To MOOC or not to MOOC? University decision-making and agile governance for educational innovation

At the time of writing (late 2013/early 2014), our analysis of detailed data provided by Coursera, one of the major MOOC hosting companies and with which we partner, showed some interesting patterns of types of organisations, age of partnership and number of MOOCs offered. Of the 78 organisations in the dataset, 45 per cent joined in the ‘early phase’, which we are defining as ‘before end 2012’, and 54 per cent joined in the ‘late phase’, i.e. January 2013 onwards. By November 2013, the late phase partners had almost all provided between one and seven MOOCs, and only two had offered more (eight MOOCs). Given the time since joining, this observation is unsurprising. However, the early phase partners had also mainly (61 per cent) offered only up to seven MOOCs, and those which had offered more than seven MOOCs were distributed between those offering eight and those offering twenty-seven MOOCs. It appears that some universities have strategies and operational processes/capacities that lead them to develop many MOOCs rapidly; in reality without much time to learn from one group before embarking on the construction of the next group, and others are more ‘paced’ or more restricted by capacity for production and management.