During the summer break on campuses nationwide, providers of
massive open online courses (MOOCs) were evidently hard at work developing
their fall-term offerings and broadening their capabilities—and were the
subject of still more comment and analysis as technology influences higher
education. Some highlights appear here.
HarvardX Enrollments
and Aims
HarvardX
reported that combined enrollments in all 17 University courses offered through
the edX venture with MIT exceeded 500,000 as of mid August, with
“Introduction to Computer Programming” (160,000 registrants) and “Justice”
(70,000) leading.
The
Extension School is experimenting by offering its enrolled students the edX
versions of three courses for credit. Others can of course register for the
edX courses on a noncredit basis. And Harvard College students enrolled in the
equivalent campus courses can use the online materials and exercises as virtual
“textbooks” and as supplemental learning aids.
Even as HarvardX has moved into its new quarters at 125
Mount Auburn Street and continued to augment its staff (adding a chief
videographer and a program assistant, and continuing to hire student video
assistants and a research programmer), edX
has rented much larger offices in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, totaling 30,000
square feet, according to news reports; the
Crimson reported that total staffing
was expected to be 90 to 100 employees and consultants by the time of the
move in January.
HarvardX posted
its video branding “anthem” (a visual montage with musical accompaniment) online,
and has also posted a
trailer for the forthcoming ChinaX course, narrated by Christopher Lydon,
journalist and formerly host of The
Connection on radio station WBUR.
A special report on “Learning in the Digital Age” in the
August Scientific American presented diverse
perspectives on MOOCs, adaptive-learning technologies, and their use in varied
classroom settings. To the extent that MOOC proponents focus on making elite
U.S. universities’ courses available to students in developing nations (see
edX president Anant Agarwal’s comment on “planet-scale democratization of
education”), a report from Rwanda by reporter Jeffrey Bartholet noted that
“most of the developing world is not connected to the Internet and that MOOCs
require skills and motivation possessed by only the very top students.” In
fact, according to one expert Bartholet interviewed, students in developing
nations with limited educational infrastructure especially require the support
instructors provide in person: learning how to study, gather information, and
analyze it. In this light, Bartholet reported, in developing economies, “For a
small minority of exceptional students, MOOCs are a godsend.” In a sidebar, HarvardX
faculty director Robert A. Lue argued that “experimentation is key” in
determining how to use online-learning tools, perhaps in “flipped classrooms”
where students view recorded lectures before course meetings, and then use
their time together with professors to explore challenging problems. To that
end, he wrote:
This is why every course or module in HarvardX…has an
associated research component. We measure student progress as it relates to the
sequence of course material, how that material was delivered (that is, lecture
versus video animation), whether the instructor used interactive assessments,
and other parameters. Such complementary research with each online course will
form the basis for improvements in pedagogy….
The MOOC Research
HUB, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is one center
established to explore the effectiveness of the technology in “extend[ing]
access to postsecondary credentials through more personalized, more affordable”
online pathways.
Coursera Operations
Coursera, one of the for-profit MOOC ventures, having raised $43 million in a
second round of financing, appointed a president,
Lila Ibrahim, bolstering its senior management, which includes founders
Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, both computer-science professors at Stanford.
Ibrahim worked for Intel for 18 years, and then joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers, a leading venture-capital firm. She is co-founder of Team4Tech, a
nonprofit enterprise that provides primary- and secondary-school education
technologies to developing countries. Coursera recently
unveiled a broad program of professional-development courses for K-12 teachers.
Udacity’s Course-Credit
and College-Competency Initiatives
Udacity, another for-profit online company, founded by yet
another Stanford faculty member, Sebastian Thrun, ran into criticism when
preliminary results from its for-credit statistics and algebra courses offered
through San Jose State University (SJSU) seemed to yield poor student outcomes.
Thrun
recently noted in Information Week
that the initial cohort included many high-school students who had struggled
with remedial mathematics, who could not be expected to perform at
college-student levels. In a second course offering, he said, the pass rate
rose, with course-completion rates of 60 percent to 80 percent (most MOOCs not
embedded in an institution and tied into course credit report single-digit
completion rates). He called the results validation of an approach to online
education that “really reaches people—not just the world’s most motivated 1
percent.”
In late August, San
Jose State released data on the summer pilot program, indicating pass rates for
online students that exceed those for
certain classroom, campus-based offerings in the same subjects (elementary
statistics, algebra, psychology, and so on) Information
Week reported—and San Jose plans to resume the “Plus” courses. According
to SJSU provost and vice president for academic affairs Ellen Junn, the
courses demonstrated that:
Learning by
doing works.
Online video allows us to stop every few minutes and offer students the
opportunity to try what they’ve learned with an online exercise. Instructors
have found this so effective that some are incorporating SJSU Plus materials
into their campus-based courses.
Student
interaction remains strong. Does online learning stifle conversation? We found the
opposite. Students are connecting with each other, instructors and
instructional assistants through every means available: text, email, phone
calls, chats and meetings.
Separately,
according to Tamar Lewin’s front-page New
York Times account, Udacity’s venture with Georgia Institute of Technology
to offer a MOOC master’s degree in computer science “could signal a change
to the landscape of higher education”: Georgia Tech offers an elite
computer-science program; the
Udacity version will cost $6,600, versus $45,000 for the on-campus version;
it aims to enroll as many as 10,000 students worldwide annually; it is
for-credit from the start; and it joins Georgia Tech professors and content
with Udacity’s online platform and course assistants to help the registrants.
AT&T, which hopes to use the course to train employees and hire graduates,
provided $2 million in seed funding.
Who Is Teaching What—Or
Not
In an article titled “Masculine
Open Online Courses,” Inside Higher Ed
reported in early September that MOOC offerings are characterized by a gender
gap: more men than women teach the online courses. It attributes that
finding in part to the continuing skewing toward courses in science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics, where there has been a long-term
faculty gender gap.
Among the interesting developments in online course
offerings this fall are:
A multimedia tie-in. Larry J. Sabato, of the University of
Virginia, is offering “The
Kennedy Half Century” this autumn on Coursera. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that it comes complete
with an
hour-long PBS documentary, based on his new book, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting
Legacy of John F. Kennedy.
A “synchronous” massive online course. At the University of
Texas at Austin (an edX affiliate), James W. Pennebaker, chair of psychology,
and fellow faculty member Samuel Gosling are delivering
their “Introduction to Psychology” course to a camera crew—while the 1,500
enrolled students will watch their lectures live, but not in person.
According to Inside Higher Ed, the
professors found students who took their course online outperformed those who
attended physically, and that taking the class online compressed the
achievement gap between the upper- and lower-middle-class students.
A MOOC defector. The Chronicle reported that Princeton
sociologist Mitchell Duneier has become a “conscientious objector.”
Although his introductory sociology offering attracted 40,000 registrants and
widespread news coverage, he decided to stop offering it after Coursera inquired
about licensing it so other colleges could incorporate it into their schools’
“blended” classes (mixing online and in-person instruction), thereby saving
money. Duneier told the Chronicle, “I’ve
said no, because I think that it’s an excuse for state legislatures to cut
funding to state universities.” He also expressed doubts about the pedagogy.
This issue arose last April with special force at SJSU, where philosophy
professors wrote to Harvard’s Michael J. Sandel, Bass professor of government, expressing their
concern that the edX version of his celebrated “Justice” might be used to
undercut their own teaching, for local, economic reasons, and has simmered
among faculty members at several campuses. (At the same time, the University of
Maryland is conducting an experiment in course redesign using Coursera and
other online content, and is offering credit for students who complete
introductory math and science courses offered by Coursera and Udacity. See
below about a statement by the University of Texas.)
And a survey of skeptical faculty members. In its “Survey
of Faculty Attitudes on Technology,” conducted by the Gallup organization, Inside Higher Ed found that “Faculty
members, by and large, still aren’t buying—and they are particularly skeptical
about the value of MOOCs”—but the skepticism is tempered by experience with the
technology. According to the August 27 summary report on the survey:
[O]nly
one in five of [respondents agreed] that online courses can achieve learning
outcomes equivalent to those of in-person courses, and majorities considering
online learning to be of lower quality than in-person courses on several key
measures (but not in terms of delivering content to meet learning objectives).
But,
importantly, appreciation for the quality and effectiveness of online learning
grows with instructors’ experiences with it. The growing minority of professors
who themselves had taught at least one course online (30 percent of
respondents, up from 25 percent last year) were far likelier than their peers
who had not done so to believe that online courses can produce learning outcomes
at least equivalent to those of face-to-face courses; 50 percent of them agree
or strongly agree that online courses in their own department or discipline
produce equivalent learning outcomes to in-person courses, compared to just 13
percent of professors who have not taught online.
And
while even professors who have taught online are about evenly divided on
whether online courses generally can produce learning outcomes equivalent to
face-to-face classes (33 percent agree, 30 percent are neutral, and 37 percent
disagree), instructors with online experience are likelier than not to believe
that online courses can deliver equivalent outcomes at their institutions (47
percent agree vs. 28 percent disagree), in their departments (50 percent vs. 30
percent), and in the classes they teach (56 percent vs. 29 percent).
University of Texas
Policy
The University of Texas at Austin, an edX partner, is a
flagship public institution facing the pressures of rising enrollments and
stringent budget pressure from the state legislature and governor. Its
president, William
C. Powers Jr., on August 15 disseminated “Five Guiding Principles Going Forward
with Blended and Online Education,” inviting discussion about control of
the curriculum, rewards for faculty members who participate in online courses,
academic standards, sharing with other institutions, and the long-term
financing of online efforts—issues raised in depth in an accompanying
report on “Technology-Enhanced Education.”
(Similar questions
have been raised, in varying degrees, at Harvard, in Faculty of Arts and
Sciences meetings and elsewhere, but have not, so far, resulted in
comparable policy papers or documents for discussion within the community.)
Powers spelled out guiding principles including:
faculty and academic control of the curriculum;
rewards for faculty members (“Just as faculty members who write textbooks or create devices benefit
from their work, we should ensure that faculty who create online content can
benefit, as well as their departments, colleges, and the University. Even when
the University sponsors the creation of these resources, our general position
should be that faculty own the copyrights for the content they create and grant
licenses to the University to use and adapt their content, consistent with
Regents’ Rules and the law.”);
financial
sustainability (with due regard for online resources’ “potential to generate
revenue, improve productivity, and dramatically increase the number of students
who benefit from our faculty.”)
sharing of
content among institutions (“Blended learning will never be sustainable if
every professor or every university must reinvent the wheel. We have never
expected our professors to write all of the textbooks from which they teach;
likewise we cannot expect all teachers who use blended learning to generate
all-original content.… Where appropriate, we also should learn from, leverage,
and grant credit for high-quality online content and technology created by
other leading universities.”); and
continuous innovation (“[I]nteractive course materials created by our faculty and colleagues at
peer institutions, learning analytics that help us identify and address
individual students’ needs, and social media tools with the ability to engage
great numbers of learners around the world set the stage for innovations that
will define 21st century education.”).
Higher-education
news reports about Powers’s statement stressed his emphasis on scaling up
current pilot experiments to affect teaching and learning throughout the
institution, and on the sharing of course materials among institutions—both
those created at Texas and those adopted or adapted from elsewhere. The Chronicle, for instance, headlined its article,
“Get Used to Sharing Digital Content, Says U. of Texas at Austin President.”
From California to
the White House
A California State Senate legislative initiative to mandate
that state institutions confer credit for low-cost online courses offered by
outside providers has been shelved until at least late next year. The bill, SB
520, arose in part because of concern about students being shut out of
introductory courses or courses they need to complete degree requirements. In
the meantime, California higher-education institutions have begun developing
many more online courses internally and with partners including edX and Udacity,
and they and Coursera are focusing more on for-credit courses within
institutions’ curricula, the Chronicle reported.
At the same time, President
Obama’s initiative to control college costs and channel federal financial-aid
funds to effective institutions highlights the role of “redesigned courses
that integrate online platforms (like MOOCs) or blend in-person and online
experiences” in accelerating the pace of learning. It cites Carnegie Mellon’s
Open Learning Initiative, the State University of New York’s massive “Open
SUNY” initiative (meant to make learning much more widely available), and
Southern New Hampshire University’s competency-based (rather than
credit-hours-based) online learning options. (Southern New Hampshire’s
College of Continuing Education CEO Stephen Hodownes was a panelist on
online learning during a Harvard-MIT summit last March.)
Recognition, Formally
In a scholarly vein, the new
Harvard Education Press title, Stretching
the Higher Education Dollar: How Innovation Can Improve Access, Equity, and
Affordability, edited by Andrew P. Kelly and Kevin Carey, contains
in-depth analyses of MOOCs created at diverse institutions and by Udacity, and also
of the Southern New Hampshire experiment, among other pertinent topics.
And as if certifying that MOOCs are here to stay in some
form or another, Oxford
Dictionaries, published by Oxford University Press, has now sanctioned the term,
defined thus: “a course of study made available over the Internet without
charge to a very large number of people,” citing as its origin, “early 21st
century: from massive open online course.”