‘Big Deal’ Cancellations Gain Momentum; Inside Higher Ed, May 8, 2018

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed; ‘Big Deal’ Cancellations Gain Momentum

"Also last year, SPARC, an advocacy group for open access and open education, launched a resource tracking big-deal cancellations worldwide. Greg Tananbaum, a senior consultant at SPARC, said that there is a “growing momentum” toward cancellations.

According to data from SPARC (which may not be comprehensive, said Tananbaum), in 2016 five U.S. and Canadian institutions announced cancellations with big publishers such as Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Elsevier. In 2017, seven more North American institutions said they planned to cancel their big deals, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Kansas State University, among others. 

Motivation for Cancellation 

Both Tananbaum and Anderson agree that one factor driving cancellations of big deals is that library budgets are not growing at the same rate as the cost of subscriptions. Given budget restrictions, “there’s just a reality that tough choices have to be made,” said Tananbaum."

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues...

Q. What do you see for Coursera as the biggest challenge now? You’ve probably solved some, and new ones crop up. What is on your mind these days?

A. I think there’s still an awareness challenge. Even today, there was a Pew center study that shows, I think, that only 20 percent of professional Americans, so people who would be in our target demographic, only 20 percent are aware of MOOCs. I guess the other 80 percent don’t read The Chronicle of Higher Ed, or The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. I think it’s, how do you get to those people? Even more so, how do you get to those people in countries outside of the United States, where awareness is even lower, to let them know that this opportunity exists for them?

Q. I guess that is a question, because I obviously like people to read us and to read these other esteemed publications, but there’s other things that people do. Have you done bus ads, or are you thinking of other ways to get at people who have different media habits? How do you reach people who may benefit from MOOCs but not know about them?

A. That’s a really great question, and we now, only about a year and a half ago, we finally hired a marketing person who was thinking about this full time. We didn’t have one in the early days, but we have some partnerships that I think are really exciting. For instance, the one with Times Internet of India. They do billboards, and ads in traditional newspapers, including newspapers that our typical demographic hasn’t been reading, and so this was reaching out into a whole new demographic. I think that’s one direction. We’re doing partnerships with governments on work-force development. We found the ones that we’ve had, for instance, in Singapore, to be hugely impactful, both on the learners, but also on the work-force development needs in the country. I think that those are new channels that we’re exploring to reach new populations."