Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Some students may get college credit for passing massive online open courses now that the American Council on Education (ACE) has certified five Coursera MOOCs taught by university professors.
But it’s up to universities to decide whether to grant credit. Duke won’t even let its own students get credit for the ACE-certified Bioelectricity and Genetics courses taught by Duke professors.
Don’t sneer at the low-cost online degree, writes a correspondence-school graduate who went on to earn a PhD, work as a professor and run a think tank. For many people, the choice is cost-effective higher education or none at all.
The hot way to earn low-cost college credits: Take a free online course and pass a “challenge exam.”
Online learning will replace residential campuses predicts Nathan Harden in The End of the University as We Know It in The American Interest. Only the elite universities will have bricks, mortar and ivy.
The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
Community colleges will survive to serve students who need an instructor, writes a professor.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are expanding rapidly, reports the New York Times. But where’s the money?
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.
In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.
. . . New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.
All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.
Coursera is trying to create “revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers,” reports the Times.
Selling certificates of completion requires a way to verify students are doing their own work. Verification could use typing patterns, reports the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
eCornell is trying to enroll MOOC students in a paid follow-up class.
If students can earn transferrable credit — or perhaps employer-designed certifications — then there’s gold in them thar MOOCs.
A wonderful site called Retropundit has the news from 1913: In 50 years, Tufts professor predicts moving pictures will make professors obsolete.
In a speech reported by the Boston Daily Globe, Tufts Professor Edwin C. Bolles hailed recent inventions which “make moving pictures talk” and predicted:
Fifty years from today a college faculty will consist essentially of a president, a janitor and a moving-picture man. . . . The professors will be able to give their lectures without even entering the class room, the moving picture films will reproduce their voice and every one of their characteristic gestures and postures.
“One suspects fifty years may prove too short a span of time for such radical changes in our system of higher education,” writes Retroprundit. ” Time will tell.”
Soon, more college students will be able to earn credits for competency, whether they learned through a free online course, on-the-job training, military experience or independent study.
Khan Academy founder Salman Khan talks about his new book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, in an interview with MIT Technology Review. Instead of the Prussian model — students march in lockstep through the curriculum — Khan believes technology will make “mastery learning” practical.
Everyone advances at his or her own pace. Don’t try algebra until you know your arithmetic. Spend less time in lectures and more in hands-on problem solving.
Most students can be motivated to learn, if they can go at their own pace, Khan says. “The core reason for students disengaging is that they are frustrated. They’re in algebra class but don’t have a good foundation in pre-algebra or arithmetic.”
Khan Academy is “investing heavily” in analytics, says Khan. “What does a student know? What does a student not know? How effective is the tutorial?” In elementary and middle schools using Khan in the classroom, teachers are very enthusiastic about the real-time learning assessments — more so than the videos.
Online learning will revolutionize higher education and liberate students from ever-rising college costs, Khan says.
Here’s what I think it could look like in five years: the learning side will be free, but if and when you want to prove what you know, and get a credential, you would go to a proctoring center [for an exam]. And that would cost something. Let’s say it costs $100 to administer that exam. I could see charging $150 for it. And then you have a $50 margin that you can reinvest on the free-learning side.
If students can earn credible credits by taking free online classes, the college cartel will be broken, writes Jeff Selingto at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Now universities often reject transfer credits, claiming the quality of instruction doesn’t match their own, he writes.
. . . what happens when students arrive at the registrars’ office with credit-bearing courses from professors at Stanford, Penn, and Princeton? What will the excuse be then to reject the credits—that the courses were free? Such an excuse might finally expose the true reason many colleges refuse to accept transfer credits: They want students to pay them tuition for a class . . .
It all depends on assessment. If there’s a credible, cost-effective way to measure learning, then everything changes.
Colleges aren’t good at remedial education, writes Ohio University economist Richard Vedder. Few remedial students go on to earn a degree. Colleges should outsource remediation and concentrate on college-level instruction.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were developed for motivated, independent learners. Now the Gates Foundation is funding proposals to create MOOCs for remedial students.
Recent Comments