Universities will also need to carefully consider the relative merits of housing courses on, and offering them via a MOOC platform as opposed to doing this themselves. Whilst it’s easy to make a fairly unsophisticated argument that going it alone means not incurring any 3rd party costs, HEIs need to conduct a cost benefit analysis in reference to their strategy to come to sound decisions.
It’s also worth noting that this doesn’t need to be an either/or decision, in fact a horses for courses approach could be effective, especially where institutions are confident in reaching and recruiting from the target audience themselves and where they have a strong online learning proposition already.
In essence what characterises all of this advice is deliberate, strategic, well-informed and thought-through decision making in relation to MOOC platform partnerships. Some universities have not always been very rigorous in this respect.
Nevertheless, as we enter a new era for online education, one in which there seems to be more universities developing partnerships to offer an online portfolio of courses, it will be interesting to observe whether MOOC platform partnerships will play a role in that and what this ultimately begins to look like.
Via Peter Mellow, juandoming