MOOCs Teach OA a Lesson | SciTechSociety

"Just four years ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were tentative experiments promoted by a handful of professors. (Wikipedia, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education) Today, universities across the world are rushing in, and millions of students are enrolling. Contrast this with the Open Access movement (OA). More than twenty years after the introduction of the hep-th database (which became arXiv), OA remains a struggle. There have been significant OA advances, but universal open access to the scholarly literature remains a distant promise, probably requiring many more years. Why did OA never reach the kind of momentum MOOCs seem to have? Because successful MOOCs serve many thousands of students, their per-student costs are extremely low when compared to traditional teaching. Yet, the cost of producing a series of high-quality large-scale interactive multimedia events is significant. Compared with MOOCs, the start-up cost of OA is almost negligible. After an institutional repository is set up, the only barrier to OA is a few key strokes per scholarly paper. Why were academic leaders so concerned about the minimal costs of OA? Why are they not concerned about the far more significant costs of MOOCS? MOOCs have the potential of disrupting thousands of teaching positions. MOOCs are a threat to admissions offices and a system of university reputations based on rejection rates. On the other hand, universal OA would primarily disrupt libraries, publishers, and their middlemen, not academics. Yet, academic leaders are enamored with MOOCs, and they treat OA like a chore for which there is always some excuse to postpone. If MOOCs really prove to be as disruptive as hoped or feared, they figure it is preferable to be on the side of the disrupters. Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption? In my search for answers, I arrived at four tentative conjectures..."