Moocs? They’re a cracking good idea | News | Times Higher Education

"As a 12-year-old boy in India, Anant Agarwal bought 80 chickens and set up a chicken farm in an outhouse in the yard outside his Mangalore home. Selling eggs to local restaurants gave the future president of edX – the US massive open online course platform – his first successful business and offered the first display of the entrepreneurial flair that has resulted in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor becoming a leading figure in online higher education. 'The trick is to wake up at 4am [and collect the eggs] before the chickens wake up,' he says. 'I had quite a decent business-to-business enterprise going.' Despite this gift for making money, one of the features that sets Agarwal’s edX apart from other prominent Mooc portals – such as Coursera and Udacity – is the organisation’s 'not-for-profit' approach. The UK’s FutureLearn, a Mooc platform owned by The Open University, has also confirmed its intention to operate for profit – something that critics say can demote the importance of education quality in favour of ensuring quick returns for investors. 'I have had five start-up companies in my career…so I do see making money as a good thing,' Agarwal explains. 'But for me and the edX founding partners – MIT and Harvard University – education is a basic human right that everyone should have access to. 'I believe that we should make decisions based purely on principle, not on the basis of return on investment for our investors. We felt the best way to do that was for edX to be a non-profit.' Of course, no firm can survive without revenue, and the former egg‑seller has hatched a number of plans to try to ensure the financial stability of his company. One route being pursued by edX, which is now partnered with 27 universities across the world, is the licensing of its online courses to other higher education institutions. The idea is that students can view video lectures at home, or on campus in their own time, before receiving face-to-face instruction and guidance from their institution’s academics. Best of blends This concept of 'blended learning' is not new. However, the proliferation of online material as a result of the Mooc movement means that it is becoming increasingly easy to access entire courses online, and licensing this material is a potential source of revenue for providers. 'We are looking at how we can use what we’re learning in Moocs, and the technology we’re creating with Moocs, to improve education on campus,' Agarwal says. 'We already have blended courses running in a number of places – from the National University of Mongolia to places in the US, including MIT, San José State University and [the University of California,] Berkeley.' For these courses, Agarwal has a new acronym – Spocs, which stands for small, private, online courses. Plans are already in place to license Spocs to a dozen California State University campuses from autumn this year. However, some academics in the state have expressed concern that moving lectures online could prompt universities to cut the number of academic staff they employ ..."