Cost, Reform, and (or) Competition in Higher Education: Harvard University and the MOOC Movement

• In Event: 186 - Regular Session. Sociology of Higher Education. Organizational and Economic Transformation in the Higher Education Field

Abstract

This paper presents primary evidence to explain why Harvard, America's richest and oldest university, moved aggressively into the provision of online course delivery using MOOCs in 2012. After offering a number of popular explanations for these actions which are dominated by financial pressures and a desire to reduce cost, this paper uses the tools of organizational sociology to argue that Harvard's move to partner with MIT to launch edX was driven by perceptions of field wide uncertainty and pressure to keep up with a new and ascendant group of elite universities closely tied to a culture of engineering. While the administrators who drove this project experienced some resistance among the faculty and broader community, the lavish production budgets enabled advanced faculty to pursue projects of personal, intellectual, and professional, ambition that were unanticipated at the project's inception.

Author

• Ben Hidru Gebre-Medhin, UC Berkeley