In the historic sweep of technology, higher education stands apart as a bastion of old-fashioned thinking. But in anticipation that the information revolution is coming for colleges, Ivy League colleges are competing to create online classes without the Ivy League price tag and without the Ivy League admission hurdles. In a recent article in the New Yorker, the President of Stanford, John Hennessy said, "There's a tsunami coming."
Daphne Koller, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a free online classroom, believes that Hennessy is right. "The tsunami is coming whether we like it or not," she said. "You can be crushed or you can surf and it is better to surf."
Coursera is a massive online open classroom — or MOOC — that operates in conjunction with four top universities – Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Princeton. Co-founded by Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera currently offers forty classes on topics ranging from poetry to robotics. Like a traditional class, each online class is comprised of a series of video lectures with PowerPoint slides. Students can participate in discussion boards and are graded on the assignments. Students who complete the course with passing grades receive a certificate of completion.
Read more here.
Apt. 11d 
Great article. I should try something like this to pick-up some programming.
LikeLike
The article was interesting, but I was kind of stuck at:
“While these programs have already shown success at reaching large numbers of students, it is not entirely clear how MOOCs will impact existing systems of higher education.”
The one suggested impact, that colleges “will not be able to charge students for content any longer” strikes me as unconvincing. As you state later, that was a minimal part of what they were offering to begin with.
So, it still might be “The Big Idea That Can Revolutionize Higher Education,” but I’m having a failure of imagination in seeing exactly how.
Unless maybe this could somehow lead to an unbundling that can get can get exactly what you want for less. Why pay for the whole album now that you can just buy the song? Why pay a monthly cable bill when you can just purchase that one show? Why pay for 100 credit hours at Stanford (35 in your major) when you can just . . . what? Just take the 35 hours and not pay for the rest? But if you don’t get a degree from Stanford at the end, then you aren’t getting the full benefit for the lower price.
LikeLike
So many similarities between this and what’s going on with e-publishing. Fascinating stuff. My head hurts.
LikeLike
These courses can be a great supplement for smart, motivated people of all ages…but then, those people have probably been getting the content all along via books – whether it’s Erasmus or Teach Yourself C++. (Is that a thing anymore? My computer knowledge is from the 90s.) Or Learning Company CDs. This step makes it somewhat easier to learn new things, but not, I think, that much easier. Many more students are generally unmotivated. Some can’t be bothered to buy the textbook or read much of the material I post online, but I can occasionally engage or get them interested in something in the classroom.
For credentialing, they may be helpful in fields where multiple choice tests can really measure learning – I assume that’s true of things like math, accounting, and computer science, though I am not really sure. I’d be pretty skeptical about someone whose only grades for essays or other work of that type came from a machine. I would think, too, that it would be hard to use for credentialing due to massive problems with cheating, but I suppose if LSAT and MCAT can handle it on a much smaller scale, these guys can too.
Not so surprising that the co-founder of a for-profit corporation that hopes to monetize this model thinks it’s a tsunami. But it’s good that the best schools are getting into this. At my university they are really pushing hard to get lots of courses converted to online, but pretty soon there will be massive numbers of courses available from lower or middle-tier places, and who’s going to want to take all of them?
LikeLike
I agree with Ragtime and af. If it’s about content and learning new skills, online courses are different in degree but not type from video tapes and books. There are already billions of books (many of which come with quizzes in the back) to teach yourself pretty much anything. I suppose the certificate is something nice you can put in your resume, but if you know a concrete skill, it probably isn’t all that necessary. My brother taught himself how to program in middle school from those “Teach Yourself C++” type books, and at 16 he got a job in a high tech company as a programmer (working summers and occasionally after high school.) He got the job because he was a great programmer, which is a somewhat transparent skill set, and it’s hard to see how a certificate would have helped. I imagine this is also true if you are a car mechanic or hair dresser or a chef and the like: if you have the skills, you don’t need a certificate, and for things where skills aren’t obvious, a certificate wouldn’t be all that useful (like, I’m not sure what the benefit for a certificate in Greek philosophy would be). Also, this doesn’t do anything to get around credentialing where it really matters. Maybe you could teach yourself to be a doctor from these classes, but I can’t see anyone seeking the services of a non-accredited medical professional, lawyer, accountant, etc., no matter how many certificates they’d earned. Also, as Ragtime points out, a college diploma is about more than just what you learn, and the function a Stanford diploma plays wouldn’t be replaced by 40 certificates from free online courses taught by Stanford professors and graded by robots.
LikeLike
“I imagine this is also true if you are a car mechanic or hair dresser or a chef and the like: if you have the skills, you don’t need a certificate, and for things where skills aren’t obvious, a certificate wouldn’t be all that useful (like, I’m not sure what the benefit for a certificate in Greek philosophy would be).”
Hair dressing and costmetology generally tend to be highly regulated, with lots of paper barriers to entry.
The Institute for Justice explains what happened in Arizona when eyebrow threaders just wanted to do eyebrow threading: “But to be eligible to take the [cosmetology] licensing exam, which does not test an applicant’s knowledge of threading, a would-be threader would have to take at least 600 hours of classroom instruction at a cost of over $10,000. And worse, not a single hour of that instruction teaches threading.”
https://www.ij.org/az-eyebrow-threading-release-10-12-2011
There was likewise a fight for hairbraiders.
http://www.ij.org/legal-barriers-to-african-hairbraiding-nationwide
There are similar professional barriers elsewhere. There are places where you had to be a licensed funeral director to sell a coffin (or at least until there were such places until a 2011 case in LA).
http://www.ij.org/louisiana-caskets-release-7-21-11
Here’s a piece on the fight against the interior decorating lobby:
“This year, the clique of designers came with a full-court press, introducing bills in the Texas House and Senate that would require six years of combined college study and apprenticeship, plus passing a $1,000 privately administered national exam that has very little to do with the day-to-day practice of most interior designers.”
http://www.ij.org/ij-takes-the-fight-to-the-interior-design-cartel
Sometimes, people aren’t just going for credentials for the heck of it. There may be actual government policies (invariably pushed by powerful industry lobbies) that explain their pursuit of seemingly meaningless pieces of paper.
LikeLike
If it’s about content and learning new skills, online courses are different in degree but not type from video tapes and books.
I think that may be understatement for certain areas at least. Unlike a book or a video, you can get much more rapid feedback from an online course. By rapid feedback, I don’t just mean you can be evaluated before you continue in an error, but that you are getting (or could get, depending on the set-up) something interactive.
LikeLike
Something with game-like elements to keep you moving.
LikeLike
“Something with game-like elements to keep you moving.”
Exactly. I don’t think that we’ve yet seen the sort of seamless union between good software and good educational content that the medium allows. (Although some people seem to pick up a lot of content even from commercial games.)
I’m not a gaming person myself, but I’ve seen how persistently people keep butting their heads against a tough game environment. Sprinkle in a bit more educational content (you could get more supplies for use in-game by answering questions correctly) and you could create something both addictive and highly educational. (My daughter has been playing an Air Force sponsored free game where you design airplanes.)
From the discussions I’ve seen, motivation is the big problem with online and individually-paced learning. Self-paced sounds great in theory, but in practice, thousands of “self-paced” exercise videos, stationary bikes, language learning programs and other self-improvement materials are gathering dust in homes across America. If (as I suspect) online/self-paced learning is more likely to appeal to weaker students, it’s important to make the process itself motivating.
LikeLike
Amy P
With hairdressing, I’m not sure how online classes would change that. If hairdressing schools are behind the requirements, I can’t see how a free online certificate would count towards the requirements. (Plus there’s no way to accrue practice hours over the internet.) I think this is part of what the difference is between an actual diploma from an accredited institution and a certificate from a free online course (even one designed by an MIT professor.)
I agree with the self paced learning stuff, since I’m also skeptical that unless there are deadlines with enforcements, very few people will actually follow through. I mean, I’m sure many people will, but I don’t think enough to radically replace our current style of higher education.
LikeLike
“I can’t see how a free online certificate would count towards the requirements.”
I kind of veered off track onto the question of certification vs. non-certification, but now that you mention it, I think even hairdressing has a lot of pen-and-paper type knowledge (for instance, knowing enough theory behind the various chemical processes in order not to spectacularly botch client hair while dying, perming and straightening).
I also suspect that being a car mechanic is getting to be such an electronically-driven profession these days that there is also a lot of pen-and-paper knowledge there, too. (I’ve heard a lot of complaints from mechanically savvy owners that cars these days are so computerized that it’s hard for a guy on the street to fix a car, like you could in the good old days.)
LikeLike
These classes probably won’t have any impact on the middle class students who attend average to elite colleges. We’re a long way away from abandoning the BA for a certificate of credential. I could see how a class like that could elements of the basic Introduction to American Politics Class, i.e. how a bill becomes a law, what are interest groups, how has the presidency changed over the years. But a class like that couldn’t provide the questioning of the students that happens in the classroom, i.e. how do you feel about the Supreme Court making decisions about health care, what do you think about what your classmate just said, why do you think that. Also, most people aren’t self-learners. They need the pressure from peers and faculty to do the reading and to think more deeply about a subject matter.
However, maybe the cost of higher education might push people in this direction. There are community college A.A. classes that could be taught effectively in this manner. Computer Science classes, where the interaction with faculty is less important, can be done just fine this way. MOOCs aren’t for everyone, but they certainly do have an audience. Just look at the numbers of people who are signing up for those classes.
LikeLike