Edtech companies may fall victim to financial shocks in key university systems and are still “struggling to find a clear purpose” but an increased focus on lifelong learning and new opportunities to teach fields such as AI could save them, according to experts.

After rising to prominence more than a decade ago with massive open online courses (Moocs), online learning providers such as Coursera, EdX and FutureLearn all experienced financial struggles after investment that peaked during the pandemic dried up.

Most have moved to focus on professional development, offering both individual subscription models and partnership deals with universities that provide access for students. Many institutions have also agreed to host courses on the platforms.

With both UK and US universities cutting back amid financial and political uncertainties, such deals are under increasing scrutiny, said Paul Bacsich, an online learning consultant.

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“I think anyone coming up to the end of a Mooc contract would, like any other contract, be saying, ‘What’s it done for us? Could someone do it better, or possibly more likely these days, can we think of doing the same kind of thing in a different way?”

Neil Mosley, another online learning consultant, said many providers were now offering what he called “zombie courses”, with no one taking them. A “number of universities”, he said, had decided to discontinue partnerships.

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“I think Moocs, as we understood them 10 years ago, have been on the decline for a while now, and the only way is down really,” Mosley said.

Many universities are exploring offering similar courses using their own staff and resources, while edtech companies’ moves into offering degrees and microcredentials have had varying levels of success.

But companies have profited from offering AI-based courses amid huge demand to learn these skills. Coursera in particular posted recent impressive revenue growth figures.

“One of the big things that’s driving their success at the moment is that they’ve been very rapid, agile in developing courses on AI, and they’re seeing really significant enrolments in AI,” said Mosley.

He added that the companies that had been most successful were ones who could be quick and agile in developing courses that align with demand.

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AI could also prove useful to the edtech companies themselves, Mosley said, because it can be used to make content “much more quickly”, and translate courses into different languages.

“There are loads of different avenues to explore, but it just depends on the appetite and the will and the ability to move in that direction quickly.”

Diana Laurillard, professor of learning with digital technologies at UCL, said that Moocs could still have a role in higher education if you looked past their initial aspirations. 

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“What you have to do is to recognise what they’re good for,” she said. “There was an awful lot of hype around the introduction of Moocs being the way to solve the problem of access to higher education in impoverished countries and things like that, and it absolutely cannot do that because you can’t give students the kind of nurturing and personal feedback they need on a massive basis. So it’s no good at all for undergraduate education.”

While Moocs can be effective when incorporated into undergraduate studies as a resource similar to a textbook, she agreed that their biggest potential lay in professional development. 

Laurillard said UCL has developed what it calls “CoMoocs” (Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaboration), which use open online platforms to create social and collaborative learning for professionals.

“As long as you forget about the hype that this is going to solve all the problems of access to HE and you see it realistically for what it does do, it brings chunks of well-designed, specialised education into the hands of higher education teachers all over the world,” she added.

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However, universities need to “embrace” that they need to charge a fee to create a “workable business model over time…[but] the problem is that people haven't really embraced that properly”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com