What Impact Have MOOCs Had on Open Courseware?

“'What has the impact been of MOOCs on MIT OCW usage?' Matthew Rascoff (@mzrascoff) tweeted earlier this week. It’s a great question. Have massive open online classes spurred more interest in MIT Open Courseware — that is, those freely available and openly licensed course materials (readings, lessons, lecture notes, and quizzes) posted online by the MIT faculty? Or has the interest and hype surrounding massive open online classes (MOOCs) driven users away from MIT’s openly licensed course content and towards course content on the various new MOOC platforms — course content that might be free to access or enroll in, but that isn’t necessarily openly licensed? It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, of course. It’s not necessarily a matter of MIT Open Courseware or MOOCs winning the future of education. (It’s worth pointing out, perhaps, that within the institution of MIT, MIT OCW and MITx (now edX) have always been separate initiatives.) But then too, this is not just a matter for MIT, whose open education practices are well established — over a decade old. For other institutions, this might appear to be a choice: either open education or MOOCs. That’s part of the concern that (NITLE]’s Bryan Alexander articulates when he says that 'All of the issues around creating or using OER, of getting faculty towards supporting open access, of implementing inter-institutional open source software communities – all collapse before the MOOC.' Rather than pursue policies and practices that would lead to establishing open access, open educational resources, open source, many administrators simply want to pursue MOOCs. For MIT Open Courseware, the pursuit of MOOCs — by MIT and by higher education at large — seems to have boosted usage. That’s the response by MIT Open Courseware’s spokesperson Steve Carson to Rascoff’s tweet, at least. The site has seen 'record levels of traffic' since the MOOC craze began: 22.3 million visitors in 2012, up 25% over 2011."