E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSDozens of elite institutions are now partnering with start-up companies such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, to deliver so-called massive open online courses or MOOCs. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.
University of Virginia history professor Philip Zelikow has taught the course, "The Modern World: Global History Since 1760" for 16 years -- but this semester is different. Instead of delivering it to 120 students on campus, he'll be teaching 42,000 students around the world.
While online learning is not new, access to top-notch professors at some of the world's most prestigious universities is. Along with the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University are among dozens of elite institutions partnering with start-up companies such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, to deliver so-called massive open online courses or MOOCs.
Now, Greek history at Wesleyan University, poetry at the University of Pennsylvania, astronomy at Duke University, and "Introduction to Music Production" at the Berkley College of Music are all just a click away. And they're absolutely free.
Since 2011, more than 2.5 million students from around the world have enrolled in MOOCs. Even though they are not offered for college credit and completion rates are low, some educators see the potential to revolutionize higher learning.
"Thanks to these free online courses, you can shop a range of disciplines and do it all from the comfort at your own home," Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said.
Zelikow was apprehensive at first.
"I'm not a techie guy who's interested in experimenting with all this computer stuff," he said. "In fact, I was kind of a skeptic about all this online stuff. I thought it was fad-ish."
But after spending hundreds of hours preparing for this semester's course, Zelikow now sees the potential in expanding online.
"Bruce Springsteen is involved in selling recorded music to people all over the world. And he also sells tickets to live concerts," Zelikow said. "Nobody thinks the recorded music is just as good as the live concert. But he wants to be in both those lines of business."
He says there's not only value in reaching thousands of students worldwide, but believes the move online has actually improved his course for those taking it on campus.
"I thought of ways to use this [online course] to actually re-invent the ways I teach my ordinary class at the university and make it a better class than it used to be, to solve certain problems that are kind of structural problems in the way we teach our residential courses," Zelikow said.
Dawn Smith, 38, has taken "Fundamentals of Pharmacology" through the University of Pennsylvania and a public health class through Johns Hopkins after deciding to change careers.
"I needed some textbook knowledge," Smith said. "I felt in order to be taken seriously as a candidate I needed to show I was doing something proactive."
Critics of MOOCs complain about their size, saying it leads to minimal student-professor interaction.
"I've met students from Germany that I've spoken to quite frequently - Australia, Japan, China, and then some in Africa," Smith said.
Although she would "absolutely recommend" this online platform, Smith acknowledges the limitations, too.
"There isn't that immediacy of being able to ask a question and then have an answer," Smith said. "There's no one standing in front of you showing you how to do something."
Other concerns include measuring student progress and the sustainability of these courses over a long period of time.
Siva Vaidyanathan, University of Virginia media studies professor, says he thinks MOOCs are an "interesting experiment," but that they're just that - an experiment.
He doesn't believe they can replace a traditional college education.
"Imagine taking a university and removing all the really fun stuff," Vaidyanathan said. "And all you're left with is me talking to you through a camera. That's not that good for anybody."
As professors, students and investors navigate this new terrain, there are questions about the potential for profit in the future and the place MOOCs may have in higher education.
For some, however, these online classes bring about hope.
"Education is such an equalizer. It raises people's abilities … lets people build a better life," Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said.
Even Vaidyanathan sees the silver lining.
"I hope somewhere in some corner of the world … some child discovers calculus, discovers physics, or discovers poetry through a MOOC and gets … inspired to change the world," he said.
Leave a Comment:
You want to bring the cost of education down, on line schools are one way to do it.
Another way: Stop giving taxpayer-guaranteed loans to students.
School is Not for education. School is to brain wash the next generation and prepare them for a life of toil to enrich the elite. Just ask a kid that is nearing the end of his 12 years in public education and he will tell you they simply want to BE someone rich and famous but dont like the idea of spending time in the trenches that their parents had to do to dig themselves out of poverty. .. usually comes around to either degenerating in to prison or the military for continued support of the habit of eating on someone elses dime except for a few..
School is more than just learning facts, which is what on-line classes give you. A good education is interacting and collaborating, discussing and arguing. These are ways of deepening understanding and of improving recall when you do need those facts.
And warrren needs to get out and meet some students!
@ warren
I think you should definitely home school your kids. I don't want them in my class.....
NJ native
"A good education is interacting and collaborating, discussing and arguing."
True but impossible in a class room in under an Hour.
Notice something important about this segment -- with the possible brief exception of a female pharmacology professor, all of the professors who talk about MOOCs or are offering MOOCs in the segment are men. The final montage: all male professors.
This unfortunately is not just an issue for this particular segment: female instructors have largely been left behind in the MOOC revolution. As I argued with a coauthor in the LA Times last week, in not including women in proportionate numbers as MOOC instructors, the U.S. is missing a huge opportunity to "export equality as well as education."
Has it ever occurred to you that female instructors have recognized that the"MOOC revolution" denies the students the ability to engage in the face-to-face interaction that allows the nuances of body language and facial expression?
well who's stopping the female instructors from doing these things? or are there actually more "profitable" ventures online for females in "instructor" outfit perhaps? would be silly to pass that opportunity up.
What are your feelings about not including men in proportionate numbers in elementary, middle and high school education?
If quantity over quality is the way you want to go...
A pointless politicization. Anyone can construct these courses. Kahn Academy does it for the cost of a webcam. Asking government or administrators of Unis is uncecessary and, in fact, counterintutive to the movement itself. What this shift really represents is the decentralization of information. This all ties in with the JSTOR leak, and Obama's new "citizen" open access (bull@!$%#). Feminism is a small, and I'll be frank, insignificant aspect of this movement. I have no doubts whatsoever that it will be gender-nullified. I don't disagree that there should be female teachers - rather - I disagree that information itself is gender biased. That's nonsense.
One other thing, is the lack of merit in the US education system. Let's get the best professors doing the best lectures and distributing them. @!$%# tenure, and @!$%# unions. It's just a way of justifying mediocrity (the hallmark of American kids' capabilities in maths and sciences).
something is needed to bring down the racket that called itself education institution. tuition costs are way out of proportion and it's simply ridiculous these days justifying paying that much for what used to cost me a fraction of it many years ago. the way it is now, the universities are simply the tools they use to hold the future of your own youngsters hostage (money for degree) and that's no way to live.
in the uk online education is called "the open university" has been going for decades. includes postal contact and study courses at universities at holiday time. some output shown on reglar tv as documenteries by the bbc. popular and effective.
it is not correct to compare 'coursera' and 'the open university'. coursera is free, has well structured courses and a dozen of well known universities on board. the open university requesting a fee depending on the country you live in, and has quite confusing course info. the open university had a chance to be the first but unfortunately lost a wonderful opportunity.
We may as well go to online education. Traditional education has failed.
Of all these so called geniuses graduating from Ivy League schools, non can do math. We have a budget that we can't balance in America and a world economy going to -s h i t-.
If you look at the amount of dollars per unit-hour for a course at an online school you may find that it is actually more expensive. Most city colleges (2-year schools) offer fairly inexpensive educations, often some of these schools are geared toward careers in the local industry. From telecommunications, electrician, plumbing, nursing and the like to more technical preparation for the 4-6 year schools, that lead to even higher paying careers and jobs. But what it comes down to is where the jobs are coming from and if there are any to be had, in an area of study that is of interest. I personally learned my physics from Julius Sumner Miller who taught on T.V. back in 1960.
I stopped reading this article because of the annoying little green anchors that pop up through out the article. Years ago Netscape developed a browser that could block the hole in HTML Standard which allowed Pop Up windows. Now through mostly Silverlight by Microsoft, Wed Designers can inbed Flash based pop up windows that open in your browser and they anchor them through out the article. They serve no purpose and are unrelated to the word or paragraph or article. And they pop up if your mouse happens over them. And they are most often found in the little thin area were the advertisements encroach from the side. SO they lead your mouse right over the anchor. Why does this bother me. Because the HTML code is linked to your mouse movement and upon activating this pop up it authenticates the site to store or upgrade a flash or standard cookie on your computer. A data miner that collects all your browsing habits and sells them to Data Warehouses that use the info to sell to you browsing habits to advertisers to gear the ads directly to your browsing habits. These companies are worth billions and as time and technology increases so will the data being monitored and the risk of identity theft or worse...cyber stalkers...
The cookies in many ways resemble viruses. But are legal cause hackers can't afford the expensive lobbyist that Microsoft and Google has...so anyway just ranting. Now I close my page when these things pop up on me....just call me copper top.
I use Firefox fortified with AddBlock, FlashBlock, Ghostery and NoScript.
AddBlock means I see no advertisements.
FlashBlock means instead of animation I see only an icon informing me that there is one just in case I might be interested.
Ghostery means I decide which tracking bots, if any, I allow to function on my computer.
NoScript means that third party scripts are prevented from executing on my computer unless I give them permission to.
Little green anchors? Never see them. And page loads are faster.
Why don't you try to take advantage of these resources?
Bonus feature: it's all free.
Happy trails.
Thank you. One of the most informative posts I've read. Thank you again.
At last! One simple way to provide universal free education. It is my personal belief that all education , and medical care for that matter, should be provided for by the state or federal governments for free. Todays educational establishments are nothing more than churn and burn money making , or should I say robbing , institutions. Requirements for degrees have courses that have nothing at all to do with the degree being sought but will make you a "well rounded student". With todays technologies you can have a vertiual world wide classroom providing for global education. Global education is where we should be focousing our attention anyway because we are already living in a global society and as time marches on cultures and societies will intermingle more and more and have some sort of insight into that society's culture and haveing had some interaction at some level will make for better understanding and intergration of whatever it is you are doing . I have always thought that the only way to bring all mankind together and to realize that we are all the same species is to have some sort of alien invasion. However if all knowledge and education where available for free, which it almost is , we all might see things in a different and more positive light. Haveing free world wide education would allow individuals from different countries to experience how concepts , designs, methods , the list can go on and on , but the essential thing is we could see how it is applied or used or even thought of in different cultures and societies. Also free education would give the individual the freedom to really choose what he/she really wants to be or to contribute to the rest of mankind and the planet. Sooner or later mankind will find out that being part of the global population is more tha a paycheck and what you can do . It is will finally come down to what will you do that really makes you happy while contributiong to the human race at the same time . If we could somehow make universal education free then we could be on our way to saving mankind and the planet. The next step is to get rid of a money system which stifiles all peoples from becoming what they truly could be. But hey one thing at a time .
There already exists a technology whereby a professor can make his or her knowledge available to students worldwide for free. This technology has numerous advantages over streaming video: the pace whereby the information is delivered is entirely under the control of the students, so they can pause the lecture, skip backwards, jump ahead, skim, and review entirely at their own speed. This technology is also fully portable, and doesn't require any up-front expenses like computers and internet connections. It's called a book.
Also, everything we've learned about teaching in the last several decades has caused teachers to move away from the "lecture for an hour and then give a multiple choice test," which is all these courses offer. And at least in a regular lecture, a professor can watch the students to see whether they're getting the content, pause for questions, and interact. This just takes the worst part of college classes.
And hey -- public libraries were going to kill off universities back in the 19th century. Correspondence courses were going to kill them in the 1920s. Television was going to kill them in the 60s, and courses on VCR tapes were going to kill them in the 70s. Yet somehow, they're still around.
So hastily do we underestimate the democratizing power of information technology.
There's a simple misunderstanding in your comment, and that's price performance. The cost of operating a library, of producing and distributing tapes or books, is astronomical in comparison to the distribution of bits traveling at the speed of light across the earth. Price performance in this respect improves exponentially, in an exquisitely predictable fashion. Sending a biology text to an African country could cost hundreds of dollars, instead of fractions of a penny. What should concern us is the publishing industry, in cohorts with corporate universities, attempting to stifle this revolution. So far, there have been some very forward-thinking institutions in America like Berkeley (I took a quantum computing course there for free).
I can get a bookfor free online already via Google Books. During my initial degree in History, I was able to find information much faster on the internet and via electronic databases than digging through books. Often 20 sources or more could be researched in less than a day's work.
The conservative adage of teacher vis-a-vis student is archaic, and while not ineffective, it is oddly misused in the US. It isn't the mentor-student relationship which produced the most brilliant philosophers in history - as in the School of Athens - but rather, a combative and crude form of information transfer and replication.
The results speak for themselves. American public schools are a failures of cataclysmic proportions. Studies have clearly shown that self-driven, creatively-centered learning fosters robust brain development, in the areas that matter - like the MPFC. The strict internalization of information isn't even necessary anymore, given our ready access to the compendium of all human knowledge within a few keystrokes. There's infinitely more information in my pocket than the library of Alexandria held at any given time.
Let's take this a step further and make the obvious assumption that this technology will evolve; as algorithms for data mining and human language processing advance, we'll see a dramatic change in how humans interact with the internet. I'm not talking about implants (although the frontier is being advanced rapidly in that respect) but rather, smart programs like Mathematica and WolframAlpha, which facilitate creativity. The real solution is somewhere in between cold internet distribution of information, and mentorship through peer-to-peer or prof-to-peer interaction. When you have a class of 60, 000, obviously you can't have normal "office hours," but another student is a valuable asset. Study groups often bumped my mark 15% or more.
My first 2 years at UVa, most of my classes were in huge lecture halls: 300-500 students. There was no real interaction with the professors, no questions, discussion, etc. Easily could have been taught online with no degradation in quality. In fact, many profs filmed their lectures and put them in the library. Some students skipped class and just watched the videos.
My last 2 years (and later at grad school), classes were much smaller, and there was interaction with faculty and other students. This could not have been accomplished online. But the first 2 years? Definitely.
That's Berklee College of Music, not "Berkley."