HigherEd: Disrupted or Disruptor? Your Choice.

“We are at or approaching a point of significant transformation where you will be able to snap modules together from a wide array of choices, or link them in ways that produce what are sometimes called stackable credentials,” says Molly Corbett Broad, president of theAmerican Council on Education, or ACE, the predominant national association of colleges and universities.

All of these alternatives to conventional higher education are growing exponentially, thanks to their flexibility and, often, considerably lower cost.

A new federal report shows that 1.3 million high school students took courses for college credit in the 2010-2011 academic year, up 67 percent from the last time the government checked, in 2003.

More than half of all colleges award at least some credit for military and career experience, according to the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL. The number of transcripts from military and corporate training courses submitted for college credit through an accreditation service provided by ACE rose 35 percent in the last 10 years, and a consortium of colleges that agree to accept credit for military experience now awards an average of just under 18 credits per year to each of more than 45,000 service members.

Meanwhile, more than six million people are enrolled in one or more college classes online,the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board report.

“You’re seeing learning becoming much more open,” says Mark Milliron, chancellor of the Texas branch of Western Governors University, which awards degrees based on “real-world competencies” obtained from work experience and elsewhere. “People have access now to lots of different learning resources, and ways to prove what they’ve learned.”

Other than at a handful of accredited alternative universities such as Western Governors, however, getting a degree in this way depends on mainstream schools accepting nontraditional credits toward one, something they’ve been slow to do. After all, it cuts into their business of providing classroom education for a fee. There are also legitimate concerns about quality. Just because ACE accredits certain military and corporate courses for academic credit doesn’t mean that colleges are required to accept them, and there’s no way of tracking whether or not they do.

Last year, when the Department of Defense asked colleges that enroll service members under the department’s tuition reimbursement plan to accept more nontraditional credits—which would have saved the government money—the colleges balked, saying it was undue interference, and the Pentagon backed down.

But under growing pressure to improve graduation rates, more colleges and universities are coming to terms with this new higher-education model.

“What we’re seeing, in dramatic ways, is this kind of informal learning beginning to creep into the more formal learning environment,” says David Theo Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and cofounder of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, which promotes technology in teaching.

A survey by the education marketing company Stamats found that offering credit for life experience helps attract the lucrative and growing segment of older-than-traditional-age college-goers. It’s also a way to meet the national goal of increasing the number of Americans with university degrees, since an estimated 37 million adults have almost, but not quite enough, college credits to get one, Milliron says.

And public universities, whose funding increasingly depends on graduation rates instead of enrollment, have an incentive to recruit students with career experience, who a CAEL study showed are more than twice as likely to graduate as students without it.

“Institutions of higher education are going to have to ask hard questions about whether internal barriers are stopping students who have learned something from getting credit for that learning because of institutional history or policy,” Milliron says.

Some states, including Colorado, Minnesota, and Vermont, aren’t waiting for their public universities to award credit for military and career experience. They’re ordering them to start that process. And a proposal in the California state Senate would push public universities in that state to accept credit for certain outside online courses, including some provided by for-profit companies.

 

One reason for all of this attention is that unconventional credit is often cheaper than the traditional kind, for both students and taxpayers. Applicants usually must pay fees to prove they’ve actually learned something elsewhere―say, by submitting portfolios or taking assessment tests―but a student who earns 15 credits for career experience can save from $1,605 at a large public university to $6,000 at a private one, according to CAEL. It also saves time. With their credits from “real-world” experience, Western Governors University says its students take an average of 35 months to earn a bachelor’s degree, compared to more than 50 months at other higher-education institutions. In March, the government gave the idea another boost by saying federal financial aid could be applied to the cost of assessing prior learning in this way.

Companies, organizations, and government agencies―including Microsoft, Disney-Pixar, Intel, NASA, and Mozilla, the company that developed the Firefox web browser—are now developing digital “badges,” which would track a person’s experience and skills in addition to, or even instead of, university degrees.

Several websites have sprung up to help students “bank” their credentials, or tell them which institutions will award them academic credit for career experience.

“People are finding themselves taking a smattering of credits and programs and life experiences, and would like to find a way for those to count,” says Ramin Sedehi, director of higher education consulting at the Berkeley Research Group.

Some activists are pushing this movement even further, suggesting that people forgo college altogether and do their higher learning elsewhere. That’s the subject of a new book called “Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will,” by Dale Stephens, head of an organization called UnCollege, who suggests that work experience, internships, online courses, and other alternatives provide the kind of education that employers value.

“I don’t have anything against universities or colleges,” says Stephens, who received a fellowship from billionaire Facebook founder Peter Thiel that pays students under 20 a $100,000 stipend to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs. “My problem is with people going to universities or colleges simply because they think that’s what expected of them.”

 

As the community-college sector faces declining state funds, heightened expectations for student success, and deep public scrutiny, many of its approximately 1,200 institutions will also go through changes in leadership. About 500 presidents are expected to retire in the next five years, according to an analysis by the American Association of Community Colleges, which is holding its annual meeting here this week. And nearly 200 colleges have new presidents at the helm since the group's meeting last year.

The challenges for community-college leaders today and for the next generation are profound, three long-serving presidents told a crowd on Monday. National attainment goals and the push to graduate more students put pressure on the sector's traditional commitment to open access, they said, just as colleges' financing structures are falling apart.

That day of reckoning is already here, said Kenneth L. Ender, president of Harper College, outside Chicago. "The current business model that we rest upon," he said, "is not sustainable."

The hard facts drew grim nods here on Sunday. Community colleges' total operating revenue is significantly less per full-time-equivalent student than it used to be: Across all colleges, that ratio declined by 29 percent, to $3,094, from 2004-5 to 2010-11, according to an analysis of federal data by Kristin Wilson, chief academic officer at Hopkinsville Community College, in rural Kentucky.

State dollars per student are dropping significantly, Ms. Wilson said, while federal dollars—including stimulus funds and allocations for special projects, excluding federal financial aid—are, on average, rising. Community colleges are growing more reliant on discrete disbursements of federal money, she said. "We're using it to scrape by."

Know Thyself

At Northern Virginia Community College, state support has dropped by 20 percent as enrollment has grown by 25 percent, said its president, Robert G. Templin Jr., on the panel. That fiscal climate, which shows no signs of easing, requires strategic, creative thinking to serve students, he said. "How do we have significantly better outcomes for them, and how do we do it at a declining cost per student?"

Delving into institutional data to set priorities is crucial, Mr. Templin said. "Don't look for a best practice at my place and try to import it to yours," he told the group. Rather, leaders should work with their institutional researchers to identify critical points in students' paths and develop programs to promote their progress.

Successful efforts require faculty input, Mr. Templin said, even when such discussion is difficult. Presidents should be prepared to contend with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief, he joked (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). As faculty and staff members try to build consensus, data should be the guide, Mr. Templin said. Evidence-based decision making is an important but rare skill, he said, one the next generation of presidents must possess.

Leaders should also embrace public accountability, said Mr. Ender, of Harper College. They ought to involve the local community in setting bold, transparent goals, he said, and gather stakeholders regularly for progress reports. The president compared the strategy to one for quitting smoking: Tell everybody you know, and let them help you get there.

Mr. Templin stressed the benefit of partnerships, particularly around the difficult issue of remedial education. "How do we prevent the need for remediation?" he asked. "We can't solve this problem inside our institutions." Working with elementary and secondary schools as one public system of education, with the same students at different points in time, holds a lot of promise, he said. He was careful not to blame those schools for the designation of so many students as unprepared for college-level work, saying that colleges often put students in remedial courses who don't belong there.

Creative Revenue

Finding funds for new projects is a perpetual challenge for community colleges, which must become more entrepreneurial, Mary F.T. Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore., said on the panel. Colleges need to focus on bringing in revenue to support student success, she said, describing Lane's effort to raise $53-million to build a new campus. "I didn't think I'd be putting together financial deals," Ms. Spilde said, but she had to.

College leaders must constantly identify potential new sources of revenue, Mr. Harper said in an interview following the panel. Right now, he is pursuing an agreement with a four-year nonprofit institution to share tuition revenue from students who would stay on Harper's main campus while pursuing a bachelor's degree. He is after private capital from corporate partners that will put their name on a curriculum. And he is in talks with a foundation seeking to finance the development of online courses and programs in career and technical education for international distribution.

"By default, you've got to find a way to finance your institution," Mr. Ender said.

Entrepreneurship has been a focus throughout the community-college meeting. On another panel, a representative of Tulsa Community College discussed licensing products and services developed through its Center for Creativity. Though not conceived to generate revenue, Houston Community College District's international programs may hold that potential. The district has worked, for example, with a state-run oil-and-gas company in Brazil that sought help with safety training.

Evolution in Learning

Innovations in technology can also help sustain community colleges, Ms. Spilde said on the presidents' panel. Students are increasingly pursuing self-paced or competency-based learning online, she said, and they may turn to community colleges for a credential. "What happens when they show up at our doors and say, 'I don't want to take a course,'" but they want certification for what they know?, she said. Institutions need a business model for that.

And if the federal government, as announced after President Obama's State of the Union address in February, starts looking into a new form of accreditation, community colleges need to be part of that conversation, Ms. Spilde said.

More reflection on community-college leadership will come in June, with a report by the Aspen Institute, which in recent years began running a competition to recognize excellence in the sector.

To navigate a challenging landscape, community-college presidents must be deliberate, Mr. Templin, of Northern Virginia, told the group. The national agenda stresses completion, but the leaders' goals must be broader, he said. "The outcome is not a degree. It's not transfer. It's to have individuals with portable credentials of market value that are in careers with family-sustaining wages."

Community colleges must commit not to let that mission be displaced, Mr. Templin said. Otherwise, he said, "we're going to find that we've sacrificed access to get our numbers up, and that our degrees don't mean anything."

The free online engineering course could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

 

When Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the California Institute of Technology, began promoting his online course on machine learning, one person he turned to was Caltech’s dean of admissions. Dr. Abu-Mostafa believed that prospective Caltech students would benefit from learning what it actually takes to be an engineer — something that high schools, on the whole, fail to teach adequately.

National Science Foundation statistics lend credence to his worries: while one in 10 students in the United States enter college with the intention of majoring in engineering, nearly half of those students fail to complete their degree requirements.

Caltech admissions officials agreed wholeheartedly, and promptly sent out an e-mail blast to applicants suggesting Dr. Abu-Mostafa’s course, Learning From Data, on iTunes U.

“University is a mystery to these students, and they really don’t know what they’re getting into a lot of the time,” said Dr. Abu-Mostafa, whose course ultimately attracted 100,000 subscribers. He estimates that one in 10 were in high school, based on the number of e-mails he received from different age groups.

“The class crystallized their interests,” he said, “and gave them some confidence going into the field.”

Now, in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students, Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.

If the program is truly unprecedented, as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

“Students who are considering taking these courses should know it’s not going to help them get into Brown.”

 

— Jesse Schreier, instructional designer at Brown University

“The real goal here is to get students interested in engineering to better understand engineering, so that they can make good decisions about what they do in the next step,” said Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown. “If they decide that they’re interested in engineering and they want to apply to different engineering schools, we want them to have all the information they need.”

The course is based more on activities and research assignments than on video lectures, in an effort to challenge students to actually build something, Dr. Drexler said. Students will also receive guidance on what types of courses they should look for when applying to colleges.

“This is the kind of innovative leadership that can be a game changer for students,” said Josh Coates, chief executive of Instructure, the software company that provided the platform for Brown’s project. “We all know we need more STEM education, and bridging the gap between college and high school with an open online course is a great way to get more kids into these kinds of fields and more interested in the college experience.”

The 500-person cap for the first course section, which began April 1, was met in December. Teachers have also expressed interest in incorporating the course work into their own classes, Dr. Drexler said.

“Students who are considering taking these courses should know it’s not going to help them get into Brown. It’s really about learning what it’s like to be an engineer,” said Jesse Schreier, the instructional designer for the course. “There’s absolutely no guarantee that Brown admissions is going to look on an applicant with kinder eyes.”

Still, Brown’s online development team is debating whether to offer a certificate of some kind to students who complete the course, which officials know would be used as yet another college application supplement. Coursera offers such certificates upon course completion, and some students are already beginning to use them to bolster their college résumés.

“There’s clearly a recognition around the country that American students would benefit from broader engineering literacy,” said Sanjay E. Sarma, director of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who applauded Brown’s efforts. “Will this play into the application? Certainly. But the last thing that I would want is for parents to have their students sit at home at the computer taking these courses at the expense of other projects.”

The officials behind the Brown initiative said their primary motivation was a larger national concern: the growing shortage of engineering graduates in a job market that demands them, as a result of misinformation, insufficient preparation and fears about the difficulty of engineering. And the idea of offering something free and open — unlike the costly, in-person summer extension programs run by Brown and many of its peers — seemed to have tremendous potential beyond just giving students a glimpse of what Brown, as a single institution, has to offer.

“If a student wants to get into the University of Michigan and they’ve actually shown that they’re already passionate about this topic, and they’ve taken that extra step to learn more about engineering, and if they have all the other credentials they need, then yes, that definitely is going to set them apart,” Dr. Drexler said. “It’s how you reflect your passion. If you look at it that way, then yes, it can be a positive addition to a college application.”

Based on the success of this course, Brown is likely to expand its MOOC offerings for high school students to other disciplines. But for now, it is approaching the project as many universities are approaching MOOCs: with cautious optimism, a sense of excitement and full acceptance that their initiatives may not succeed.

“If it weren’t for the fact that my father was a professor of engineering, I wouldn’t have known what a creative discipline it is,” said Nick McKeown, a professor at Stanford University who is teaching an online course for the university’s Class2Go program. “The word ‘engineering’ comes from the root ‘ingenious.’ It’s all about creation and invention. Teaching high school kids about that is wonderful, so I think the Brown program sounds fantastic.”

Michael Cusumano, a professor at M.I.T., raises doubts about the ultimate cost to the education field of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

 

That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with “nukes” seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education. Leading universities have scrambled to join or offer alternatives like edX, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and others.

The MOOCs movement has been greeted with equal parts enthusiasm and angst. The MOOC champions predict a technology-fueled revolution in the distribution and democratization of high-quality education. The MOOC skeptics have a variety of qualms, but especially about what is lost in the retreat of face-to-face teaching — a point eloquently made by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, in an article in the current New Republic, “MOOCs of Hazard.”

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.

His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.

The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”

But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.

Mr. Cusumano’s concerns grow out of his study of the software and media industries in the face of price pressure from free, open-source software and digital distribution over the Internet. Two-thirds of the public companies in the software industry disappeared between 1998 and 2006, as companies failed or were acquired. In the media world, Mr. Cusumano contends that newspaper and magazine companies — including The New York Times Company — made a strategic mistake by giving away their publications free on the Web. The online pay walls that publications have since put up, he said, seem to be helping to stabilize things, but only after a precipitous decline.

Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep. The damage would occur, he writes in the article, “if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry — zero — which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo.”

In our conversation, I offered the obvious counterargument. Why should education necessarily be immune from this digital, Darwinian wave, when other industries are not? Isn’t this just further evidence of the march of disruptive progress that ultimately benefits society?

Mr. Cusumano has heard this reasoning before, and he is unconvinced. In the article, he explains, “I am mostly concerned about second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges, many of which play critical roles for education and economic development in their local regions and communities.”

“In education,” Mr. Cusumano adds, “‘free’ in the long run may actually reduce variety and opportunities for learning as well as lessen our stocks of knowledge.”

Later he writes: “Will two-thirds of the education industry disappear? Maybe not, but maybe! It is hard to believe that we will be better off as a society with only a few remaining megawealthy universities.”

Education via the Internet has been overrated and could produce more dropouts than degrees.

 

Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues.

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First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.

Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. Over all, the center has produced nine studies covering hundreds of thousands of classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing.

The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.

A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English.

Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed. What they often get online is estrangement from the instructor who rarely can get to know them directly. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming.

The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.

A CERTAIN drama has become familiar in the United States (and some other advanced industrialized countries): Bankers encourage people to borrow beyond their means, preying especially on those who are financially unsophisticated. They use their political influence to get favorable treatment of one form or another. Debts mount. Journalists record the human toll. Then comes bewilderment: How could we let this happen again? Officials promise to fix things. Something is done about the most egregious abuses. People move on, reassured that the crisis has abated, but suspecting that it will recur soon.

The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down — some to a point even lower than where they began.

This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined. In the decades after World War II, homeownership and higher education became signs of success in America.

Before the housing bubble burst in 2007, banks persuaded low- and moderate-income homeowners that they could turn their houses and apartments into piggy banks. They seduced them into taking out home-equity loans — and in the end, millions lost their homes. In other cases, the banks, mortgage brokers and real-estate agents pushed aspiring homeowners to borrow beyond their means. The wizards of finance, who prided themselves on risk management, sold toxic mortgages that were designed to explode. They bundled the dubious loans into complex financial instruments and sold them to unsuspecting investors.

Everyone recognizes that education is the only way up, but as a college degree becomes increasingly essential to making one’s way in a 21st-century economy, education for those not to the manner born is increasingly unaffordable. Student debt for seniors graduating with loans now exceeds $26,000, about a 40 percent increase (not adjusted for inflation) in just seven years. But an “average” like this masks huge variations.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000. These debts are beyond students’ ability to repay, (especially in our nearly jobless recovery); this is demonstrated by the fact that delinquency and default rates are soaring. Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind. For federal loans taken out in the 2009 fiscal year, three-year default ratesexceeded 13 percent.

America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities.Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.

Compare this more-than-doubling in tuition with the stagnation in median family income, which is now about $50,000, compared to $46,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation).

Like much else, the problem of student debt worsened during the Great Recession: tuition costs at public universities increased by 27 percent in the past five years — partly because of cutbacks — while median income shrank. In California, inflation-adjusted tuition more than doubled in public two-year community colleges (which for poorer Americans are often the key to upward mobility), and by more than 70 percent in four-year public schools, from 2007-8 to 2012-13.

With costs soaring, incomes stagnating and little help from government, it was not surprising that total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year. Responsible Americans have learned how to curb their credit-card debt — many have forsaken them for debit cards, or educated themselves about usurious interest rates, fees and penalties charged by card issuers — but the challenge of controlling student debt is even more unsettling.

Curbing student debt is tantamount to curbing social and economic opportunity. College graduates earn $12,000 more per year than those without college degrees; the gap has almost tripled just since 1980. Our economy is increasingly reliant on knowledge-related industries. No matter what happens with currency wars and trade balances, the United States is not going to return to making textiles. Unemployment rates among college graduates are much lower than among those with only a high school diploma.

America — home of the land-grant university, the G.I. Bill and world-class public universities from California to Michigan to Texas — has fallen from the top in terms of university education. With strangling student debt, we are likely to fall further. What economists call “human capital” — investing in people — is a key to long-term growth. To be competitive in the 21st century is to have a highly educated labor force, one with college and advanced degrees. Instead, we are foreclosing on our future as a nation.

Student debt also is a drag on the slow recovery that began in 2009. By dampening consumption, it hinders economic growth. It is also holding back recovery in real estate, the sector where the Great Recession started.

It’s true that housing prices seem to be on the upswing, but home construction is far from the levels reached in the years before the bubble burst of 2007.

Those with huge debts are likely to be cautious before undertaking the additional burdens of a family. But even when they do, they will find it more difficult to get a mortgage. And if they do, it will be smaller, and the real estate recovery will consequently be weaker. (One study of recent Rutgers University graduates showed that 40 percent had delayed making a major home purchase, and for a quarter, the high level of debt had an effect on household formation or getting further education. Another recent study showed that homeownership among 30-year-olds with a history of student debt fell by more than 10 percentage points during the Great Recession and in its aftermath.)

It’s a vicious cycle: lack of demand for housing contributes to a lack of jobs, which contributes to weak household formation, which contributes to a lack of demand for housing.

As bad as things are, they may get worse. With budgetary pressures mounting — along with demands for cutbacks in “discretionary domestic programs” (read: K-12 education subsidies, Pell Grants for poor kids to attend college, research money) — students and families are left to fend for themselves. College costs will continue to rise far faster than incomes. As has been repeatedly observed, all of the economic gains since the Great Recession have gone to the top 1 percent.

Consider another dubious distinction: student debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy proceedings.

We’re a long way from the debtors’ prisons Dickens described. We don’t send debtors to penal colonies or put them in bonded labor. Although personal bankruptcy laws have been tightened, the principle that bankrupt individuals should be allowed a fresh start, and a chance to discharge excessive debt, is an established principle. This helps debt markets work better, and also provides incentives for creditors to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers.

Yet education loans are almost impossible to write off in bankruptcy court — even when for-profit schools didn’t deliver what they promised and didn’t provide an education that would let the borrower get a job that paid enough to pay back the loan.

We should cut off federal support for these for-profit schools when they fail to graduate students, who don’t get jobs and then default on their loans.

To its credit, the Obama administration tried to make it tougher for these predatory schools to lure students with false promises. Under the new rules, schools had to meet one of three tests, or lose their eligibility for federal student aid: at least 35 percent of graduates had to be repaying their loans; the typical graduate’s estimated annual loan payments could not exceed 12 percent of earnings; or the payments could not exceed 30 percent of discretionary income. But in 2012, a federal judge struck down the rules as arbitrary; the rules remain in legal limbo.

The combination of predatory for-profit schools and predatory lenders is a leech on America’s poor. These schools have even gone after young veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are heart-rending stories of parents who co-signed student loans — only to see their child killed in an accident or die of cancer or another disease — and, like students, can’t easily discharge these debts.

Interest rates on federal Stafford loans were set to double in July, to 6.8 percent.  Good news came on Friday: it appears that there is a temporary reprieve, as Republicans have come around. But the stay would be temporary and would not address a more fundamental issue: if the Federal Reserve is willing to lend to the banks that caused the crisis at just 0.75 percent, shouldn’t it be willing to lend to students, who will be crucial to our long-term recovery, at an appropriately low rate? The government shouldn’t be profiting from our poorest while subsidizing our richest. A proposal by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, for lower student-loan interest rates is a step in the right direction.

Along with tougher regulation of for-profit schools and the banks they connive with, and more humane bankruptcy laws, we must give more support to middle-class families struggling to send their children to college, to ensure that they have a standard of living at least equal to that of their parents.

But a real long-term solution requires rethinking how we finance higher education. Australia has designed a system of publicly provided income-contingent loans that all students must take out. Repayments vary according to individual income after graduation. This aligns the incentives of the providers of education and the receivers. Both have an incentive to see that students do well. It means that if an unfortunate event happens, like an illness or an accident, the loan obligation is automatically reduced. It means that the burden of the debt is always commensurate with an individual’s ability to repay. The repayments are collected through the tax system, minimizing the administrative costs.

Some wonder how the American ideal of equality of opportunity has eroded so much. The way we finance higher education provides part of the answer. Student debt has become an integral part of the story of American inequality. Robust higher education, with healthy public support, was once the linchpin in a system that promised opportunity for dedicated students of any means. We now have a pay-to-play, winner-take-all game where the wealthiest are assured a spot, and the rest are compelled to take a gamble on huge debts, with no guarantee of a payoff.

Even if compassion isn’t a factor — even if we focus just on recovery now and growth and innovation tomorrow — we must do something about student debt. Those concerned about the damage America’s growing divide is doing to our ideals and our moral character should put student debt at the top of any reform agenda.

The university's Arts & Sciences Council rejected a partnership with 2U, which had formed a consortium of top colleges to offer such courses.

 

The faculty of Duke University's undergraduate college drew a line in the sand last week on online education: Massive online experiments are fine, but there will be no credit-bearing online courses at Duke in the near future.

The university's Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education.

2U's defeat at Duke marked the second time in a month that undergraduate faculty members at a top liberal-arts college had struck down a proposed deal with an online-teaching consortium. On April 16, professors at Amherst College rejected an invitation to join edX, a nonprofit provider of massive open online courses.

Like the Amherst faculty, members of the faculty council at Duke passed an alternative resolution affirming that they intended to pursue online education—just not like this one, right now.

Duke signed a contract last year with 2U pledging to develop online courses, the first of which would be offered on the 2U platform in September. But a late push by skeptical faculty members, many of whom resented the Duke administration for not consulting with them before entering into a preliminary agreement with 2U, set the stage for a close vote.

In a letter published in the student newspaper one day before the vote, 75 professors came out against the proposed partnership.

Related ContentWhy Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOCs, at Least for Now

"While paying Duke tuition," the authors wrote, "students will watch recorded lectures and participate in sections via Webcam—enjoying neither the advantages of self-paced learning nor the responsiveness of a professor who teaches to the passions and curiosities of students."

Taking the Plunge

The next day their representatives on the Arts & Sciences Council killed the proposal by a 16-to-14 vote, with two abstentions.

While noncredit MOOCs have dominated headlines, 2U has been ushering top institutions into online education at a more modest pace and scale. The company, formerly called 2tor, has developed fully online graduate programs for several high-profile universities since 2008, including Georgetown University and the University of Southern California.

More recently, the company has been making inroads at undergraduate colleges. In November it announced that it would work with undergraduate faculty members at 10 institutions,including Duke, and rebranded itself "2U" in the process.

The idea was to get a whole group of colleges to take the plunge into online, credit-bearing courses together. Colleges in the consortium would offer online courses that resembled those they were accustomed to teaching on their campuses.

Students would log in to virtual classrooms at designated times, along with their professors. They would be able to see and hear one another well enough to have group discussions. Courses would be small and would be restricted to tuition-paying students enrolled at member colleges. Those included Emory University, the University of Notre Dame, and Washington University in St. Louis, among others.

At Duke, after it was announced that the university would be part of 2U's consortium, several faculty committees spent months refining a proposal that would eventually have to pass a vote by the Arts & Sciences Council for the plan to proceed, said Thomas W. Robisheaux, a professor of history and chair of the council.

Limits were placed on the number of credits students could earn online. Caveats were created to ensure that Duke's on-campus offerings would not be cannibalized. Individual academic departments would be allowed to opt out of the program, and the university as a whole would commit to only three years of involvement.

In all, the proposal was reviewed and modified by three standing faculty committees in addition to the ad hoc committee appointed to draft it, said Mr. Robisheaux.

"Those of us who serve the council," he said, "were taken aback by the argument that there wasn't adequate faculty input."

Taking Umbrage

But many professors had taken umbrage at the notion that Duke's provost, Peter Lange, had signed a contract with 2U with little faculty input.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Lange said that the faculty council's vote did indeed supersede the contract, and that Duke would not be part of the 2U consortium. Chancellor Patterson, a spokesman for 2U, said the company had no objection to the university's reneging on the agreement.

Chip Paucek, chief executive officer at 2U, said he did not worry that the loss of Duke would imperil the future of the company's undergraduate consortium.

"Schools have different processes and procedures, and it's just really not appropriate for me to comment on those procedures," said Mr. Paucek. "I do believe there is very strong interest in this level of institution to continue to experiment with online education."

The company still plans to offer 11 courses from other top colleges in the fall, he said.

Only one Duke course, according to Mr. Paucek, had been planned for the fall—an adapted version of a course in behavioral finance, taught by Emma B. Rasiel, an associate professor of economics.

In an e-mail interview, Ms. Rasiel said she was disappointed that the partnership had been derailed.

"Far from having to make compromises, I would argue that, with 2U's expertise and support, we would have produced just as rigorous and pedagogically valid an educational experience as those I aspire to provide in a regular classroom setting," said Ms. Rasiel.

However, she added, "I understand that there are many different points of view among my colleagues, and respect their right to express their perspectives."

Members of the faculty council concluded last week's meeting by passing a different resolution, to "remain committed to continuing their current practice of exploring and adopting a variety of online platforms with which to deliver the highest quality liberal-arts education."

But Mr. Robisheaux said there was "no specific other project that we in Arts & Sciences have identified" that would satisfy the criteria of the faculty.

A comprehensive and up-to-date list of MOOC providers.

 

The recent emergence of Massive Open Online Courses, commonly known as MOOCs, is revolutionizing the online education world and is having a profound impact on higher education. With the growing adoption of MOOCs, the number of MOOC providers has also increased many folds.  Below is a comprehensive and up-to-date list of MOOC providers; might be helpful to all interested.

Peace and cheers.

List of MOOC ProvidersEdX - A Not-for-profit enterprise with MIT and Harvard universities as founding partners.Coursera - A social entrepreneurship company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University.NovoEd - Rebranded version of Stanford’s Venture Lab, with a special focus on students collaboration and real-world course projects.Udacity - Udacity was an outgrowth of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course online for free in which over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled.Futurelearn - The first UK-led multi-institutional platform, partnering with 17 UK universities, offering MOOC to students around the world. It is a private company owned by the Open University.OpenUpEd - First Pan-European MOOC initiative, with support of the European commission.  It includes partners from 11 countries.iversity - A company with a diverse interdisciplinary team from Berlin presently offering MOOC  production fellowship and collaboration network for academia.Open2Study - An initiative of Open Universities Australia which itself is a leading provider  online education through collaboration of several Australian universities.Canvas - An open, online course network that connects students, teachers & institutions10gen Education - an online learning platform run by 10gen (the MongoDB company)OpenLearning  Class2Go – UWA  Class2Go – Stanford - Now in maintenance mode. Will be merged with edX platform.MRUniversity - Focusing on economics courses, founded by two GMU professorsAcademic EarthP2PU - Peer to Peer University is a non-profit online community based learning platform, founded with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation.   Udemy - An online learning platform that allows anyone to host their video courses.Caltech’s ‘Learning From Data’ CourseOpenHPI - The educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, focusing on courses in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).UoPeople – University of the People (UoPeople) is a tution-free, non-profit, online academic institution offering undergraduate programs in Business Administration and Computer Science.  Saylor - a non-profit organization that provides over 280 free, self-paced courses.World Education University - WEU UnimoociDESWEB

In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes Huntington, a writer living in Maine,thought of ways to spend her time. She confided in a letter: “The radio has been a source of unfailing diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be broadcasted.” Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses.

As educators contemplate the MOOCs of our day—massive open online courses—they would do well to consider how earlier generations dealt with technology-enhanced education.

We are not the first generation to believe that technology can transcend distance and erode ignorance. Nearly a century ago, educators were convinced that radio held that same potential. The number of radios in the United States increased from six or seven thousand to 10 million between 1921 and 1928. Many universities explored the possibility of broadcasting courses across the country and allowing anyone to enroll. Some onlookers believed those courses would transform higher education and eliminate lecture halls and seminar rooms. One observer noted, “The nation has become the new campus,” while another celebrated the “‘University of the Air,’ whose campus is the ether of the earth, whose audience waits for learning, learning, learning.”

By 1922, New York University had established a radio station, through which “virtually all the subjects of the university [would] be sent out.” Eventually a multitude of universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Kansas State, Ohio State, NYU, Purdue, Tufts,  and the Universities of Akron, Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Utah, offered radio courses. Subjects ranged from Browning’s poems to engineering, agriculture to fashion.

While each institution ran its courses differently, there were commonalities. Often, students registered by mail and received a syllabus by return mail. Some then mailed in assignments to the faculty. Several universities offered credit.

Hopes ran high that these courses might spread knowledge more democratically—that they would, in the words of one commentator, make the “’backwoods,’ and all that the word connotes … dwindle if … not entirely disappear as an element in our civilization.” By offering education to people from all walks of life, radio would reduce rural populations’ isolation and mitigate class differences.

Yet gradually problems emerged, and doubts spread that on-air courses would ever fully replace traditional colleges. First was the issue of attrition. Like most modern-day courses taught at a distance, completion rates were disappointing. Of those enrolled in one course, only half took exams. There were reports that listeners’ interest in erudition often competed with the temptations of entertainment. Listeners might tune into a lecture occasionally, but not with the regularity or dedication ardent advocates predicted.

Some also complained that the learning was passive.  In 1924, the journalist Bruce Bliven skeptically asked: “Is radio to become a chief arm of education?  Will the classroom be abolished, and the child of the future be stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket?” Answering his own question, Bliven wrote, “A good mind … must be built, not stuffed. … Radio, of course, faces squarely against this whole tide.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge was that radio did not offer opportunities for social interaction in the way that traditional courses did. A sociologist noted  in 1927, “There are certain fundamental things in man’s nature that tend to show us that broadcasting cannot … supersede the theater, the concert,  … or the lecture hall.” He continued, “Broadcasting has hardly any gregarious or association appeals.”

Finally, even when students endured the isolation and passivity of this new mode of learning, conquered the temptations of popular radio programs, and finished a course, it wasn’t clear what that meant. Students in Kansas State’s radio classes received certificates verifying they had participated in “the college of the air,” but these were not the same as real diplomas. Other colleges tried to make the classes count for university credit: Between 1923 and 1940, 13 institutions offered courses for credit, and nearly 10,000 students enrolled. But a mere 17 percent actually received credit, and by the 1940-41 academic year, there was only one radio course in the United States for which a student could earn credit—and nobody enrolled in it.

Decades later, as we contemplate MOOCs, much of this sounds familiar. In discussions of radio courses in the 1920s and 30s, and in the euphoria over online courses today, university administrators, along with journalists, gush about the potential of technology to extend the geographic reach of the university, even while acknowledging MOOCs’ experimental nature, the lack of a way to monetize them, and the need to build in greater interaction between lecturer and audience.

Admittedly, the past is not the present, and the “college of the air” is not a MOOC. MOOCs offer more possibilities for interaction than radio did. Yet while participants in MOOCs report a good deal of interaction among students, they report little to no communication with their professors—unsurprising, given the student-faculty ratio. And like radio, MOOCs still can’t offer the level of sociability or one-on-one interactions that brick-and-mortar classes do. (Even regular online courses don’t do that very well: Our cash-strapped, time-pressed students confide that while online classes are convenient, they still prefer to take courses in a classroom, with a professor, on our campus.)

The problem of what MOOCs add up remains. While some universities have promised to accept them for credit, in the long term, we may find, as proponents of radio did, that the courses play at best a minor role in helping students earn degrees.

Finally, MOOCs, like radio courses of the 20s, face competition from temptations less present in the traditional classroom. Many radio listeners resolved to “attend” courses, only to have those resolutions undermined by the distractions of easy listening. When there is no instructor physically present, attrition and inattention abound.

This isn’t to say that modern universities are perfect. But the limitations of early-20th-century “universities of the air” and 21st-century MOOCs remind us of what real universities do well. While MOOCs expose students to information, that is not the most fundamental dimension of learning. Perhaps most central to an education are the habits of mental discipline and the motivation it instills. Traditional colleges offer engaged professors who care if students attend class, answer their questions, and help them stay focused. Colleges offer spaces for a type of sociability that broadcast radio and MOOCs have yet to replicate. So long as they offer those advantages, universities are unlikely to disappear into the ether.

Stephen M. Kosslyn is founding dean of the Minerva Project, a for-profit institution that hopes to compete with the Ivy League.

 

Many administrators at traditional colleges might hesitate to step up to lead a brand-new institution whose founders proclaim that it will be "a top-tier university" designed to provide "what an Ivy League education should be about," and a for-profit one at that.

But that does not seem to daunt Stephen M. Kosslyn, 64, founding dean of the Minerva Project, which plans to open in the fall of 2015.

In Mr. Kosslyn, the project has a leader with 30 years of experience as a professor of psychology and dean of social sciences at Harvard University, a pioneer in cognitive neuroscience who two years ago took his skills to the directorship of the highly regarded Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Why move from a prestigious private institution to an unproven, risky venture? "I see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to start from scratch and create something new," says Mr. Kosslyn, speaking by phone from Minerva's offices, in San Francisco.

At existing universities, he says, "too many legacy systems" obstruct reforms. Among those systems are large lecture classes in which, research shows, a majority of students are in something close to a sleep state. At Minerva, he says, "we don't want the boring, talking-head thing."

Even massive open online courses, or MOOCs, all the rage, are "just an extension of the way things are already done," he says—experts handing down pearls of wisdom to scribbling students who rarely ask a question.

Minerva plans, instead, "a kind of academic boot camp," online and in the classroom, beginning with cornerstone courses that alert students to content in later courses while instilling core skills in negotiation, rhetoric, human motivation, learning, and memory.

Minerva will encourage students to rotate through designated housing in four of its seven base cities, only two of them in the United States. It will sponsor such extracurricular activities as tours of cities' cultural institutions as well as provide standard extracurricular offerings: student newspaper, clubs, sports.

Ben Nelson, Minerva's chief executive, who is a former president of Snapfish, an online service for hosting and printing photos, says he heard from many impressive candidates for the project's deanship. But he and fellow Minerva officials—among them Lawrence H. Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard and former U.S. secretary of the treasury, andBob Kerrey, a former president of the New School and a past U.S. senator—selected Mr. Kosslyn because "he's pretty much out of central casting, if I sat down in a laboratory and created the perfect candidate."

Mr. Kosslyn hadn't been looking for a job until he met Mr. Nelson and realized that Minerva offered a culmination of his whole career in studying effective teaching-and-learning strategies, in particular those based on his developmental- and cognitive-psychology studies. "So I was absolutely ripe to make this change," he says.

He will begin by hiring leaders and faculty members for the four planned colleges of Minerva's School of Arts & Sciences, and setting curricula based on recent research on online, seminar-based instruction.

Faculty members will range from early to late career, and be paid at competitive rates, Minerva says. Their primary affiliation will be with Minerva while on a three-year contract, but they will be free to continue their research by using facilities at universities affiliated with Minerva, or alongside colleagues elsewhere. To facilitate that arrangement, Minerva will hold classes on Tuesdays through Thursdays.

The project has secured $25-million in venture capital. "We needed money to get things started, but then we'll have to have students, too," Mr. Kosslyn says. To be viable, Minerva will need to enroll about as many undergraduates as Ivy League universities do—in the range of 5,000 to 8,000. He hopes that much-lower tuition fees, and the lure of a novel, globe-hopping undergraduate degree, will encourage students to enroll.

EDUCAUSE Review Online

 

Key Takeaways

• A turning point will occur in the higher education model when a MOOC-based program of study leads to adegree from an accredited institution — a trend that has already begun to develop.

 

• Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance.

 

• MOOCs represent a postindustrial model of teaching and learning that has the potential to undermine and replace the business model of institutions that depend on recruiting and retaining students for location-bound, proprietary forms of campus-based learning. 

 

MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credittoward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution. With this new business model, students might still have to pay to certify their credentials, but not for the process leading to their acquisition. If free access to a degree-granting curriculum were to occur, the business model of higher education would dramatically and irreversibly change. As Nathan Harden ominously noted, "recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information."1

Colleges have a problem here: the way in which the core services of education are rendered is changing, but the underlying business model is not. This widening disconnect threatens not only the financial viability of traditional campuses following the "Law of More,"2 but, more fundamentally, their rationale.

 

A number of converging trends pose a challenge to brick-and-mortar institutions:

1. the emergence of the learning sciences and their application to educational practice,

2. the movement toward competency-based education, and

3. new business models that effectively combine instructional quality, lower cost, and increased access through unlimited scalability (MOOCs).

 

A turning point will occur when a MOOC-based program of study leads to a degree from an accredited institution. Indeed, we are already partially there: students can now receive transfer credit toward a degree from an accredited institution for learning not obtained at a college or university.

 

THE END OF THE NUCLEAR INSTITUTION

There is compelling reason to think that unbundling institutional knowledge provision and credentialing is not only gaining momentum but is inevitable. Recent events confirm Peter Stokes's observation that the fusion of the core elements of land-based education (faculty, curriculum, credentials) is no longer inseparably tied to a single institution.

 

The emergence of MOOCs as an alternative to location-bound, proprietary forms of campus-based learning and portals like edX, Coursera, and Udacity that host them undermine the individually crafted course model that sustains the "college credit monopoly."

 

The acceptance of credit for MOOCs by accredited institutions, such as Colorado State University's Global Campus,Antioch University,San Jose State University, Georgia State University, and the recently announced MOOC2Degree collaboration between dozens of public universities and Academic Partnerships, the impetus from Gates Foundation grants to develop MOOCs for "high enrollment, low-success" introductory courses, and the partnership between the Saylor Foundation andExcelsior College and StraigherLine Are all opening up a path to credit for free and low-cost courses. A parallel movement away from seat-time to competency-based learning at Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and the University of Wisconsin System further erodes the value proposition underlying the traditional model of land-based education.

 

MOOCs, as currently designed, address two of the three challenges facing postsecondary education: access and cost. MOOC-based degree programs would not only democratize education, but their scalability would help end the unsustainable trajectory of tuition. They are an effective remedy to the "cost disease" plaguing higher education12 and a viable solution to the problem of providing global access to educational credentials.

 

 

MOOCs: QUALITY MATTERS

Notwithstanding the importance of their role in reducing cost and expanding access, the remaining unresolved issue facing the acceptance of MOOCs is access to what? The major obstacle to their acceptance relates to the third challenge: their quality. As some rightly point out, current course models can aptly be described as "self-service learning and crowdsourced teaching." Although self-directed learning and peer mentoring have instructional benefits when part of a well-designed curriculum, most MOOCs (especially in STEM areas) are designed in a way that skews toward autodidacts and more advanced learners. Novice learners needing instructional guidance are largely on their own and no better off perhaps than those in a large gateway course delivered in a lecture hall on campus. Although improving the quality of student learning is one of the priorities of the major MOOC providers, most of their courses currently lack a sophisticated learning architecture that effectively adapts to the individual needs of each learner.

 

Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance. According to the most recent Babson Research Group survey, institutional decision makers have yet to be convinced of the value of MOOCs. Although not specifically attributing their skepticism to the perceived quality of MOOCs, the report finds that only 28 percent of chief academic officers believe that they are a sustainable method for offering courses.14 What potential, then, do MOOCs have not only to improve learning but to provide the best possible educational experience? Contrary to what some may think, designing the best learning environments does not entail their being taught by the best professors or affiliated with elite universities. Instead of simply using scholarly reputation and institutional prestige as quality standards, we should judge MOOCs by how well they enable the conditions that optimize learning for each student.

 

Although critics may scoff at the simplistic design of most current MOOCs, it would be shortsighted to dismiss them as hopelessly inferior to classroom-based instruction. If there is one lesson from the history of disruptive innovation, it is that we often wrongly assume that a product or practice that dominates a current market defines enduring standards of optimal quality. It would be a mistake, then, to think that the near-term shortcomings of MOOCs inhibit their potential to improve in quality. MOOCs and other forms of open curricula will transform how people learn only to the extent that they enable effective learning. What, then, might a learning-optimized MOOC look like?

 

MOOCs AS PRECISION BUILT COURSEWARE

 

We do not need to look far to find a model. Given the pioneering research of Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues, we do not need to speculate about the conditions that produce effective learning. Of three learning conditions — tutoring, mastery learning, and conventional classroom instruction — the least effective was classroom-based group instruction.15 The most effective was a combination of one-to-one tutoring and mastery learning: Bloom estimated that about 90 percent of students receiving tutoring and corrective feedback can perform at two standard deviations above the average student taught by conventional group instruction.16 Subsequent research by Van Lehn found that, although the effect size Bloom claimed for human tutoring might be too high, it supports the general conclusion that intelligent tutoring systems, unlike conventional classrooms, have the potential to approximate Bloom's Two Sigma effect by customizing feedback and targeted guidance to the individual learning needs of each student.17 When embedded into digital content to provide context-specific coaching and guidance, cognitive tutors and feedback loops can incrementally guide each learner along a personal path toward progressively greater understanding and mastery.18

As digital environments that personalize learning, MOOCs have the potential to serve as "educational positioning systems" that precisely navigate students through their curriculum along individual "pathways and routes to maximize student success."19 Initial results indicate that courseware explicitly designed in accordance with effective practices drawn from the learning sciences and enhanced with learning analytics to function as educational positioning systems can have a positive impact on student performance.20 MOOCs can be designed, therefore, as precursors of course exemplars — early prototypes of optimized learning environments that continuously improve educational practice through application of the learning sciences. In contrast to go-it-alone legacy practices that combine batch-processed instruction with folk pedagogical approaches to teaching, the design of MOOCs as course exemplars would systematically apply research–based principles and practices to create the conditions that best enable each student to learn.21 Innovative MOOC design could therefore act as a catalyst for transitioning from our current handcrafted model of teaching to precision-based exemplars.

 

Fortunately, already completed foundational work can be adapted to build a large-scale research infrastructure for supporting the development of MOOCs as precision-built courseware. At the epicenter of applied research in the learning sciences, Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative and the affiliated Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center have led the efforts to transform education into a science. Courseware development projects funded through the Community College Open Learning Initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenge Grants, and APLU/OLI Multi-institutional Cognitive Coursewares Design initiative use the OLI's research-based methodology and data-driven design model to improve learning systematically through a cyclic process of iterative feedback. Although designing courseware that functions as learning exemplars is not the primary goal of the OLI, MOOCs could be designed using its data-driven model to develop courseware that massively individualizes learning. OLI-designed MOOCs, therefore, offer an opportunity to replace intuitive approaches to teaching with practices that enable more effective and efficient forms of learning.

 

A NEW BUSINESS MODEL

The emergence of a new educational model based on MOOCs fits the evolutionary pattern of Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. Christensen and Wessel identified a business model's "extendable core" as the basis of its performance advantage.22 If MOOCs turn out to be more than just a fad, it will be because their extendable core confers a competitive advantage that enables them to attract new customers and extend their customer base.23 The extendable core of precision-built MOOCs would consist of their ability to scale learning-optimized courseware. Their principal advantage would not simply consist, then, in their being more convenient or cheaper or "good enough," but in their being more effective in producing better learning.

 

Five characteristics in particular define the extendable core of precision education:

1. Its research-based methodology produces learning-optimized course architectures.

2. It is maximally effective because it individualizes learning.

3. It is efficient because it is competency based.

4. It is scalable.

5. It is cost-effective.

 

If precision education were adopted as the design standard for MOOCs, it would improve the quality of learning for students across all socioeconomic levels and demographic areas. It would affect not only students seeking convenient and affordable options but also students enrolling in the "full-service" sector of the educational market dominated by traditional land-based institutions. In closing the quality differential between MOOC-based curricula and locally crafted instruction, precision-built courseware would gradually eliminate the distinction between "high-end" and "low-end" education. There would only be one kind of learning — optimized for each individual. Effectively designed and organized into a coherent curriculum, MOOCs would have the potential to usher in an entirely new business model of higher education.

 

THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY FROM DISRUPTION

In their defense, legacy institutions might counter that Harden's point about the destabilizing effect of the Internet is largely irrelevant because they offer students more than just information. As Christensen pointed out, brick-and-mortar institutions have advantages that are not easily duplicated online: they provide an on-campus experience that offers students (who can afford it) myriad socialization and networking opportunities.24 According to conventional thinking, college campuses, unlike online networks, serve as career and relationship incubators. But are even these advantages safe from disruption?

 

MOOCs are beginning to compete with one of the key elements of the extendable core of location-based education: they are challenging the proposition that in-person, on-campus networking confers a decided advantage for those seeking to parlay their degrees into jobs. Recently the major for-profit MOOC providers, Coursera and Udacity, disclosed that mining and brokering talent for business clients are primary drivers behind their business model.25 Coursera's Career Services, for example, proposes to use MOOCs to identify and channel talent to high-tech businesses. By taking advantage of MOOC-enabled recruitment opportunities, talented individuals need not wait to earn a degree before successfully marketing their credentials. If MOOCs can be used to create a system that rewards demonstrable competency, then they will further undermine the value of campus-based networking. When used to connect talent directly to prospective employers, MOOCs can circumvent one of the few remaining rationales for seeking a traditional college experience.

 

Note that, in the "recruitment services" model, MOOCs do not create talent — they identify it and broker its acquisition. Rather than create intellectual capital, they serve primarily as a means of certifying its possession. Even if MOOCs were used solely as a recruitment tool, however, the rationale for preferring a precision-built model of learning that develops the competencies being measured would still hold. In fact, the for-profit model of MOOCs depends on and presupposes the existence of an optimally designed process that develops the competencies they evaluate. Precision education therefore underlies the rationale for MOOCs as both academic exemplars and as a litmus test for identifying those who possess relevant job-related competencies. Whether the motivation for adopting a MOOC is for-profit or nonprofit, the success of either model depends on a design strategy that optimizes learning.

 

A POSTINDUSTRIAL MODEL OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Precision-built MOOCs challenge the assumption that students need to come to a campus to interact with resident faculty in order to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for credentialing. They therefore have the potential to undermine the dominant role that campus-based educational institutions have had as exclusive providers of knowledge and credentials. As competition with MOOCs increases, they will face the following dilemma: Should they compete with MOOC-based curricula head-to-head, or should they begin to assimilate MOOCs into their traditional, residency-based curriculum? On one hand, for those institutions without the cachet of being highly selective, participation in the for-profit MOOC model is problematic: acting as a talent broker for employers would likely siphon away talented, potential degree-seeking students. It would be great for employers and for students who are qualified to transition into good jobs, but not so great for institutions that depend on cultivating and retaining residential talent. On the other hand, elite private and flagship public universities with established brands might choose to offer MOOCs on the basis that they would not pose a threat to their residential operations. But precision-built MOOCs will eventually compromise even their residential academic model as well. Students who would still prefer, for nonacademic reasons, to pay a tuition premium for a campus experience would likely be at a competitive disadvantage if their curriculum were locally crafted instead of learning optimized. On the strength of their extendable core, therefore, MOOCs represent a postindustrial model of teaching and learning that has the potential to undermine and replace the business model of all institutions that depend on recruiting and retaining students for on-campus studies.

When Fatimah Wirth decided to teach a massive open online course about how to run a virtual classroom successfully, she did not expect it to turn into a case study for the opposite.

But after a series of design flaws and technical glitches turned Ms. Wirth’s MOOC, “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” into an Internet punch line, the instructional designer and her colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology decided on Saturday to suspend the course.

The course got off to a bad start; one student reported that the first e-mail he got from the instructor “was not an introduction to the course per se, nor instructions for getting started, but rather an apology for the technical glitches that were, unbeknownst to me, already occurring.”

Ms. Wirth had tried to use Google Docs to help the course’s 40,000 enrolled students to organize themselves into groups. But that method soon became derailed when various authors began editing the documents. Things continued downhill from there; some students also had problems downloading certain course materials that had been added to the syllabus at the last minute. When the confusion continued, Georgia Tech decided to call a timeout.

The company on Sunday announced that it would reopen the course at an unspecified date. Richard A. DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, told The Chronicle he expected the course would be live again “in a matter of days.”

In the meantime, Coursera is dealing with the backlash against its first aborted MOOC since it began offering the massive courses early last year. This is the first time the company has suspended a course, said Daphne Koller, its co-founder, in an interview. “Given that we’ve launched well over 100 courses, I think that’s a pretty good track record,” she said.

There is still debate about whether MOOCs can replicate the educational experience of a traditional classroom, but in general the large-scale online courses have managed to avoid being panned outright. Udacity, a competing MOOC provider, was forced to cancel a mathematics course last summer due to concerns over quality—but the incident appears not to have significantly damaged that company’s brand.

Still, the false start of Georgia Tech’s online-education MOOC drew ire from some observers.

“While it was made clear from the beginning that the university is still testing the waters for online courses like this one, I feel kind of cheated,” wrote one student on her blog.“Something as fundamental to a course as the access to important learning materials is something that needs to be sorted out in the planning phase, not in the first application phase.”

Ms. Koller said that while Coursera regretted its role in fielding a course that was not ready for prime time, the episode probably will not lead the company to circumscribe the methods of its instructors.

“If we turn out to be overly prescriptive, it might prevent experiments that are successful,” she said, “even if it also prevents experiments that are not successful.”