This post is portion of Employ Education, an ongoing series in which ReadWrite examines technological innovation in education and how it’s reshaping universities that are preparing students for a transformed workforce.
Why pay thousands of dollars to sit in a stuffy university lecture hall as a professor drones away in front of bored students when you could rather take some of the world’s greatest courses on the web? For totally free?
A handful of startups and university-backed nonprofits are starting to provide on that proposition—one that could upend higher education, not to mention the plans of millions of students who are aiming to position themselves for employment in today’s digital economy. Of course, the trend is nevertheless in its infancy, with massive challenges ahead where student retention, university cooperation and company models are concerned.
But proponents of the on-line-education revolution are not shy about their ambitions. Sebastian Thrun, a former Stanford professor who co-founded the startup Udacity two years ago, reportedly believes that in 50 years, there will only be 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education—with Udacity, of course, potentially one of them.
Off To A Rapidly Start—Sort Of
This on the web movement is centered around “huge open on-line courses,” which go by the ungainly acronym MOOCs. These are usually college-style lectures reconfigured for the online student, complete with lecture video (of varying production worth), assignments and interactive discussions. The aim is to provide instruction similar to what students can get in a classic college atmosphere, only far more cheaply and conveniently.
Websites like Udacity, Coursera and the non-profit edX (founded in mid-2012 by Harvard and MIT) offer an array of programs taught by established professors at huge-name universities. Students register with an email and can begin taking classes on a rolling basis. There is no application process, and the thousands of students taking a single class can get there in a few clicks.
MOOCs are clearly starting to catch on. Standard colleges and universities enrolled practically 20 million folks in the 2011-2012 school year. Meanwhile, some of the new online programs—many of them less than two years old—already claim millions of students. Coursera, a startup founded in 2012 by but yet another pair of Stanford professors, boasts of over four million individuals enrolled in its on-line courses.
But Is Our Students Learning?
Completion rates at MOOCs, though, are a diverse story.
Michael Littman, a Brown University laptop-science professor, taught a Udacity course on algorithms that enrolled 16,000 students although he was actively teaching it over the summer season. Only 1 percent of on the web participants, nonetheless, completed the course in real time, which means they kept up with Littman’s teaching schedule, interacted with him on the internet and completed when he wrapped up the course.
The numbers may look low, but Littman proclaimed himself pleased with the turnout. “Even although it was a modest percentage of students that completed the course, the total completion was still a lot more than any students I’ve taught,“ he told me in a telephone interview.
MOOC proponents argue that such numbers are beside the point, because on the web courses permit students to work via class material at their own pace. Instructors, even so, have no way of being aware of if students completed the course right after they finished teaching, or if they dropped out altogether.
Stuart Preston, 44-year-old sales engineer for voice over IP merchandise in Phoenix, Arizona, is 1 of those students. He’s at present enrolled in a Coursera computer-networking course taught by professors from the University of Washington. It is his 1st MOOC, and he’s locating it tough to keep pace with the professors.
“The class is on week seven, but I’m only on week three,” he said in an interview. “It’s effortless to blow [off] a class with no direct personal accountability.” 
The Price Equation
The effect of MOOCs on conventional colleges and universities remains tough to measure. Many best-tier universities have embraced on-line courses as a way to democratize high quality education by generating their lectures and coursework more broadly accessible, frequently to other less well known colleges. Not surprisingly, such efforts also tend to bolster their institutional prestige and to boost the profile of star faculty members who create on the internet courses, a reality that occasionally rankles at institutions reduced on the larger-ed food chain.
At San Jose State University, for instance, the philosophy division not too long ago refused to use a social-justice MOOC created by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, complaining in an open letter than the move was “financially driven” and would lead to a “compromise of good quality.” As the authors explained:
[W]e fear that two classes of universities will be produced: 1, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own true professor the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of videotaped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is accessible on their house campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant.
In April, Amherst College in western Massachusetts turned down an invitation to join edX in April after a faculty vote. Duke University’s undergraduate faculty likewise lately rejected an administration strategy to develop on the internet courses for college credit.
Some state universities, even so, are embracing MOOCs as a way of reaching far more students. California State University, for instance, not too long ago mentioned it will supply 36 on-line courses to students enrolled at any of its campuses, enabling far a lot more students access to required courses. (This year, five of the system’s campuses had more applicants for every single key than it had slots available.) The University of California and University of Texas systems have implemented similar systems.
Even at two-year neighborhood colleges, normally a low-expense option to 4-year institutions, tuition costs have risen 24 percent more quickly than inflation more than the past 5 years. That makes MOOCs far more economically desirable for many students.
“I suspect that we’re in a period of experimentation,” Littman, the computer-science professor at Brown, told me. “A lot of schools are seeing it as way for the intro classes to be taught. Those classes can be covered by MOOCs and then students can take upper levels with professors.” 
The On the internet Degree Cometh
In one of the bolder moves, Georgia Tech—together with AT&T and Udacity—plans to provide an online master’s degree in personal computer science next year that it will teach exclusively via MOOCs. The cost for the program, which should run 3 year for most students, is anticipated to be just below $ 7,000 a conventional graduate degree would price three to eight occasions that.
Students who total the program will acquire a totally accredited masters degree. It really is a testbed in a lot of respects, not least simply because it will weed out students who aren’t serious about finishing their courses. One objective is to prove in an academic setting whether or not an totally online education is not only achievable, but also a respectable alternative to standard classrooms. 
The program also aims to support address the lack of workers in science, technology and engineering fields. Applications are due in October.
The MOOC Counter-Revolution
And however not all is nicely in MOOC-ville.
Earlier this month, Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, one of the most prominent professors in the MOOC neighborhood, quit teaching his well-liked sociology course on Coursera. Duneier told Chronicle of Larger Education that his decision followed Coursera’s request to license his course to other colleges.
“I’ve stated no, simply because I feel that it is an excuse for state legislatures to reduce funding to state universities,” Duneier told the Chronicle. “And I guess that I’m truly uncomfortable getting part of a movement that’s going to get its income in that way.”
Other academics are operating on options to MOOCs that aim to take benefit of on the internet technologies without having merely making centrally created, 1-size-fits-all courses. A single group of feminist scholars, for instance, have created a distributed on the web collaborative course—known, of course, as a DOCC.
DOCCs aim to use online technologies to improve in-particular person teaching whilst also producing the benefits obtainable to on-line students. Instead of a single syllabus, or course of instruction, for all students, a DOCC is taught across classrooms at many college campuses simultaneously. Courses will differ based on the institution, but each and every will use a widespread video presentation to set the theme for that week’s course that video will also be accessible on-line. Online students get a dedicated discussion space for conversation, and professors teaching the DOCC will also hold office hours especially for on-line participants.
The initial course designed below the DOCC parameters is Dialogues on Feminism and Technologies, yet another learning experiment with dialogue and lectures constructed around feminist discussions of technologies and innovation. Institutions like Brown, Rutgers, Yale and a variety of art schools will be offering the feminism and technologies course. 
“Schools, classrooms, and learners are very distinct,” Alexandra Juhasz, a professor at Pitzer and co-facilitator of the plan, told me. “This is why we chose this model.” 
Shrinking MOOCs Down To Size
Feminists aren’t the only ones rethinking MOOCs. Last month, the California Senate shelved a bill that would have required state universities to provide much more on-line courses for credit, following pushback from faculty unions and a series of amendments that shifted choice authority over on the internet credits back to university faculty. A comparable measure in Florida was also largely defanged following strenuous objection and compromise.
Some MOOC providers themselves seem to be rethinking their method, in part because it’s becoming clearer that many—maybe most—universities are not going to merely grant them the ability to offer courses for regular college credit. “Credits are the coin of the academic realm,” Russell Poulin, deputy director of a Boulder, Colo., larger-education technology cooperative, told the Chronicle of Greater Education. “And if that is where the coins are, these businesses are going to drive there.”
As firms, MOOCs are nonetheless largely living on the largesse of their investors whilst they function out how to truly produce revenue. That’s not simple if your plan is to preserve your offerings totally free.
Both Udacity and Coursera also recruit students on behalf of large businesses like Google, Amazon and Facebook. MOOCs charge considerably significantly less than conventional headhunters and have access to large pools of talent that demonstrate specific understanding around subjects these organizations are seeking for.
Some MOOCs are licensing courses to educational institutions that want to supplement classes with video lectures. That is a bit of a step back from the early, grandiose vision of sweeping away the current educational method with cost-free, greatest-of-breed courses on all subjects.
But some MOOC pioneers are sounding a bit like folks who’ve had a recent encounter with gravity. “A medium where only self-motivated, Net-savvy individuals sign up, and the accomplishment rate is 10 %, does not strike me very yet as a remedy to the problems of higher education,” Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun recently told the Chronicle. Udacity, of course, sees a genuine company in supplying technologies and support solutions for online courses provided by universities. 
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