New Directions for
Institutional Research
John F. Ryan
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Gloria Crisp
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Number 167
Jossey-Bass
San Francisco
MOOCS AND HIGHER EDUCATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH
Stephanie J. Blackmon, Claire H. Major (eds.)
New Directions for Institutional Research, no. 167
John F. Ryan, Editor-in-Chief
Gloria Crisp, Associate Editor
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THE ASSOCIATION FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH (AIR) is the world's largest professional association for institutional researchers. The organization provides educational resources, best practices, and professional development opportunities for more than 4,000 members. Its primary purpose is to support members in the process of collecting, analyzing, and converting data into information that supports decision making in higher education.
*Special thanks to Erin Wojtkun, doctoral student in the Higher Education Administration program at The College of William & Mary, for her early work with the APA formatting of the special issue.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are online distance education courses in which enrollment is open to anyone and that are usually unlimited in the number who can enroll. They are a new instructional form in higher education, and they have been hailed for the potential they have to bring access to higher education to greater numbers of students and criticized for the commodification of higher education (Young, 2013). Love them or hate them, MOOCs appear to have gained ground, as more than 400 institutions and 23 of the top 25 institutions, as rated by US News and World Report, currently are offering MOOCs (Shah, 2015). What role they will ultimately play in higher education is not yet clear. Although some have feared them as a potential disrupting force in higher education, Siemens, Gasevic, and Dawson (2015) believe that MOOCs are now simply viewed as “an additional learning opportunity.”
Whatever direction they take, MOOCs ultimately will bring new opportunities and new challenges to institutional research. This new instructional model presents additional ways in which courses may be categorized and counted. MOOCs also bring new patterns of student enrollment, engagement, persistence, and retention. Moreover, they create new patterns in faculty workloads as well, along with attending concerns of faculty about this workload. All of these changes can influence the ways in which institutional researchers carry out research in institutions of higher education, and it is imperative to be prepared for the work to come.
Our goal in creating this special MOOC-centered issue of New Directions for Institutional Research was to provide institutional researchers as well as a general higher education audience with a broad introduction to MOOCs as a new and different instructional form that offers us new challenges and new opportunities in higher education. We began our work for this issue by identifying the MOOC-related topic areas that we believed would potentially be most useful to institutional researchers. The topic areas we identified are interrelated, and thus they were impossible to separate completely. We developed a framework for the chapters by identifying key questions that would allow the major ideas to unfold in a logical sequence, as follows:
We included work from leading scholars in this growing area of work, and we asked the authoring teams to tackle their topics on MOOCs in the way that they felt would be most relevant to institutional researchers first and to a broader higher education audience second.
We are pleased to present this special issue of New Directions for Institutional Research that includes six chapters intended to present institutional researchers with a range of topics that are integral to understanding the current and future caveats, complexities, and opportunities related to MOOCs. In Chapter 1, “Massive Open Online Courses: Variations on a New Instructional Form,” we editors (Claire Major and Stephanie Blackmon) consider the definition of MOOCs in detail, we describe the various types of MOOCs, and we provide insight into the current and future directions of research related to this instructional form. In Chapter 2, “Massive Open Online Courses, Big Data, and Education Research,” Sarah Eichhorn and Gary Matkin address what MOOCs will mean for education research, in particular arguing that the possibilities for “big data” that they provide have the potential to inform our understanding of students’ learning. Chapter 3's contribution from Chris Glass, Mitsue Shiokawa-Baklan, and Andrew Saltarelli is titled “Who Takes MOOCs?” The authors describe the average MOOC student, focusing on the demographics and characteristics of MOOC learners. They also consider the possible implications of the various enrollment patterns. In Chapter 4, “Don't Forget the Fine Print: MOOCs and Student Privacy,” Neal Hutchens and Azalea Hulbert describe various legal implications for this new instructional form. In “MOOCs and Persistence: Definitions and Predictors,” Chapter 5, Brent Evans and Rachel Baker address various ways of defining and understanding persistence in MOOCs. Finally, Stephanie Blackmon concludes the issue by presenting data from a study on the future of MOOCs in higher education in Chapter 6, “Through the MOOCing Glass: Professors’ Perspectives on the Future of MOOCs in Higher Education.”
Our intent with this issue was to offer readers a broad, balanced representation of the present and potential MOOC landscape in higher education. We also hope that the text will serve as a resource for institutional researchers or anyone who is interested and invested in understanding what MOOCs mean for higher education research and practice. We hope not only that this special issue will answer questions, but more importantly that it will raise new ones about the implications of MOOCs for the future of research in higher education.
Stephanie J. Blackmon
Claire H. Major
Editors