Modelling strategies and business models for MOOCs : building the MOOC ecosystems for higher education institutions

Disaster is a laboratory for innovation. Indeed, during a war, or in the aftermath of an earthquake, whole industries and societies mobilize to tackle the immediate challenge, while a cadre of researchers are looking for a way to transform the crisis into advances that will improve lives, or save lives, in the future. Looking at the education sector, the global COVID-19 pandemic has been a powerful trigger to speed up a process of digitalization and innovation. In fact, existing technologies have been the one and only means to keep education up and running. Such technologies have not started out life in these harsh times, but they stood on the fringes of education for a long time. With the inability for education of being provided in the traditional way brought in by the COVID-19 pandemic, such technologies hastily exited their latent stage, becoming a vital ingredient for the nourishment of education across the world. Similarly, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), online courses openly accessible to a massive number of people, are nothing new. It has been more than ten year since the onset of the first MOOC at University of Manitoba, Canada, and it is nearly ten years since the MOOC tsunami hit institutions across the globe. In a world of rapid technological change and shark-fin market adoption, a similar time frame would be more than sufficient for a new technology to disrupt the market, potentially outperforming incumbents. However, MOOCs have not yet changed the status quo of the education sector, bringing researchers to question whether they truly may be regarded as a disruption or not. As a matter of fact, MOOCs do not currently seem to be competing with higher education institutions, but rather to be seized by the latter as an opportunity, which can be unfolded in several heterogeneous directions. However, it is not yet clear how higher education institutions can broadly create, deliver, and capture value by leveraging MOOCs, and, ultimately, whether their provision might be economically sustainable or not. Here is where this dissertation comes in. Indeed, fascinated by such a formidable challenge, the authors investigated both in theory and practice the strategic drivers and business models for MOOCs that might be successfully implemented by universities. This work resulted in the definition of the BubblesMOOCs framework, a comprehensive and adaptive model that can advance both research and practice. In particular, considering the unprecedented times, MOOCs can play a pivotal role to bring education towards a new era, whereby the BubblesMOOCs framework is set to be the benchmark to lead this transition.

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