Taking my second MOOC - Copyright for Librarians and Educators

Not too long ago I completed my second MOOC with Coursera. This time it was shorter (4 weeks), and directly related to my professional life. Although just about every librarian has a smattering of information about copyright, it was useful to have an organized course format to put it all together, force me to think about it systematically, and fill gaps in my knowledge.

I have to say that this is where MOOCs seem to be the most useful. And the statistics on MOOC takers appears to bear this out. MOOCs are taken by those who already have jobs and already have college degrees, and about half expect to use them to improve their current or future working lives.

This may be in part due to the actual distribution of MOOCs. While you can find some humanities courses today, MOOCs were originally very computer science and math oriented. Let's face it, not many people who take math or computer science classes for fun are not employed in math or computer-related fields. I also wonder how much this contributes to the gender gap in MOOCs. If people are taking MOOCs in areas related to their professional lives, and the professions skew male, then it makes sense that those courses would skew male in attendance. My copyright course skewed female, but it also aligned with career fields (education and librarianship) that skew heavily female. As the mix of courses changes, I wonder if the surplus of male MOOC students will start to shrink.

Of course, that may never happen. As MOOCs move toward trying to produce some profits, there may be a move away from the humanities. One of the income streams that I keep seeing is the sale of certification. That was an option for my MOOC, and it makes sense for MOOCs that are directly related to a professional field. But certifications are far more common in fields like computer science than they are in humanities-related fields. Will there be certifications in Renaissance poetry? Film studies? Social psychology? And if there were, would it make sense for people to pay for them? If certification becomes the route toward profits, I would expect courses that don't result in certification purchases to drop away. Since certification seems to dovetail with male-dominated professions, we could see an ever-more male MOOC world. (One exception I see is grant-writing, where certification could enhance the resumes of many people with humanities degrees, and is more likely to have gender parity.)

I do intend to try more MOOCs. I'm thinking I may try a self-paced MOOC next, to see how I do without the time-pressure of traditional course deadlines. I'm also interested in taking a MOOC that is more developmental (instead of designed for professionals in that field). If MOOCs are supposed to take the place of formal learning for the millions of people who can't geographically or financially access traditional college education, both of those features will be important.