Five Ways Free Online Classes Will Change College, or Not
Jeff Selingo
Bestselling author | Strategic advisor on future of learning and work | College admissions and early career expert | Contributor, The Atlantic | Angel investor | Editor, Next newsletter | Co-host, FutureU podcast
Nothing moves fast in higher ed, except for MOOCs.
A year ago very few people had heard of the acronym for Massive Open Online Course. Now stories about the courses attracting tens of thousands of people for free are almost a weekly occurrence in The New York Times. Times columnist Tom Friedman writes about MOOCs so often, they've become his next World is Flat. One of the largest MOOC providers, Coursera, is barely a year old and already has 2.5 million students, 215 courses, and 33 college and university partners.
Because MOOCs are attracting so much attention and hype, they are often conflated as being the silver-bullet solution to all that ails higher education. They’re not. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be yesterday’s news by this time next year. Just like online shopping didn’t put brick-and-mortar stores out of business, online education can co-exist along traditional residential campuses. Shoppers need and like both forms of purchasing and college students like both forms of course delivery when they offer flexibility. Here are five ways MOOCs will and will not change higher ed in the coming years:
Admissions
Colleges search far and wide to find the perfect class each year, and for some, just to fill their freshmen class. Just like dating and marriage, sometimes those matches work out, sometimes they don’t. One-third of students now transfer colleges once before earning a degree. Another 400,000 drop out of college each year. If applicants take a MOOC or two from one of the colleges they are considering, it allows the institution to better assess the readiness of potential students.
What MOOCs won’t do: Some MOOC evangelists picture the courses outright replacing the admissions process (the SATs, the essays, the applications, etc). For now, MOOCs won’t be more than just one piece of the puzzle in admissions.
Remediation
Four in ten freshmen arrive on campuses unprepared for college-level work and must enroll in remedial reading, writing, or math courses. Some 75 percent of colleges offer at least one remedial course, which is nothing more than a high-school class. MOOCs can reduce those numbers if some students could take MOOCs to brush up on what they don’t know well enough before they get to college, for free and with little risk.
What MOOCs won’t do: Students who aren’t ready for college-level math and reading unlikely have the discipline to keep up with a free online course. So MOOCs won't work in isolation for that portion of remedial students who need to relearn entire subjects.
Hybrid Courses
Hybrid courses (combination of face-to-face and online) have the potential to transform how students learn, how quickly they finish a course, and as a result, lower the cost of going to college. Early research shows that hybrid courses are just as engaging for students. MOOCs can provide the online content for a hybrid course, reducing the cost to colleges and time of professors to replicate the creation of course content across every single campus.
What MOOCs won’t do: Provide content for every single professor who wants to create a hybrid course. MOOCs are likely to provide the best content for introductory courses, at least at first.
Alternative Provider
Rather than enroll in that pricey professional certificate program at the college down the street, you’ll take a few MOOCs and pay for a verified certificate at the end of each course for a few hundred bucks. Eventually, MOOCs will put bundle together a few courses into a curriculum that will lead to a certificate equal to what colleges are now charging thousands of dollars for.
What MOOCs won’t do: Replace the bachelor’s degree. A degree is more than simply a collection of 120 credits. A structured undergraduate curriculum from an institution still matters, at least until someone else figures out how to copy that for a much lower price.
Replacement for Advanced Placement
Last fall, Dartmouth College became the latest school to stop offering college credit for AP courses. Because MOOCs are essentially an outgrowth of college courses, schools could start granting credit for MOOCs over AP.
What MOOCs won’t do: Colleges are still concerned with students coming to campus with too many credits earned elsewhere. Some, like Dartmouth, want to be sure students get the full campus experience, others want to protect their bottom line and be sure they get tuition dollars for as many courses as they can.
Photo: wrangler/Shutterstock
Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large at The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of the forthcoming book, College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, scheduled for release on May 7. Sign up for updates on the book here and receive one of two free PDF workbooks, Making the College Decision or Colleges of the Future, a perfect way to get a head start on College (Un)Bound for students, parents, counselors, college leaders, and others.
Researcher, Educator, Practitioner. Passionate about Sustainable, Regenerative, Equitable, and Resilient Communities. Born at 329 ppm.
10 年Hi Jeff! Thank you for the great article. I would like to have your opinion on my issue. I have applied for a PhD in Canada, in which one of the prerequisites was an undergrad statistics course. Before applying, I asked them whether they would accept the certificate of a MOOC and they wrote to me that they would. So, I completed the Statistics course offered by Udacity and San Jose State University (SJSU) and included that certificate in my PhD application. But now: a) the Canadian university refuses to accept the certificate if SJSU doesn't provide a transcript and b) SJSU doesn't verify the fact that I took and successfully completed the course. I'm computer/networks (very) literate and I have successfully completed several MOOCs so far. I'm sure Udacity and SJSU can find a way to verify my certificate. Thus, I'm very disappointed because, as an open-minded young person, I can't accept that a MOOC, the future of education, can jeopardize my PhD! Thanks in advance for your reply!
party & wedding wand-waver/ writer/ artist/ teacher
11 年People sometimes underestimate the time and cost involved in creating and maintaining 'cheap' or 'free' online courses just as they underestimate the cost of creating and maintaining digital textbooks and all the underlying technology support required to keep it up and running. There is also the question of assessment. Only a certain quality level of assessment can be carried out for free by an automated online system. Essay style papers don't get graded by machines but by people and assessment feedback is an essential part of learning, not just of getting an exit qualification. I'm a huge fan of blended learning but my experience and feedback from colleagues is that creating and managing online courses is exceptionally time consuming for university faculty. I agree with the idea that for introductory, 'generi'c courses sharing content accross universities would be an excellent idea. I know in academic literacy courses we often reinvent the wheel. Still, as someone who passionately enjoys interacting with a class, I can say that I'd lose a lot of my teaching energy and drive if I didn't have students in a room with me, and I felt the same way taking a (rather expensive, actually) online course recently, excellent and 'high touch' though it was.
Master Benefits Advisor @ CALIBRE Systems, Inc. | Hypnotherapist, NLP Trainer
11 年Well put! Thank you for your insights.
Higher Education Consultant and Author
11 年Jeff is balanced as always. I agree especially that MOOCs will not take the place of the key elements of college life that must include human interaction. That means that the students who struggle need more rather than less hands on interaction. It means that learning how to work in teams and generally play nice with others still demands projects and assignments overseen by grown ups as part of the educational experience. I agree that survey, introductory and lectures can work here but college also demands lively discsusion and sharing of disparate points of view in a mediated context. You cannnot do that with 28,000 students in a course. The survey of faculty reveals that the time taken to do this well means time taken from other tasks and costs will have to be considered for either replacing those activities or their abandonment. In the book. Many years ago Neil Postman in Technopoly cautioned that new technologies be introduced with an interdisciplinary view of their consequences. That would seem to be good advice here.