With online courses which confer degrees/certification to students from all over the world, there is far too much of a vested interest in optimizing to the shortest path required to get the degree. Its no longer a subject pool of auto didacts, but a subject pool where auto didacts are the minority and degree/certifacte focused individuals are in the majority.
Many students aren't like that - but if they come from a background which doesn't give a damn whether you learned something as long as you got a degree/cert from X uni.
If in the end, if the shortest path is just doing the test, turning in the Homework, and ticking attendance, then someone will be doing it for a price. They already are doing it in colleges.
The scale of it in turn makes peer review, or group work, complex projects which require active scrutiny, hard, if not impossible to execute.
I don't see how this can't end with course material being put out by one group, and standardized testing being done by someone else, a la the CFA or other certification exams.
Yes, I absolutely expect there will be test centres where students pay to sit the exam in exam conditions. There's no other way to produce credible results. But the test centre would only need to be a tarted up cybercafe.
Do you envisage the course material and exam being designed by MIT but the exams being administered by some other party, or would the other party also design the exam (as is the case with CFA)?
Whenever anyone defends the current brick and morder model of college education they do a lot of handwaving about the benefits of small classrooms, access to professors, and the "college experience". In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest colleges in the world both in terms of enrollment and campus size, most of the professors didn't seem passionate about teaching. They were talking "at" these massive auditoriums filled with half-interested kids. I always resented having to physically go to class, especially since I had a long commute to school every day. Rushing back and forth across this massive campus from class to class seemed ridiculous to me as well. I get that some kids need that personal attention from professors and TAs to learn, but I certainly didn't. I learn best on my own, at my own pace, and in the comfort of my own home.
Perhaps online colleges could replace impersonal experiences at large institutions while freeing up more opportunities for those who really would benefit from smaller classes. Alternately, the education bubble might just continue to swell. Then, those who can't afford the increasingly exclusive, expensive and, therefore, grade-inflated campus experience might be told there is no real problem since they can just 'learn online for free.'
Further, the fact that you managed to learn without small classrooms, contact with professors and a formative campus experience doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from those things. For example, I don't think it's meaningless hand waving to talk about being able to go to Alfred Aho's office hours and ask him pretty much anything you want and get an impromptu interactive lecture. The people who seek out office hours of this sort are often those who are voracious learners who do learn on their own and want to keep learning more.
As for having to rush back and forth or not being in the comfort of your own home, I'd say that comfort is not necessarily synonymous with personal benefit.
I can certainly see udacity type courses replacing the 1000student first year intro lectures - all those stats101 and intro mathematical methods classes.
Lectures aren't a particularly good way of teaching something. They were invented in the middle ages when, before printing, the number of students exceeded the number of copies of the textbook.
Their only real role in a general course it to take attendance and because you don't trust the students to actually spend a week reading the textbook on their own.
A udacity (or Khan academy) type setup where the student HAS to complete each problem is almost as good as a one on one tutorial - and certainly better than sitting at the back of the big lecture theater watching someone read powerpoint slides.
The reason that "multimedia self directed online learning experiences" haven't worked is that they were just as passive as lectures. Having a youtube clip of a lecture on in a window on your browser is about as effective as photocopying a paper as an alternative to reading it!
In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota,
My two postsecondary degrees are both from the University of Minnesota. As a Chinese major in the 1970s, my typical class size for in-major courses shrank down to three or four students total by the third year of the program. (First-year Chinese had fifty students in three sections in those days; second-year had fifteen in one section.) One of the great things about huge brick-and-mortar state universities over the last century has been having a large enough critical mass of students to offer rarely sought courses like Chinese (in those days) or Attic Greek or Classical Nahuatl (any day) or other courses that my friends took while enrolled. Harvard has enough sheer money from its endowment to offer Sanskrit or other rarely studied courses
even if those courses gain very low enrollments. Most other universities subsidize limited enrollments in rare courses with high enrollments in the commonplace courses.
The great thing about more and more university-level courses going online is that eventually there should be a niche for university-level courses delivered online on almost any subject that has ever been treated in a university-level course. That will allow, I hope, curious learners to shop around and figure out which general statistics course (a HUGE enrollment course) and which Aramaic course (a course with tiny enrollment in the best of times) offers the most return of learning for the investment of time, effort, and some amount of money to take the course.
I think many brick-and-mortar universities, and perhaps approximately one state "flagship" university per state, will still be able to survive the onslaught of competition from online courses for a while because of prior claims to credentialing students and the advantage of in-person interaction with other students (and with some less introverted instructors). But further diversity of provision of courses allows each provider to specialize in what it does best, and should make learning more efficient (in the economist's sense of "efficient") for everyone.
P.S. The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.
AFTER EDIT, responding to a point in another comment:
Yes, independent test centers with good test security will help online credentials gain acceptance, and Udacity has already anticipated this problem. Udacity has announced in a blog post, "Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE announces testing centers,"
a partnership "to make our classes count towards a credential that is recognized by employers." So this is an example of unbundling the package that is currently offered by degree-granting universities. The universities both teach courses and administer tests, and claim therefore to offer credentials that can be trusted. But one group of organizations could offer a wide selection of courses, while another group of organizations offers a wide selection of credentialing tests, and I expect that to be the wave of the future.
> The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.
I'm still unclear what the business model for universities (as opposed to private companies) in this space is. The problem is, they will inevitably be compared to (and in some sense compete against) their non-virtual counterparts. Especially when they've essentially given away all their course materials and lecture videos for free, and considering these classes are not for credit, I just don't see the benefit for the average person over studying what's already freely available. And one can't even make the argument that the free resources aren't meant to be used to learn a subject (as is the case with most free reference material), since these were obviously created with precisely that goal in mind.
When they inevitably move to a tuition based model, the ever present question of "the real MIT or the online one?" may be too much to overcome.
I can think of three reasons universities would do this.
First: Universities do not generally take pride in having a commercial "business model" approach. They almost all say education, rather than profit, is their aim. They say they don't charge $x because they want to extract the maximum rent from the market, they charge $x because that's what it costs to provide the course.
What better way to prove this commitment to education than to charge much less for a course that costs much less to run?
Second: Sony chariman Akito Morito reportedly once said "My job is to make our products obsolete before our competitors do."
If online learning is the next big thing, you want to be at the cutting edge of it. You don't want to end up a local bookstore in the age of Amazon, you want to be Amazon.
Third: 120,000 people signed up for the first MITx course (only 7,000 people went on to get a passing grade) and the system handled them OK. You can accept much less profit per student when you've got a thousand times as many students. Of course, there are more experiments needed to determine whether they can provide useful credentials people will get their wallets out to pay for - but people are used to paying a lot for university courses. If they made just $10 to $100 per student per course they could be looking at some serious money.
To improve education on campus and around the world:
- On campus, edX research will enhance our understanding of how students learn and how technologies can best be used as part of our larger efforts to improve teaching and learning.
- Beyond our campuses, edX will expand access to education, allow for certificates of mastery to be earned by able learners, and make the open source platform available to other institutions.
Personally, I've started using Coursera (Stanford/Princeton/Penn) in my spare time and I love it. I used to be very skeptical about online education, but now I see I was wrong. Using this free resource, I have expanded my knowledge/skillbase in some pretty esoteric areas significantly than I could have done using books or the internet alone. Had my undergraduate university possessed a platform like EdX or Coursera, I can assure you I would have gotten a better education by being able to review lectures at my own speed and review them at will (as opposed to missing them altogether).
That said, I can't yet imagine a world where I would skip an opportunity to attend Harvard, MIT, et cetera simply because I could take some of the courses for free online.
That's why they do it. Nobody is going to turn down a place at MIT/Stanford/Caltech to do the course online and even if they did there are 20 other candidates.
But they might turn down a place at UVa to do the courses at @MIT - get a cert and spend the $50K they saved on a startup.
This free market increases MIT/Stanford's reputation, it hits 2nd tier state-U and totally destroys the online market for Phoenix University type places.
The issue isn't MIT competing with itself, it is, as the OP mentioned, MIT online competing with the second tier "me-too" institutions out there that are charging the same tuition for a far inferior experience. If you are considering getting a degree from a university few people have heard of or respect but will have to pay the MIT price for, you will at least have the option of choosing the online route to achieve a potentially superior education. The choice will be more and more difficult as online universities get A-listed and solve the many problems they currently have with their user/educational experience.
They don't need to generate a profit and it would be preferable if there was no profitable business model for it. Donations to both MIT and Harvard are considered charitable; making more of their classes freely available online would justify that.
To say it would be preferable if there were no profitable business model is short-sighted. It would mean that the only entities capable of undertaking something like this would be existing universities (and the wave of private companies offering a wide curriculum of online courses would end). Those universities that attempted something similar would at best be able to merely recoup costs. In short, the higher education revolution would amount to existing universities putting classes online. Why in the world is that preferable?
With online courses which confer degrees/certification to students from all over the world, there is far too much of a vested interest in optimizing to the shortest path required to get the degree. Its no longer a subject pool of auto didacts, but a subject pool where auto didacts are the minority and degree/certifacte focused individuals are in the majority.
Many students aren't like that - but if they come from a background which doesn't give a damn whether you learned something as long as you got a degree/cert from X uni.
If in the end, if the shortest path is just doing the test, turning in the Homework, and ticking attendance, then someone will be doing it for a price. They already are doing it in colleges.
The scale of it in turn makes peer review, or group work, complex projects which require active scrutiny, hard, if not impossible to execute.
I don't see how this can't end with course material being put out by one group, and standardized testing being done by someone else, a la the CFA or other certification exams.