Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
MOOCs aren’t disruptive — unless they lead to a degree. It didn’t take long. Georgia Tech will partner with Udacity to offer an online master’s degree in computer science for $7,000, reports Forbes. The on-campus program costs $40,000.
Georgia Tech hopes to grow its master’s program from 300 students now to as many as 10,000 within three years, but expects to hire only eight new instructors.
For $150 per online course, California students will be able to earn college credit in remedial algebra, college algebra and introductory statistics. The San Jose State-Udacity pilot will be limited to 300 university, community college and high school students. Udacity will provide support services, such as online mentors.
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.”
Sebastian Thrun, who drew 160,000 students to his free, online artificial intelligence course, is quitting Stanford University to create a free online university called Udacity.
There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether, said Thrun in a talk at the DLD Conference in Munich, reports Felix Salmon of Reuters. Of 248 students who earned a perfect score, all were online students.
Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.
And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.
“I can’t teach at Stanford again,” Thrun said. He hopes to enroll 500,000 students for his first Udacity course on how to build a search engine.
It’s too bad Thrun has to leave Stanford to create Udacity, Salmon writes.
Stanford refused to issue a certificate to the 20,000 online students who finished Thrun’s course and a second open computer course, notes NPR. Instead, online students received a letter from the professor indicating their class rank.
“We are still having conversations about that,” says James Plummer, dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering. “I think it will actually be a long time — maybe never — when actual Stanford degrees would be given for fully online work by anyone who wishes to register for the courses.”
By contrast, MIT will offer a credential, for a small fee, to online students who succeed in courses offered by MITx. ”A world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputation” is putting “its brand and credibility behind open-education resources,” writes Kevin Carey.
It’s the great unbundling of the university, writes Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic. Universities used to offer a bundled package of knowledge and credentialing.
People attended university in order to learn stuff that they couldn’t learn elsewhere — because the experts weren’t elsewhere — and to be certified by those experts as having actually learned said stuff. The bundle has been a culturally powerful one.
But now: unbundling. Clearly, many universities have come, or are coming, to the conclusion that their primary product is the credentialing, and that they can give knowledge away either as a public service or as brand consolidation (choose your interpretation according to your level of cynicism).
Can universities continue to control credentialing?
I wrote about digital badges, an attempt to challenge universities’ credentialing monopoly, on the U.S. News site.
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