but maybe

not.



The initial argument: the high costs of ‘free’



As I wrote in April 2013 [6], there are many beneﬁts of ‘free’ goods as in

most

open-source

software or a lot of digital content available

through

the

Internet.

But there can be negatives as well. This

observation

comes from looking

back

at the history of free or cheap

Internet products

and services and their

impact

on software

product

companies as well as on the digital music, video,

book



1

Email:

[email protected]



105

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106

M.A. Cusumano



publishing, and newspaper and magazine businesses. Many companies

struggled

or failed to make the

transition

in business models. In education, the

negative

effects could occur if free online education sets a new

threshold

price for

the

industry

– zero, or near zero – which becomes commonly accepted and

difﬁcult

to undo. If this happens, education might go the way of other businesses

affected

by platform dynamics and

network

effects, with a few large

organizations

such as

Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon and Apple emerging to dominate the

market.

Free

products

and services appear over the

Internet

because the

marginal

cost of

reproducing

a digital good is essentially zero. The marginal cost of

adding

users to an online class of

thousands

of students is also close to zero,

assuming

that there are no human teaching assistants and grading is done by

computers

or

voluntary crowd-sourcing.

But these calculations ignore the

expenses

associated with creating and delivering the content: faculty research,

curriculum

development,

marketing and sales,

infrastructure

overhead, quality control

and

administration.

So, yes, digital goods and services such as software

products,

newspapers, magazines, books, music, videos and even college classes may

have

close to zero marginal costs and theoretical ‘gross margins’ of up to 99%, as

I

wrote about more than a decade ago with reference to the software business [7].

But if revenues collapse, whether they are software

product

sales,

newspaper

subscriptions

or college tuition, then at least some

institutions

will have

another

calculation to make: 99% of zero=zero. In this

environment,

only the large

and

rich survive, except for a few niche players, and the large and rich tend to

become

larger and richer due to the

phenomenon

of

‘winner-take-all’

dynamics, driven

by

network

effects and

positive-feedback

loops [8,9].

When universities offer free courses or inexpensive extension

school

classes as part of their

non-proﬁt

mission, it is laudable. It is even feasible

econom-

ically if they can subsidize their free efforts from other revenue sources:

students

who pay tuition, donors who add to the

endowment,

or companies,

governments,

and

foundations

that fund research and education. But most colleges and

univer-

sities have high costs and limited resources, and revenues tend to be

cyclical.

Someone ultimately has to pay for creating and delivering online

educational

content and services. Some

institutions

will also have to absorb the loss of

what

would otherwise have been

tuition-paying students.

My biggest concern in 2013 was that universities and colleges who are

not

so ﬂush ﬁnancially or

government-supported

will struggle in the new

environment.

For-proﬁt

universities, whose degrees and promises of

employment

are

already

being

questioned

and investigated by the U.S. Congress, will

probably

be the

ﬁrst

institutions

to decline or disappear [10]. That may be a positive consequence

for

society. We also do not have to worry too much about the survival of schools

of

very high quality and global

reputations,

which usually also have large

endowments

and multifaceted sources of income. Their ability to charge tuition rates that

reﬂect

or exceed actual costs may well be

threatened

in the future,

however.

For example, as seen in Figure 1, 10 years ago MIT ran a deﬁcit

and

would not have been able to fund free

MOOCs

during the period 2001–2008,

very different from the surpluses of recent years. In the nearer term, however,

we

should be very concerned about

second-tier

and other universities and colleges as

well as

community

colleges that depend on tuition combined with very

limited



The high costs of ‘free’ online education: some observations and policy suggestions

107



MIT campus operating expenses and revenues, ﬁnancial years 1981–2013

Source: [11],

p. 21.



Figure 1



government

support.

Many of these

institutions

play critical roles for

education

and economic

development

in their local

regions.

It is possible that ‘free’ in the long run may eventually reduce variety

and

opportunities

for learning as well as lessen our stocks of knowledge. For

example:

usage of Wikipedia is up, but

contributions

have been declining steadily over

the

last few years [12]. Meanwhile, encyclopedia companies, including the

venerable

Encyclopedia Britannica, have closed or found it increasingly difﬁcult to sell

their

traditional products

[13]. Will the world be better off if most

encyclopedia

companies shut their doors and most people only use Wikipedia? Maybe,

but

maybe

not.

We have already seen a major decline in the variety and health of

book

publishers as well as newspapers and magazines. We lost

Newsweek

in 2012

to

bankruptcy

and, since 2009, almost lost the New York Times twice, saved only

by

massive cash infusions from a Mexican investor [14]. Many other newspapers

and

magazines have failed or had to be bailed out by local and foreign investors

with

a variety of agendas, and may no longer be the bastions of free speech and

press

that they once were. Web content has replaced a lot of for-fee content, but is

the

quality and objectivity the same? Again, maybe, but maybe

not.

Companies

that survive the onslaught of

competition

from free

alterna-

tives generally have business models and economies of scale and scope that

enable

them to take advantage of what we call ‘multi-sided markets’. Their

products are

really ‘free, but not free’. They subsidize one side of the market to gain

users

and make money from other parts of the market willing to pay [8]. For

example,

Netscape in the 1990s gave away browsers to educational or trial users for

nothing,

but sold

hundreds

of millions of dollars’ worth of servers and

development tools

to companies that wanted to set up websites, intranets and extranets. Then later

it

sold advertising

through

its website to companies that wanted to reach users of

its

browser [15]. Adobe gives away the Acrobat Reader, but every year sells

billions

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108

M.A. Cusumano



of dollars’ worth of other

products,

such as servers and editing tools.

Open-source

software such as Linux is free, but the leading

distributor,

Red Hat, sells more

than

a billion dollars’ worth of professional services each year (and also pays itself

for

a lot of Linux development). Google gives away the

Android

operating

system

and the

Chrome

browser for smart phones and tablets, and much more

software

functionality

delivered over its website. But Google is not in the business of

sell-

ing software

products

and services; it primarily sells advertising to companies

who

want to reach Google

users.

In my 2013 column [6], I worried especially because my research on

the

software business found that about

two-thirds

of the public software

product

companies existing in 1998 disappeared by 2006 [16]. Part of the explanation is

the

Internet

boom, which allowed some ﬂedgling companies to go public, followed

by

a wave of failures as well as acquisitions led by stronger companies such as

Oracle,

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, SAP and Adobe. But another part of the

reason

seemed to be the increasing prevalence of free or cheap alternatives that were

‘good

enough’ and available over the Web. Most software

product

companies can

never

reach a scale big enough to sustain their businesses simply by selling

advertising,

like Google does. They need to sell services or monetize another side of the

market

related to the free

products

(e.g. give away a browser or reader, but charge

for

servers, tools and

services).

Other important

industries are still struggling to recover from the

impact

of free alternatives to their

products

and services. The New York Times

made

a mistake when it offered its content for nothing over the

Internet,

and is

now

trying to backtrack and adopt a hybrid model and charge for some usage.

Hulu.

com, the TV

distribution

joint venture formed in 2007 and led by NBC, Fox

and

Disney-ABC,

once gave away all of its content free of charge, with advertising.

It

has evolved as well to a hybrid model, adding a

monthly subscription

service

with

premium content, much like Netﬂix. The music

industry

was nearly

destroyed

by

free (and often illegal; remember

Napster?)

sharing until Steve Jobs found a

way

to price and

distribute

songs with Apple’s iTunes service. Music is no longer

free,

for the most part, and the

industry

and its creators, the artists and publishers,

have

survived. Struggles continue, however, among individual artists and

companies

such as Spotify and Apple with regard to how to price streaming content and

how

much in payments the artists should receive. The problem is especially acute

with

‘streamed’ content paid for indirectly by advertising since these revenues are a

fraction of what artists used to receive when they sold physical albums or

CDs.

Meanwhile, book publishers are still ﬁguring out how to price digital books as

well as how to compete with free Web content and new entrants into

publishing

such as

Amazon.

Do we have more variety and a better world when only a few

players

survive in an

industry?

The expansion of free

MOOCs

now being offered

by

elite universities (whose

reputations

are already high,

without

free web

courses)

creates the risk that lesser

institutions

will suffer the fate of many software

product

companies as well as other

producers

of digital goods and services. Will

two-thirds

of the education

industry

disappear? Maybe not, but maybe! It is hard to

believe

that we will be better off as a society with only a few remaining

mega-wealthy

universities

dominating

educational platforms with a global

reach.



The high costs of ‘free’ online education: some observations and policy suggestions

109



Then there is the other issue of whether online education is truly a

desirable

substitute

for in-class learning and face-to-face

interaction.

MOOCs

are not simply off-the-shelf digital goods if they come bundled with

services,

such as for grading or giving feedback to the students. We often say at MIT

that

the personal

networks

and bonds our students form while at the University

are

probably

the most valuable part of their education. Agreed, residential

education

may be a luxury, but we need to think more about whether

MOOCs

are a

good

substitute.

In short, many individuals and some

institutions

will gain signiﬁcant

beneﬁts

from free

MOOCs

to the extent that more access to education is better than little or

no

access. But, to be sustainable, free

MOOCs

really need a business model that is

more

like ‘free, but not free’, a term we ﬁrst used with reference to the Netscape

browser

in the 1990s. Universities and colleges that offer

MOOCs

need to ﬁnd some way

to

cover their costs and have enough of a surplus to invest in the

future.



Reactions to the initial argument



I received several responses to the April 2013 column [6], both positive

and

negative [17,18].

Probably

the most

disturbing

note came from a

computer science

professor who had decided to teach his course on one of the major

MOOC

platforms. He

thought MOOCs

would be the future and did not want to be

left

behind. Yet he confessed that he might be

contributing

to the ‘tragedy of

the

commons’: in other words, he feared that his individual decision would not

be

good in the long run for his university or for the education profession. The

image

that came immediately to my mind was of the natives on Easter Island who

cut

down the last tree. They obtained fuel for another day, but eventually their

civili-

zation collapsed. Did they know what they were

doing?

With regard to my ﬁrst concern, i.e. threats to the economics

and

survival of

tuition-dependent

educational

institutions,

two years later, it is

still

too early to gauge the impact of

MOOCs. Nonetheless,

university

administrators

seem to

understand

the economic challenges very clearly and are already

making

some

adaptations

to the free

MOOCs

model. For example, edX courses at

present

remain free, except for some professional education courses, although some

charge

a fee for an

ID-certiﬁed

certiﬁcate. More edX courses in the future are likely

to

charge for credentials such as certiﬁcates of

completion.

Some of these

minimal-fee

courses may be eligible for degree credit at some

institutions.

edX is also

licensing

some materials for a fee to other

institutions. Coursera

is heading down a

similar

path, that is, to charge for credentials or grading. Udacity already charges

for

grading and is now focusing on for-fee executive education. In other words, a

business model that is more like ‘free, but not free’ as well as ‘not free’ is

emerging.

The

per-student

fees are small, but the potential aggregate sums are

large.

Finding a sustainable business model for

MOOCs

remains critical,

because

education and other services always cost something to produce. In the

residential

world, the most elite

institutions

set the price for tuition.

Other

public and

private

institutions

then copy these prices.

However,

only the elite private schools

have

large enough

endowments

and diverse sources of revenue that allow them to give

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110

M.A. Cusumano



signiﬁcant ﬁnancial aid to needy students as well as to subsidize experiments such as

free

MOOCs.

The average MIT student, as seen in Figure 2, pays less than half

the

nominal tuition rate. Moreover, as seen in Figure 3, even excluding

defence-related

research revenues from Lincoln

Laboratories,

net tuition has not exceeded

more

than 15% of MIT’s revenues in recent decades; the University relies much

more

heavily on research funding as well as

endowment

and other sources of

income.

Another

economic challenge is that

MOOCs

are much more expensive

to

create and produce than

traditional

classes. They resemble movie

productions, and

may require a lot of

upfront

capital as well as small armies of teaching

assistants

to be

effective.

With regard to my second concern, i.e. that a few web platforms,

led

by the most elite

institutions,

would dominate the

MOOCs

movement, this

has

occurred. Again, however, we see

important

adaptations. There remain the

two

main

MOOC

platforms, edX

(non-proﬁt)

and

Coursera (for-proﬁt),

with

Udacity

now playing a secondary role.

However,

many more universities and

colleges

have come to

contribute

content to the two main platforms. As of mid-2015,

edX

offered 160 courses with another 150 on the way and 250 archived. It had

already

served several million users and had 36 partners, including the University of

Texas,

University of California Berkeley and Wellesley College. As of mid-2015,

Coursera

claimed to have over 1000 courses, nearly 14 million users and 122 partners,

led

by

Princeton,

Brown, Columbia, Duke, Stanford, the University of

Pennsylvania

and Johns

Hopkins. Other

smaller

MOOC

platforms were also emerging in

other

parts of the world, such as China, France and the Middle

East.

At the same time, enthusiasm for

MOOCs

in mid-2015 seemed

dimmer

than in the past because data so far suggest that they are unlikely to

replace

in-person

residential education. In 2013, the New York Times gave

front-page

coverage to a University of Pennsylvania

Graduate

School of

Education report

involving a million students. Only about 4% of those who registered completed a

MOOC.

Half of the registered students never even viewed a lecture. In

addition,



Figure 2



Net MIT undergraduate tuition and fees, 1984–2013 (inﬂation-adjusted to

2012)

Source: [19],

p. 17.



The high costs of ‘free’ online education: some observations and policy suggestions

111



Figure 3



MIT revenue mixture, ﬁnancial years 1981–2013

Source: [11],

p. 25.



MOOCs

do not seem to be educating the

impoverished third-world

masses;

rather, they are providing continuing education to relatively wealthy students

of

working age, some 80% of whom already have college degrees [20].

Other

experiments, such as between Udacity and San Jose State in

small

classes of 100 students, found that the online students did much more poorly

than

regular students, even with teaching assistants. edX also did an experiment with San

Jose State and got somewhat better results,

supporting

the argument that

MOOCs

can work well when combined with live

instruction

in a ‘blended’ education

model

[21,22]. Udacity is now trying to work with companies to offer vocational

training

rather than college classes. In particular, it has

partnered

with AT&T and

Georgia

Tech to offer a

three-semester

Masters degree in

computer

science initially

for

US$6600, one-seventh of the tuition rate for

out-of-state

students [21,22].

The breadth of

MOOC

offerings is growing, but also leaves

considerable

room for

traditional

university education. Most

MOOCs

continue to be based

on

large

undergraduate introductory

lectures and some intermediate lecture

courses.

Putting these types of classes online has many advantages. Students can learn

at

their own pace; there is no need to keep giving the same lectures year after

year;

students can view the lectures from different locations or

institutions;

etc.

Yet

having access to live

instructors

also helps students learn, as the San Jose State

and

edX experiments suggest. It is possible to have interactive web classes (the

online

and

for-proﬁt

University of Phoenix has done this for years), but these

become

increasingly difﬁcult as the number of students rises. In addition, many

advanced

classes and seminars do not adapt well to the

MOOC format.



Some policy suggestions



In short,

MOOC

platforms have made considerable progress ﬁnding ways

to

balance laudable educational goals with economic and pedagogical

realities.



112

M.A. Cusumano



Nonetheless,

there remain several policy questions that colleges and

universities

still need to

resolve.



(i) Should

MOOCs

aimed at general education remain free? I think

this

is possible and desirable. They will require subsidies to produce

and

deliver, and possibly salaries for the faculty and teaching

assistants.

However,

the

high-trafﬁc MOOC

platforms can generate

indirect

revenue to offset some costs, such as by selling ads or lists of

CVs,

or licensing content. Wealthy universities and colleges as well as

foundations

and

governments

also can

contribute

some

funding.

Venture capitalists are investing as well, although it is anyone’s

guess

whether their bets will pay

off.

(ii) Should

MOOCs

with a credential, grade or credit towards a college

degree be free? I think not because I still believe that ‘free’ in the

long

run will damage the economic model of the many

non-proﬁt

educational

institutions

that rely on tuition. There is another purpose as well

to

setting a price on these courses. If there are even very modest

charges,

probably

the number of students who register for

MOOCs

will fall

dramatically.

However,

the numbers who complete the courses

should

also rise, perhaps dramatically. We need to run more experiments.

I

would try to set the price of a credentialed or graded

MOOC

to

balance

these two goals: providing education to people who cannot come to a

college campus against making enough money to cover costs plus

some

excess to invest in new course

development

and

infrastructure.

(iii) What about institutions or

individual

faculty that want to

emphasize

MOOCs’

philanthropic potential? Surely, we can still offer

education

for nothing or at very low cost to many students around the

world

through

scholarships or tuition waivers, just as we already do

at

traditional institutions.

(iv) How should traditional universities and

colleges

treat

MOOCs

in

terms

of degree credit, apart from tuition

charges?

Some

institutions recognize

courses taken at other schools in order to waive

requirements,

but

not

to accelerate

completion

of a degree; other schools accept

transfer

credits towards a degree, but with some limits on the number

of

accepted credits. I would treat internal

MOOCs

as regular classes

and

external

MOOCs

from accredited

institutions,

as long as they

come

with grades and credit, like any other college classes where a

student

applies for transfer credit or waivers. I would not carte blanche give

transfer credit for external

MOOC

courses, but would consider

the

individual student’s situation case by case.

(v) Should a student be able to get a college degree solely through

taking

MOOCs?

I think the answer here is yes, but I would treat the

degrees

more like we

currently

treat extension school degrees: give them a

speciﬁc designation. It is already possible for students to obtain

regular

college and advanced degrees (even Ph.D.s!) fully online from

some

institutions,

with or

without MOOCs.

The big question is

whether

a student who only takes, say, edX or

Coursera

classes, should

get



The high costs of ‘free’ online education: some observations and policy suggestions

113



the identical degree as a student who physically attended

Harvard,

Stanford, MIT, Berkeley,

Princeton,

Pennsylvania, Michigan,

etc.,

where only a fraction of the applicants are admitted? At present,

there

is too much variance in the quality of the

MOOCs’

students and

the

educational experience is not the same. They should not get the

same

degrees.

Nonetheless,

edX,

Coursera

and other

MOOC

platforms

may

themselves evolve into

degree-granting

institutions.



These are simply policy suggestions for some complex questions. When it

comes

to education, there are also larger issues at stake, as reﬂected in another email

I

received from a former business school dean. He too worried about the

threat

MOOCs

might be to the business models of

tuition-dependent

universities.

More

than this, though, he worried about the need to threaten

institutions

such as

his.

He

thought

the faculty union at his school had grown too powerful over the

years

and used its inﬂuence to resist

curriculum innovations

as well as to undermine

the

tenure process by limiting outside evaluations, which focused on research

quality.

Ultimately,

he saw student education as suffering. So, whatever else they

may

do,

MOOCs

can be a useful ‘kick in the pants’. They can persuade

complacent

professors and

administrators

to improve their educational

product

lest we

be

replaced by online videos and grading

robots.

My greatest concern at this point is clarity in mission. Should

univer-

sities and colleges focus on educating their local

tuition-paying

students or

on

educating the world? Many professors do both, such as by writing

mass-market

textbooks

along with doing research. But doing everything equally well is

hard.

Creating and running a successful

MOOC

seems to be

extraordinarily

difﬁcult

and

time-consuming,

and not what most professors are trained to do. So what is Job 1?

Too much

attention

on how to better disseminate existing knowledge may

ultimately

weaken our ability to create new knowledge. It would indeed be

unfortunate

if

the

fascination with online courses diminishes the time and

commitment

of our

best

faculty to teach students in person and carry out world-class research, which

we

need to create the knowledge and

MOOCs

of the future. But perhaps the

real

‘tragedy of the commons’ will be if we fail to leverage digital technologies and

the

Internet

to make education cheaper and more accessible around the

world.



Acknowledgement



This chapter is based on two columns I published in

Communications

of

the

ACM in 2013 and 2014 [6,22].



References



1.

http://ocw.mit.edu

2.

https://www.edx.org

3. Cohan, P. (2012) ‘Will edX put

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