A new revolution in online learning

More than 12 leading US and European universities have joined an internet platform created by two Stanford University scientists, which provides free online access to classes designed by academics at elite institutions. Coursera, now a year old, was founded by computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.

In the autumn of 2012, Coursera will offer more than 100 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

Even before the expansion, Koller and Ng said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, US partners will include the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia to name a few.

Foreign partners will include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland — some will also offer credits.

Free knowledge

The 12 universities joining the platform will offer dozens of new courses in the arts, computer science, health, mathematics, history, literature and other disciplines.

The classes offered by Coursera do not count as credit towards degrees at the universities involved, but online students receive certificates for completing their studies.

Ng said the move gives students “greater access than ever before to the world’s foremost subject-matter experts”.

Koller said: “We’re fortunate to have the support of these highly respected academic institutions as we move toward our shared goal of providing a high-quality education to everyone around the world.”

Many universities already offer online lectures and some — notably the Open University — offer qualifications through distance learning. However, observers say the rise of Coursera and similar online offerings marks a shift in the balance of power in higher education.

Mike Boxall, of the management consultancy PA Consulting, compared the development to the changes that have swept the media and music industry.

“The interesting thing is that it effectively marks the provision of knowledge as a free good, which accords with young people’s expectations,” Boxall said. “Now you’ve got the industry saying, we have to protect our offer — that offer is not the key to the library door — they have to provide something around that, the ability to use and interact with that knowledge.” The growth in online learning is likely to push universities towards greater emphasis on one-to-one tuition and other interaction with students, Boxall said.

“What does that mean for 500-seat lecture theatres? It’s amazing that universities are still building big lecture theatres — there’s a huge wave of building across the university world. They’re not rethinking that environment.”

“This is the tsunami,” Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Centre for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech, said. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around; but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”

Game-changer

Due to technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalise material, and the capacity to analyse huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.

To date, most MOOCs have covered computer science, math and engineering, but Coursera is expanding into areas like medicine, poetry and history.

MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.

“The fact that so many people are so curious about these courses shows the yearning for education,” Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said. “There are going to be lots of bumps in the road, but this is a very important experiment at a very substantial scale.”

So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade. The University of Washington said it planned to offer credits for its Coursera offerings this autumn and other online ventures are also moving in that direction.

How to earn credit?

David P. Szatmary, the university’s Vice Provost, says that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments, and work with an instructor.

Each university designs and produces its own courses and decides whether to offer credit.

Coursera does not pay the universities and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.

Although MOOCs will have to be self-sustaining some day — whether by charging students for credentials or premium services or by charging corporate recruiters for access to the best students — Koller and university officials say this is not a pressing concern.

About two-thirds of Coursera’s students are from overseas, and most courses attract tens of thousands of students, an irresistible draw for many professors.

The Coursera contracts are not exclusive, so many of its partner universities are also negotiating with several online educational entities.

“I have talked to the provost at MIT and to Udacity and 2Tor,” which provides online graduate programmes for several universities, Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, said.

“In a field changing this fast, we need flexibility, so it’s very possible that we might have two or three different relationships.”

Looming hurdles

However, one looming hurdle is overcoming online cheating.

“I would not want to give credit until somebody figures out how to solve the cheating problem and make sure that the right person, using the right materials, is taking the tests,” Antonio Rangel, a Caltech professor who will teach Principles of Economics for Scientists in the fall, said.

Udacity recently announced plans to have students pay $80 [Dh292] to take exams at testing centres operated around the world by Pearson, a global education company.

Grading presents some questions, too. Coursera’s humanities courses use peer-to-peer grading, with students first having to show that they can match a professor’s grading of an assignment; then grade the work of five classmates, in return for which, their work is graded by five fellow students.

Koller says, what would happen to a student who cannot match the professor’s grading has not been determined.

It will be some time before it is clear how the new MOOCs affect enrolment at profit-making online institutions, and whether they will ultimately cannibalise enrolment at the very universities that produce them.

Still, many professors dismiss that threat.

No threat to universities

“There’s talk about how online education’s going to wipe out universities, but a lot of what we do on campus is help people transition from 18 to 22, and that is a complicated thing,” Page, the Michigan professor, said, adding that MOOCs would be most helpful to “people 22 to 102, international students and smart retired people.”

Eventually, Koller said, students may be able to enrol in a set of MOOCs and emerge with something that would serve almost the same function as a traditional diploma.

“We’re not planning to become a higher-education institution that offers degrees,” she said, “but we are interested in what can be done with these informal types of certification.”

Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, which represents leading universities, including Oxbridge and Edinburgh, said: “Online technologies provide huge opportunities for the dissemination of knowledge, and our universities are continuing to take advantage by, for example, putting lectures online through iTunes U and YouTube, or by making much of our research open access. Russell Group universities have always been at the forefront of online innovations, and we are keen to exploit this further.”

— New York Times News Service/With inputs from Guardian News Service