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Scooped by Smithstorian onto Disrupting Higher Ed |
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Two software companies that sell course-management systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free online courses for the masses.
On Thursday both companies plan to announce partnerships with universities that will use their software to teach massive open online courses, or MOOC’s. The companies hope to pull in their own college clients to compete with online-education players like Udacity and Coursera.
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Robert Ghrist, a professor of mathematics and electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, knows that wielding vast networks on behalf of nonuniversity benefactors can be tricky business.
Mr. Ghrist specializes in applied topology, an abstract math field. In practice, topological math can help someone harness huge collections of sensory inputs—like those collected by cellphones, for example—to model large environments and solve problems.
The Department of Defense has enlisted Mr. Ghrist to do research along those lines. The Penn professor knows he has little power over how the Pentagon might use his insights. But he says that no longer bothers him.
“I have long ago dealt with the issue of: What if something I create is put to bad use?” the mathematician says. “And I have found that, throughout history, the benefit of building good things outweighed the hazards,” he says, citing lasers and the Internet as net-positive inventions despite ample opportunity for abuse. “That’s true in my research; it’s also true in my teaching.”
That ethical dilemma became relevant to Mr. Ghrist’s teaching only recently, when he began teaching a massive open online course on single-variable calculus through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based MOOC company.
A group of philosophy professors at San Jose State University last month raised concerns to Michael Sandel, a government professor at Harvard, for his offering a MOOC through another provider, the nonprofit edX. The administration at San Jose State is encouraging its faculty members to use edX courses in their own teaching.
Smithstorian's insight:
San Jose State is one of the first universities to integrate MOOCs into its traditional curriculum. The major MOOC providers have indicated that licensing their courses to universities might become a key part of their business models.
In an open letter, the philosophy professors warned that such collaboration could mark beginning of a long-term effort to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”
In a provocative twist, the professors addressed the letter to Mr. Sandel, implying that, by getting in bed with edX, their Harvard colleague would be culpable if their dystopian scenario came true.
When it comes to technology tools aimed at reducing operating costs, it is not uncommon for professors to distrust the intentions of university administrators—especially in California, where years of budget cuts have made faculty members especially leery of such “disruptive innovations.”
But the San Jose State philosophy professors’ decision to address Mr. Sandel directly introduced a new question: Are professors who develop and teach MOOCs responsible for how those MOOCs are used? “ No, absolutely not,” says Mohamed A. Noor, a professor of biology at Duke University.
Mr. Noor teaches a MOOC through Coursera, called “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution.” The course is one of five Coursera MOOCs so far that have earned an endorsement from the American Council on Education, a Washington-based group that advises college presidents on policy. (Mr. Ghrist’s calculus course is another.) The council reviewed the courses and determined that students who pass them deserve formal credit toward a degree, making those five perhaps the most likely MOOCs to be adopted, in some way, by other universities.
To be clear, Mr. Noor says he believes dismantling departments and replacing them with MOOCs would be “reckless.” But the Duke professor also believes that, in such a case, “the fault lies with the reckless administration,” and not the professor who furnished the MOOC to the vendor that furnished the MOOC to the administration.
“I don’t see it as particularly my business how people use the stuff once I put it out there,” Mr. Noor says—though he adds that if dismantling departments were all a MOOC was being used for, “then I’d stop.” Really, though, it is a university’s faculty, and not technology vendors and their collaborators, that is responsible for reining in reckless administrative efforts, says Mr. Noor. “Ultimately, faculty at individual colleges need to be the driving force behind what students at their campuses are using,” he says.
“And if that’s not the case” at San Jose State, says Mr. Noor, then MOOCs are “the least of the faculty’s problems.” Granted, much of the philosophy professors’ letter was devoted to criticizing their university’s administration and laying out a general case against plugging a Harvard course into the San Jose State curriculum, particularly in a humanities discipline. The decision to take aim at Mr. Sandel seemed to be a publicity tactic, and not necessarily an attempt to tarnish all MOOC professors.
In interviews with The Chronicle, the professors who created the MOOCs that have been approved by the American Council on Education nevertheless rushed to Mr. Sandel’s defense, and to their own. Roger Barr, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke, says his professional obligation is to the students taking his MOOC on bioelectricity, not to colleagues at other institutions that might be advised by their superiors to use it. “I see my job as teaching students,” says Mr. Barr, “not protecting faculty.”
Sarah Eichhorn, a math lecturer at the University of California at Irvine, says she sees creating a MOOC as roughly equivalent to writing a textbook, or producing open resources for other teachers. Ms. Eichhorn says she was surprised when the San Jose State philosophy professors went after Mr. Sandel. “I think it’s a professor’s job to make education available,” she says, “not to restrict it.” Delete the scoop?
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In an unprecedented arrangement that involves aspects of MOOCs and a major technology company's support, the Georgia Institute of Technology will soon begin offering an online master's degree in computer science at an unusually low cost.
Georgia Tech announced on Tuesday that it would work with Udacity, a company that runs massive open online courses by well-known professors, to offer a series of online courses that students could complete to earn a graduate degree from the university. AT&T is donating $2-million to help get the program started, and the company will play an active role in some courses, if professors agree—offering guest speakers or suggesting class projects.
Courses in the program will be free through Udacity's site, made up of video lectures and computer-graded homework assignments. Students who want the possibility of credit or a degree will have to apply for admission to the university and pay tuition, and those students will get access to teaching assistants and, in some cases, have their assignments graded by people.
The fees put a top-ranked computer-science program at a price point more comparable to a typical community college—about $134 per credit, compared with the normal rates at Georgia Tech of $472 per credit for in-state students and $1,139 per credit for out-of-state students, said Rafael L. Bras, the university's provost. The program is expected to take most students three years to complete, and cost less than $7,000.
The university and Udacity will split the revenue from the paying students, with 60 percent going to Georgia Tech and 40 percent to Udacity, said Mr. Bras. "Udacity and Georgia Tech split the net income of this and, obviously, the net losses, if we have any—which we hope we don't," he said.
A partnership between San Jose State University and another MOOC provider, edX, has sparked complaints from professors there, who worry that the university is headed down a path that could lead to fewer faculty members and lower-quality education.
Georgia Tech believes its project is different. "San Jose State is a different situation, and I'm not going to comment on it," said Mr. Bras. "We're talking about a professional master's degree."
He argued that technology can help reduce the cost of instruction without reducing quality. "This is not going to be a watered-down degree," he said. "It's going to be as hard and at a level of excellence of a regular degree." Students on the degree track will have to take tests in person at one of 4,000 proctored testing centers run by Pearson VUE, but most of the students probably will never travel to the campus itself.
Georgia Tech officials are betting that there are plenty of students willing to pay to get a computer-science degree from the well-known research institution. By the end of the three-year pilot, officials hope to have thousands of students enrolled. A New ApproachRussell Poulin, deputy director for research and analysis at the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, said that while other colleges offer online computer-science degrees, the program at Georgia Tech is unique in that it is trying to reduce costs by adapting teaching for an online setting rather than simply transferring traditional methods online.
"The toughest part typically is overcoming some of the politics around that," said Mr. Poulin, whose organization promotes online education as part of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
Officials at Georgia Tech say they have won all the necessary signoffs. "This program has been approved at every relevant level of the University System of Georgia, up to and including the Board of Regents," says a fact sheetabout the project.
Mr. Poulin said that the involvement of AT&T could raise concerns, though. "They'll need to be open in how much influence AT&T has in the curriculum and faculty, and what is taught—and in how much dependence does Georgia Tech have on that," said Mr. Poulin. "That would be the concern as far as keeping the academic integrity of the program so it doesn't just become a training program for AT&T."
But Mr. Bras, the provost, dismissed such worries. "I don't have any concerns of that," he said. The program will use the university's existing curriculum, he said, and AT&T employees will get no special consideration in the admissions process.
AT&T says one of its goals is to preserve a pipeline of qualified applicants. The company is also signaling its willingness to take seriously those who study online.
"These students will never have to set foot in a classroom to earn degrees on par with those received in traditional on-campus settings—degrees that will be equally valued by their future employers," wrote Scott S. Smith, senior vice president for human resources at AT&T, in a blog post. "By harnessing the power of MOOCs, we can embark on a new era for higher education and for the development of a highly skilled work force."
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the project is how quickly it all came together. That troubled Mr. Poulin, who said that many recent online-education efforts have learned things by trial and error that they could have guessed by reading previous research reports.
"If you run headlong into the forest," he said, "you're probably going to run into a few trees, rather than stopping along the side and saying, Oh, there's a map here; we could probably go through the forest without hitting trees..
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Overnight, MOOCs -- with free tuition for all, attracting unprecedented enrollments reaching into the hundreds of thousands, and the involvement of world-class faculty -- have captured the imagination of the press, public and even legislators looking for ways to expand the availability of higher education at minimal cost.
But thus far little attention has been paid to the quality of MOOCs. Quality in online learning can be defined in many ways: quality of content, quality of design, quality of instructional delivery, and, ultimately, quality of outcomes. On the face of it, the organizing principles of MOOCs are at odds with widely observed best practices in online education, including those advocated by my organization, the Quality Matters Program. Many of the first MOOCs are providing quality of content, but are far behind the curve in providing quality of design, accountable instructional delivery, or sufficient resources to help the vast majority of students achieve a course’s intended learning outcomes.
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Online learning isn’t just another path into the middle class. It’s also a way for the government to spend more wisely.
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Three times a week, 15 weeks a semester, you can expect to see Sandra DeSousa teaching a room of 150 to 250 students the math they should have learned in high school. The adjunct professor at San Jose State University has another 100 students under her charge this spring, but she rarely sees them face-to-face.
In January, the California university entered into a partnership with Udacity, a Palo Alto-based company that specializes in providing free online courses, to develop entry-level classes in mathematics. Any student, not only those enrolled at San Jose State, can take one of the courses for academic credit. The university has its own separate online offerings, but a three-unit course can cost $1,050. The programs developed with Udacity were priced at $150.
What’s happening at 30,000-student San Jose State, the oldest public university in the West, reflects the pressures facing higher education across the country. Like other state-run schools, it is expected to provide access to as many students as possible. But in the wake of the Great Recession, taxpayers and tuition-payers are struggling to foot the bill. Deficit-ridden California has cut spending per student on higher education almost 30 percent since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and tuition at the state’s public four-year colleges has risen 72 percent. Not surprisingly, students have found it ever-harder to obtain the diploma that’s become almost a requirement for jobs that assure a middle-class life. Education reformers see a remedy in Internet-based tools, which they say can help more students earn college degrees at a lower cost to themselves, their families, and the government. California legislators, hoping to hurry the process, are considering legislation that would require public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses. Those could include some of Uda-city’s free offerings.
Online education isn’t new. But the latest technological wave could shake up traditional modes of instruction—on-screen and off—and change the way brick-and-mortar universities operate. “I really do feel like this is going to erupt in a way that is helpful to students,” said Michelle Rhee-Weise, a senior research fellow in education at the Innosight Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. San Jose State’s partnership with Udacity could be the first tremor. Delete the scoop?
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Even though badges are still in their infancy, a class of them have emerged that will make employers and admissions counselors take notice.
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Sure, you can get badges for everything from helping a little old lady cross the street to winning seven sidebets in 17 days on the game Blackjack Carnival. But your mileage with employers from most of these distinctions will range from “Oh, that’s nice” to “You say you spent your unemployment playing online blackjack?” Even though badges are still in their infancy, a class of them have emerged or are in development that will serve as bona fides for valuable skills and expertise and make employers and admissions counselors sit up and notice. Delete the scoop?
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Graduates with technical degrees and certificates often earned significantly more than did those with other academic credentials.
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When it comes to getting a job that pays good wages, students in Texas might get more bang for their buck by attending a technical, two-year program than they would by earning a four-year bachelor's degree, according to a report presented on Thursday to the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board.
The report, which echoes findings released last year by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, was prepared by College Measures, a partnership of two research and consulting groups, the American Institutes for Research, and Matrix Knowledge Group.
Among the findings, graduates with technical degrees and certificates often earned significantly more money than did those with other academic credentials. And students who graduated from regional and lesser-known universities typically earned just as much as those who graduated with the same degrees from the state's flagship campuses—the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station.
College Measures, which is supported by the Lumina Foundation, provides data to help students, parents, and policy makers determine how well colleges are educating students and preparing them for jobs. It has found similar results in its studies of public higher education in Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, and Virginia.
The new report comes at a time when Texas lawmakers are considering proposals to loosen high-school graduation requirements to allow more students to pursue technical trades in fields where employers are having trouble finding enough workers. Skeptics of that approach argue that students who are more broadly educated generally fare better over the long haul.
The College Measures study makes the case for looking at the short-term gain. It found that, one year after graduation, those with two-year technical degrees earned, on average, more than $50,000, about $11,000 more than graduates with bachelor's degrees. And compared with graduates of two-year colleges who had focused on academic subjects, those with technical degrees were making about $30,000 more.
Those who went on to receive master's degrees earned, on average, $63,340, or $24,000 more than the median first-year earnings of those who stopped with a bachelor's degree. 'The Truth Is, We Don't Know'Mark Schneider, president of College Measures and a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, acknowledged in an interview on Thursday that the salary someone makes one year after graduation doesn't necessarily reflect a person's lifetime earnings potential. Many educators point out that, with rapidly changing work-force needs, students who complete narrowly focused technical degrees or certificates might land lucrative jobs right away but struggle to move on if those jobs dry up.
"We've all heard about the philosophy majors who start out as baristas at Starbucks and go on to become barristers, and the person with a technical degree who's going to be replaced by robots," Mr. Schneider said. But when it comes to tracking salaries 10 years down the road, "the truth is, we don't know."
He said he hoped to extend his studies to examine earnings three and five years after graduation.
Another key finding, he said, is that "you don't have to go to the most prestigious schools to do well in the labor market." You also don't need a bachelor's degree to do well, with holders of certificates—one of the fastest-growing credentials community colleges offer—sometimes outearning recipients of B.A.'s.
The median first-year earnings of graduates of some certificate programs, including several in health care, top $70,000. That's $30,000 more than the statewide median salary for bachelor-degree graduates. Among the high-paying jobs certificate holders are landing in Texas are in construction engineering and pipe fitting.
The report compares how students who attend different types of programs in the same field might fare a year after graduation. For instance, someone who earned a certificate in business administration/management could land a job paying $37,000, compared with the $26,000 that went to an associate-degree graduate in the same field.
But certificates don't always lead to higher-paying jobs. Just ask cosmetology students, many of whom earn $13,000 or less. Graduates with technical associate degrees in registered nursing earn an average of $68,000, while someone coming out with a certificate in the field can expect to make about $20,000.
Despite all the attention paid to the need for more graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, biology graduates at both the bachelor's and master's level earn less than statewide medians, the report concludes. Math graduates fare better, outearning biology graduates by more than $20,000 statewide.
Texas' higher-education commissioner, Raymund Paredes, said on Thursday that the report confirms what earlier studies have shown about the value of technical degrees, but that students need to be educated about the long-term ramifications of choosing different paths.
"Many students, because of time and financial constraints, can't invest the time and money it takes to pursue a four-year degree in a field that pays well," he said. "Certificates can be a very viable pathway for many high-school graduates." Delete the scoop?
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The report, from the New America Foundation, suggests collaborative approaches that would help more students find an affordable pathway to a degree.
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Public colleges and universities, which educate the bulk of all American college students, have been slower than their counterparts in the for-profit sector to embrace the potential of online learning to offer pathways to degrees. A new report from the New America Foundation suggests a series of policies that states and public higher-education systems could adopt to do some catching up.
The report, "State U Online," by Rachel Fishman, a policy analyst with the foundation, analyzes where public online-education efforts stand now and finds that access to high-quality, low-cost online courses varies widely from state to state.
Those efforts fall along a continuum of organizational levels, says the report. At the low end of the spectrum, course availability, pricing, transferability of credit, and other issues are all determined at the institutional level, by colleges, departments, or individual professors, resulting in a patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.
Some states, though, have taken "a series of steps that build on one another to make public online higher education more rational and accessible for different student populations," Ms. Fishman writes. "Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
That "something" is a model she dubs "State U Online," in which "students can move freely among institutions within a state and eventually beyond state lines." T he report identifies five cumulative steps that build toward State U Online and gives an example of a state or system at each step. Each example illustrates how that state or system overcame such obstacles as cost, getting faculty buy-in, and assuring course quality. Delete the scoop?
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Take away the dorm rooms, the classroom banter, the brown-nosing, the keg parties and the tuition, and is it still college?
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I learned many fascinating things while taking a series of free online college courses over the last few months. In my history class, I learned there was a Japanese political plot to assassinate Charlie Chaplin in 1932. In my genetics class, I learned that the ability to wiggle our ears is a holdover from animal ancestors who could shift the direction of their hearing organs. But the first thing I learned? When it comes to Massive Open Online Courses, like those offered byCoursera, Udacity and edX, you can forget about the Socratic method. 
Anne Whaits's curator insight,
April 22, 6:09 PM
Strange paradox - MOOC professors the least and most assessible teachers in history. This opinion piece reflects one person's experience of several MOOC's - interesting grading nonetheless. THE PROFESSORS: B+ CONVENIENCE: A TEACHER-TO-STUDENT INTERACTION: D STUDENT-TO-STUDENT INTERACTION: B- ASSIGNMENTS: B- OVERALL EXPERIENCE: B Delete the scoop?
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San Jose State University plans to widen its relationship with edX, the nonprofit provider of massive open online courses, and the California State University system is encouraging similar experiments on 11 other campuses.
The moves were announced on Wednesday, just two semesters after San Jose State began a pilot project with edX to improve teaching and learning in its own classrooms. The university will incorporate three to five new edX courses into its local curriculum next fall, including courses in the humanities and social sciences.
San Jose State last fall used material from an edX course, “Circuits & Electronics,” as part of a “flipped classroom” experiment in its own introductory course in electrical engineering. The university offered three versions of the course: two conventional face-to-face sections and one “blended” section, in which students watched edX videos on their own and then participated in group activities, sans lecturing, during class time.
The pass rates in the two conventional sections were 55 percent and 59 percent. In the “flipped” section with the edX videos, 91 percent of students passed.
The second semester of trials, currently under way, has also produced encouraging results, said Mohammad H. Qayoumi, president of San Jose State, in an interview. But data from those trials are not yet available because the courses are still in session.
The findings are preliminary, Mr. Qayoumi acknowledged. But the president, who has never been reluctant to criticize an implicit bias toward traditional classroom teaching, said he was not worried about jumping the gun. “It could not be worse than what we do face to face,” he said. Delete the scoop?
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"Save money and graduate early," the new program promises. It publicizes Akron's existing for-credit exams and, for a fee, helps students prepare for them.
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For many colleges, it isn't easy to figure out how—or whether—to award academic credit for learning that occurs outside the classroom. But as institutions look to raise completion rates, be more responsive to the needs of adult learners, and deal with pressing questions about competencies and cost, solving the prior-learning puzzle has taken on new urgency.
With that challenge in mind, the University of Akron next month will roll out a new tutorial-based program aimed at helping more students earn credit for course material they've already mastered. "Save money and graduate early," promises the Web site forExpress to Success, as Akron's new program is called.
The university has long offered students the option to request for-credit examinations in subjects they've studied elsewhere, but the tests weren't always available and many students weren't aware of the policy. The new tutorials are designed to give students a chance to refresh their knowledge in certain areas before deciding whether to take the tests.
"Test-prep tutorials" will be offered this summer in mathematics, statistics, sociology, psychology, and communications. They will include 10 hours of instruction, cost $100 each, and be taught by graduate assistants. The university at first will offer the tutorials in nine courses—including introductory sociology and psychology—and may expand the offerings if they're successful. Delete the scoop?
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The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money.
The plan calls for “new and expanded online programs” that “include options for time-shortened degree completion.” In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY’s Empire State College.
The system will also push its top faculty members to build MOOCs designed so that certain students who do well in the courses might be eligible for SUNY credit.
Ultimately, the system wants to add 100,000 enrollments within three years, according to a news release.
Even before the SUNY announcement, it had already been a big week for nontraditional models for awarding college credit. The U.S. Education Department on Monday said it had no problem with spending federal student aid on college programs that give credit based on “competency,” not the number of hours students spend in class.
Empire State College’s prior-learning assessment programs operate on a similar principle. Students who can demonstrate that they have acquired certain skills can get college credit, even if they did not acquire those skills in a college classroom.
The new SUNY effort will aim to copy the Empire State model across the system, said Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor.
“This resolution opens the door to assurances to our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.
SUNY is just the latest state system to use novel teaching and assessment methods to deal with the problem of enrolling, and graduating, more students.
Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington have enlisted Western Governors University, a nonprofit online institution that uses the “competency” method, to help working adults in those states earn degrees.Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are building programs aimed at helping their own adult students redeem their on-the-job skills and knowledge for credit toward degrees. And California may soon use MOOCs to deal with overcrowding in some courses at its public colleges and universities.
Ms. Zimpher said the prior-learning expertise at Empire State would make it possible for the New York system to undertake the new effort without calling in outsiders.
“Usually when you have an outside vendor, it’s to deliver something that you don’t know how to do,” she said. “In our case we actually know how to do this, and we know how to do it well.”
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EdX has released source code to the general public that supports interactive learning built specifically for the Internet.
The nonprofit online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has released XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting EdX course content.
XBlocks are a prototype second-generation application programming interface for hierarchically combined EdX courseware components such as video players and learning sequences. The XBlock source code allows course developers to combine independent XBlocks to create engaging online courses such as wiki-based collaborative learning environments and online laboratories, or create integrated education tools such as a circuit simulator for an electronics course or a molecular manipulator for teaching biology. Delete the scoop?
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Smithstorian's insight:
California is home to two of the most important things happening in higher education, one good, one bad. The good thing is the rapid advancement of cheap and free online courses offered by companies like Udacity and Coursera. The bad thing is the catastrophic failure of California lawmakers to provide enough money to support basic access to foundational courses at community colleges. Today the state Senate’s president pro tem, Darrell Steinberg, will announce a bill that essentially tries to use the one to fix the other. This groundbreaking initiative has broad implications for the nature, financing, and regulation of higher education.
Nearly half a million students are on waiting lists for basic courses in California’s public colleges, increasing the cost and duration of college and reducing the number of students who go on to earn degrees. This is a human tragedy and a policy failure on an enormous scale.
Under the proposed plan, wait-listed students would be able to take online classes that have been approved by California’s Open Education Resources Council, a faculty-led body that was created by recent Steinberg-sponsored legislation (which also authorized free, open textbooks). Students would have to take proctored, in-person exams to pass the courses. Public colleges and universities in California would be required to accept those courses for credit.
It seems common-sensical, and it is. But the bill represents a big departure from standard policy arrangements in two important ways.
Geraldine Lefoe's curator insight,
March 17, 4:39 PM
Groundbreaking way to address the shortage of places in community colleges or second rate education opportunity? Delete the scoop?
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For all the star power harnessed by massive-open-online-course providers, Yale University has been a notable absence. While many of its elite peers scrambled to get out ahead of the MOOC wave, Yale bided its time.
That’s about to change. Yale announced on Wednesday that it would soon offer MOOCs through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based company.
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Yale plans to offer four courses beginning in January, focusing on constitutional law, financial markets, morality, and Roman architecture.
The move was a long time coming. Yale, which in 2007 became among the first institutions to make its course content available free on the Web with its Open Yale Courses lecture series, has taken a distinctly deliberate approach to MOOCs. Last fall it convened a faculty committee to recommend a broad online agenda that would encompass MOOCs as well as other forms of online teaching.
“We understand that there are institutional considerations (ranging from entrance fees to intellectual-property issues to regulatory-compliance matters) that may govern which MOOC platforms could be pursued by Yale,” the committee wrote in a report last December.
Nevertheless, it continued, “we recommend that Yale should use one or more of the new MOOC platforms to continue the free, online dissemination of Yale’s teaching materials.”
Apart from MOOCs, the committee recommended that Yale begin offering online language courses for credit “that could be available to Yale College students as well as students enrolled at peer universities elsewhere.” Coursera, meanwhile, announced on Wednesday that it had created partnerships with a raft of companies and nonprofit groups that will work on translating its MOOCs into various foreign languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian, which are the native tongues of a number of countries where Coursera’s English-language MOOCs have been popular.
There is substantial demand worldwide for American higher education, but experts have warned that MOOC providers that wish to serve a global audience face a challenge in accommodating various languages and cultures. And while many MOOCs are oriented to the common languages of mathematics and numbers, language barriers have caused some problems for MOOCs that rely on peer grading.
For its part, Coursera has focused of late on expanding overseas, where, surveys have shown, most of its registrants reside. In February, Coursera announced partnerships with 16 foreign universities.
The company said its efforts to serve non-English speakers would happen in phases. “For the time being, course lectures will be translated via subtitles while all other course material, including quizzes and assignments, will remain in the course’s original language,” it said in its news release. “Coursera’s long-term goal is to have our platform localized to global audiences.” Delete the scoop?
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Faculty at several colleges have pushed back against online teaching collaborations with outside vendors, saying they want to use technology on their own terms.
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Many professors recognize that online education is changing the landscape of academe. But faculty members at several colleges are making it clear that they will not be steamrolled.
Philosophy professors at San Jose State University last week wrote an open letter saying they refused to use material from an edX course, taught by a famous Harvard University professor, for fear that California State University administrators were angling for a way to eventually gut their department.
"Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education," they wrote. At Duke University a week earlier, an undergraduate-faculty council voted down a push by the provost's office to offer small online courses for credit through 2U, a company that sells an online platform and support services to colleges.
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Are MOOCs and other online materials a threat to quality public higher education, and to our role as professors?
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The members of the philosophy department at San Jose State University think so. They recently issued an open letter to Michael Sandel, of Harvard University, objecting to his role in encouraging the use of MOOCs at public universities. The controversy stems from San Jose State’s contract with edX, a company that provides MOOCs, including one based on Sandel’s course on justice at Harvard. San Jose State has agreed to use materials provided by edX, but the philosophy department has refused to use Sandel’s online lectures in its courses.
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Competency-Based Associates Degree From College for America Is the First Sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Education for Funding Eligibility
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MANCHESTER, NH--(Marketwired - April 18, 2013) - In what is being recognized by many as a landmark in the evolution of higher education, College for America has obtained approval from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to be eligible for Title IV, Higher Education Act (HEA) funding. College for America's competency-based model is the first in the nation to be approved by the DOE under direct assessment provisions that pay for actual learning versus seat time.
Established in 2012 with support from an EDUCAUSE Next Generational Learning Challenge grant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, College for America is designed to rebuild higher education and strengthen the American workforce.
"I am excited that Southern New Hampshire University is leading the way with its competency-based associate degree program," said Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter. "Our nation needs more individuals with the knowledge, skills and training to strengthen our nation's economy, and College for America's self-paced approach and partnerships with business is an example of the kind of innovation we hope to see across the nation."
"This a major step forward, especially for working students and their employers," said Paul LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and leader on the effort to innovate the program.
"So many of them want low-cost, highly measurable degrees that actually align with the needs of employers and workforce opportunities. This new federal loan and grant eligibility not only means more access for working students... it signals recognition of a whole new way to deliver learning that we think can significantly boost national competiveness." Delete the scoop?
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In February, California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg introduced a bill that would open the door for massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera and Udacity, to offer courses for credit to public college and university students in the state. Since its introduction, Senate Bill 520 (SB 520) has generated significant controversy, and apetition by the Berkeley Faculty Association opposing the bill has collected more than 1,500 signatures.
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The Problem
When there isn't enough space in required courses, many students are forced to enroll in courses unnecessary for their program, just so they can retain the full-time student status required for financial aid. As a result, students are taking longer to complete their degrees and racking up higher levels of student debt. The Proposed Solution To alleviate the lack of access to gateway courses, Senator Steinberg proposed to allow online education providers to grant credit for equivalent courses, within specified guidelines. The bill limits the online credit courses to a maximum of 50 of the most oversubscribed courses required for program completion, fulfilling transfer requirements, or meeting general education requirements. Credit for the approved online courses would be restricted to CCC, CSU, UC, and California high school students. ... Delete the scoop?
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In thinking of return on investment, dollars and cents ought to be taken into account, but not to the exclusion of other things that matter.
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A lengthy and worthwhile read on the topic of what the value of a degree may be and how to measure it. Delete the scoop?
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Billed as Asia's forst foray into offering massive open online courses, the class on science, technology, and China is a sign of the region's growing interest in online education.
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Naubahar Sharif has been teaching science, technology, and innovation for some years at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He drew on his lectures to develop a massive open online course, or MOOC, on “Science, Technology and Society in China,” and this month it was launched on the Coursera platform – billed as Asia’s first MOOC. Delete the scoop?
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The field of massive-open-online-course providers is becoming crowded. That’s even more so at Stanford University, where Udacity and Coursera, two of the largest providers, got their start.
Now there’s a new platform to add to the list. NovoEd, which officially opened on Monday, will begin offering seven courses to the public next week, as well as 10 private courses for Stanford students. Amin Saberi, a Stanford professor and the start-up company’s founder and chief executive, said there’s a key difference between NovoEd and existing MOOC options: peer interaction.
“With this transition from brick-and-mortar classes to online learning, you shouldn’t lose the social, collaborative aspects of learning,” Mr. Saberi said. “It should be able to enable it.”
NovoEd was created by Mr. Saberi and a Ph.D. student, Farnaz Ronaghi, for use in an entrepreneurship course in March 2012. More than 80,000 students in 150 countries participated in the course by using the platform, working in teams on projects and business models.
“We had students from Silicon Valley to Russia to third-world countries in Africa,” Mr. Saberi said.
Some MOOCs have struggled to foster teamwork because of their size. In February a course at the Georgia Institute of Technology was suspended due to technical difficulties after the instructor attempted to use Google Docs to help the course’s 40,000 enrolled students to organize themselves into groups.
NovoEd is designed specifically with teamwork in mind, Mr. Saberi said. Students form groups at the beginning of each course, conduct class discussions by messaging one another or in discussion boards under an assignment, and evaluate their peers’ performance, much like team projects in face-to-face lecture courses.
NovoEd’s offerings for the public currently include courses on finance, product management, and mobile health.
One offering, “A Crash Course in Creativity,” explores how to increase your own creativity among teams and organizations. One assignment asks the teams to “look at bread in a new way” and to create presentations and video exploring the value of a loaf of bread. The videos are then viewable, and can be commented on, by everyone else in the course.
“It’s important to think about that learning is not just the mastery of skill sets or content,” Mr. Saberi said. “We want all the students to become critical thinkers. We want them to be better team leaders, better team players, and these are things you attain by working in teams and learning from your peers.” Delete the scoop?
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Philadelphia — Massive open online courses have gained renown among academics for their impressive enrollment figures and, conversely, their unimpressive completion rates.
What accounts for the high attrition in MOOCs, and what does it mean? Coursera and data researchers at several partner universities of the MOOC provider have begun trying to answer those questions by learning more about why students wash out of MOOCs—and what instructors and course designers could do to stem the tide.
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Some of that research was on display over the weekend at Coursera’s first-ever partners’ conference, where MOOC professors, instructional designers, and various invited guests spent two days talking shop.
The data so far are preliminary. But the company believes that the low completion rates in its early courses should not be read—as many critics have done—as an indictment of the MOOC format. The registration figures in MOOCs have been massive indeed. A Chroniclesurvey of MOOC professors last month found a median of 33,000 registrants for the courses that have been offered so far. One course, offered by Duke University via Coursera, saw 180,000 students sign up.
The rhetorical counterpoint to those impressive figures, which often exceed the total enrollment of large state universities, has been the massive attrition. Although millions of students have registered for courses through Coursera, the company and its university partners have awarded only 280,000 certificates of completion. In general, the rate of completion in MOOCs is believed to be around 10 percent.
But most students who register for a MOOC have no intention of completing the course, said the company’s co-founders, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. “Their intent is to explore, find out something about the content, and move on to something else,” said Ms. Koller.
The rates of completion for students who have given some indication that they plan to do the work is substantially higher. For example, for students who so much as submit the first assignment, the completion rate leaps to 45 percent.
For students who are paying $50 for the company’s new Signature Track program—which includes features designed as safeguards against identity fraud and cheating on examinations—the pass rates are even higher, at about 70 percent, Ms. Koller said.
That is even higher, she said, than the non-Signature Track students who profess in surveys to high levels of commitment to completing the course. This “suggests that having skin in the game is highly valuable,” Ms. Koller said. Delete the scoop?
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CD's replaced cassettes, and they in turn have been replaced by MP3's. GPS's replaced printed maps, and they are now being replaced by cellphones, which also happened to have replaced pay phones and many other products. There are lots of examples, but the outcome is the same: New products replace older products, and those older products become obsolete. The new products are better or cheaper or more appealing to consumers. It is not just how capitalism works; it is alsowhy it works.
That dynamic is the wheels on the metaphorical car of the market system. Sure, some people are made worse off as a result, but the benefits to consumers and other producers generally far exceed the costs to those who are hurt. In the end, society as a whole is better off, and the car keeps moving forward. As for those who lose their jobs, well, they can go back to school to get trained with new skills and eventually find another job that is more relevant to the current needs and desires of society.
That's a description of creative destruction, and basically how I have always taught the process to my students. More than that, I have always believed it to be true. But in the case of MOOCs (massive open online courses), I've allowed myself to hold onto some doubt.
No one knows for sure how popular MOOCs will become or exactly how they will alter higher education. However, given the current trajectory, it seems inevitable that, at some point, college students will have the option of taking a course with a person in a classroom or as a MOOC for an equivalent number of credits. The MOOC option will not offer the same experience, students may not find it as enjoyable, and they may not learn as much, but it will be available at a fraction of the cost of the in-person alternative. Many students will choose the MOOC, and no one should berate them for it. It is a very rational decision.
When the MOOC is a viable option, it will probably not significantly affect most large public research and elite private institutions. Those institutions sell more than an education or a degree; they offer a college experience and a level of prestige that will not diminish as a result of online courses. Some institutions will benefit from such courses.
But at smaller, lower-ranked institutions like mine—those typically with a city rather than a state in their names—MOOCs present a greater concern. Cost is a more important factor for our students in deciding whether and where to enroll. We would see decreased enrollment and tuition revenue, and without an unexpected increase in public support, we would be forced to further reduce the number of tenure-track faculty positions and/or compensation to current faculty members as a result.
Which is just another example of creative destruction: Something that is more appealing to consumers is offered that makes the older product obsolete. But this time,I am that older product. So I ask myself, will society as a whole be better off as a result? I know what the economics textbooks say, and I know what I have always told my students. But it is a lot easier to believe in a theory when it is about the world in general, rather than about your world in particular.
When I talk about creative destruction with my students now, I am not quite as dogmatic as I used to be. I tell them that there are exceptions to every theory. I do not tell them that I hope that I am one of them. Delete the scoop?
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Although many colleges with distance-education programs are seeking authorization to operate in other states, a majority are turning away students in certain states as a way of avoiding the high cost of applying to operate in them, according to a report released on Wednesday. The report, which was based on a survey conducted by three distance-education groups, says that about two-thirds of the nearly 200 colleges surveyed had applied for approval in at least one state, up from one-third in 2011. But the three organizations—the Sloan Consortium, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the WCET-WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies—also found that only 10 percent of institutions had not turned away students in some states. The U.S. Department of Education has required for decades that institutions receive authorization from the states in which they enroll students before they may receive federal student-aid funds. But for many years colleges assumed the requirement did not apply to online programs. And department officials looked the other way—until afederal rule, adopted in July 2011, explicitly extended the requirement to online and distance-education programs. Though the rule was quickly overturned, many states proceeded with new regulationsfor institutions operating distance-education programs within their borders. Some states, like Maryland, passed laws that required out-of-state institutions to pay a $1,000 fee and to register. Others, like Minnesota, sent "cease and desist" letters to institutions that refused to comply with the process. The chief obstacle for many colleges is the fees to apply for authorization in each state, which could cost an institution tens of thousands of dollars if it sought authorization in all 50 states. As a way to avoid such steep costs, some colleges have simply turned away students who apply from states with higher application prices, including Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Delete the scoop?
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In the largest survey of instructors who have taught massive open online courses, The Chronicle heard from critics, converts, and the cautious.
What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom.
The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded.
Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Since then MOOCs, which charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access, have been touted by reformers as a way to transform higher education and expand college access. Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes. 
Deb Nystrom, REVELN Consulting's curator insight,
March 18, 12:40 PM
There is some synchroncity here that this article is showing up while I'm listening to a professor at UM talk about Harvard choosing a MOOC for accounting for their entry level accounting (Brigham Young) and outsourcing professors. Professor: Wally Hopp, Associate Dean for Faculty and Research Herrick Professor of Manufacturing, Ross School of Business Positively Lean: A Path to Efficiency and Energization? Examples: Henry Ford, Joe at GM Powertrain, FelPro (300% ROI on Employee Benefits, no turnover > sold to Federal Mogul) Key themes in the blend:
Apple >> Change the world Patagonia >> Corporate responsibility (Don't buy what you don't need) Questions:
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