Last year, 110,000 students enrolled in the MIT course ‘6.002x Circuits and Electronics’ taught by Professor Anant Agarwal. The course was free, and anyone anywhere in the world could enroll.
A few months earlier, Dr. Agarwal, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an Elsevier author, had contacted the Elsevier Books department with an interesting idea. He planned to launch a free online course on a platform called MITx, and he wanted permission to upload his 2005 book Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits, published by Elsevier, in its entirety for the students to use. Elsevier colleagues discussed the matter with Dr. Agarwal, and in March 2012, all students in 6.002x Circuits and Electronics received not only free access to his course materials but a free view-only version of Dr. Agarwal’s book ... According to a recent Outsell report, 3.17 million students have taken a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and that number may expand to 6 million by 2015. Students in 196 countries have already taken a MOOC. But are MOOCs in the long run detrimental to students and universities? Will they harm authors and publishers by giving away free knowledge? As far as Elsevier concerned, if we can add value to something that is sustainable and high-quality, that is a good thing. We’ve established partnerships like the one with MITx (now edX) to see how we can produce something of value for both institutions and students. Two trends are lending themselves to sustainable courses. First, MOOCs may give students actual course credit. The New York Times recently reported that California, concerned by oversubscribed courses at its public universities, is introducing legislation into the California Senate to require these same universities to offer credit for online courses, as long as faculty have approved them. Second, MOOCs are being used in a 'blended learning' environment. That means students paying tuition at universities are using MOOCs that are integrated into their courses ... It’s not yet clear how revenue will play a part in the future of MOOCs. While students are the most important beneficiary of the courses, there are three other stakeholder groups involved in the business of MOOCs: 1. MOOC providers, such as edX, Coursera and Udacity, who provide the platform and infrastructure for the courses, and whose brands dominate the view of this educational movement. 2. Institutions and faculty, who devise the courses and choose content (from myriad places) to include in the course. 3. Content creators and publishers, whose content can get selected for inclusion in courses.A nonprofit MOOC provider like edX receives funding from its founding institutions, MIT and Harvard, but the Chronicle of Higher Educationand Harvard Magazine recently reported that edX is being tasked to become self-sustaining and is also developing a plan to share revenue with its partner institutions. Coursera and Udacity are already commercial companies, though some are concerned that the privatization of educational resources will be detrimental to learning. For institutions and MOOC providers, via methods like blended learning, tuition-paying on-campus students could offset the costs of MOOCs. And even the off-campus students may end up paying for proctoring or accreditation services, as mentioned above. As for publishers, we’ve seen that MOOCs could potentially increase sales. The course 6.002x Circuits and Electronics provided a link to purchase a print copy of the book at a 25 percent discount, or a 40 percent discount for the print and full digital version package. Despite the book being freely available on the platform, actual sales of the print book increased. However, appropriate research and execution is essential to the sustainab