Online education has been in the news lately. On one end, a number of elite universities (Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and others) started offering free online courses, or make coursework (teachers notes, exercises, curricula, videos) available online. On the other side of the spectrum, an epic battle between University of Virginia's President and the governing board, seems to have centered around progress in online education (or lack thereof).
So what is going on? Our first link is to a N.Y. Times article about Coursera, an online education venture, and the deal it signed with a consortium of top universities. According to the article "In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally." MOOCs burst into the news when a Stanford professor offered one such course, which enrolled some 100,000 learners, a few of which actually finished the course. The intention of the course, as I recall, was both to offer an educational opportunity to learners beyond the confines of Stanford, and to conduct research on the best way to teach the masses using a MOOC. A similar experiment is conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, with free language and humanities courses. Other efforts include Khan Academy, University of People, EdX and Udacity. Most of these sites offer no credit, and those that do require a small fee. The article brings up two problems that complicate offering credit to MOOCs participants - cheating and grading.
A N.Y.Times opinion piece, as well as the previous article, bring up another shortcoming of MOOCs - the lack of personal interaction between teacher and student, and among students and their peers. In a way, similar problem exists with open universities, which offer education through guided self learning, for a hefty tuition. The quality of open education, not a good fit for everyone, was found not to be as good as that of regular universities (though whether the reason is the schools or the learners they attract may be an open questions). Finally, a Wharton article discusses the technical, social and business aspects of online education.
So why do I see this trend as the death of the university, instead of an opportunity to reach a larger 'consumer base'? Because universities are not a monolith, and what's good for the elite is not necessary for the run of the mill. Free online learning will not harm the former, but will damage the latter.
1. Elite universities will probably benefit from sharing their courses online. It is an opportunity to optimize teaching, offer the world a glimpse of the institutions, and perhaps recruit the best and brightest of the online learner universe. The financial structure of elite institution depends on endowments (which comes from rich alumni), federal and other grants (through research by professors) - tuition is a small part of the income stream.
2. Lower tier universities, in contrast, have little in the way of research grants and support from rich alumni, and depend on tuition to a larger degree. If a substantial portion of their students choose alternative learning methods, and enrollment dropped, these institution will be hurt. With the cost of education rising at a neck-breaking pace, fewer students can afford such institutions (unlike the rich constituency of elite colleges, which is doing fine if not better than ever).
3. Alternative universities will pick up the slack. Already at least one company, University of the People, is offering online tuition-free programs in business administration and computer science, leading to Associate and Bachelor degrees (there are processing and exam fees, but these are order of magnitude lower that regular university fees).
I can envision a model which uses free educational resources, available through any of the above-mentioned free web sites, to undercut traditional universities. This new university could consist of a few rooms outfitted with a wireless network and a fast internet connection, where a skeleton staff of qualified educators (e.g., college graduates) would moderate distance learning by dozens of students and complement it with class discussions, dispensing and checking homework, and providing testing and grading. The cost could be a fraction of the $15,000-30,000 a year of the average college, the curriculum could follow that of any reputable university in the US or elsewhere. With some effort it would be possible to offer degrees requiring labs as well, such as science and engineering, though the easiest target would be classes such as humanities, accounting, business, law, math and computational sciences - which require little beyond computers and space.
When this happens, as it surely will, there will be little reason to go to any of the numerous second and third tier schools for the most popular programs, thus undermining their financial base and leading to a consolidation in the field of higher education.
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