Top US Universities put their Reputations Online
Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global
audience. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (ÂŁ38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionizing education around the world". Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online
interactive courses which can be studied by anyone, anywhere, with no admission requirements and, at least at present, without charge. With roots in Silicon Valley, Stanford academics have set up another online platform, Coursera, which will provide courses from Stanford and Princeton and other leading US institutions. The first president of edX is Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the pioneers of the MITx online prototype. He puts forward a statistic that encapsulates the game-changing potential.
Office of the Executive Director | Date Released:6/20/12
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Top US Universities put their Reputations Online The first online course from MITx earlier this year had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. In fact, it isn't far from the total of all the students who have ever been there since the 19th Century. 'Tipping point' The internet provides an unparalleled capacity to expand the reach - but it also raises far-reaching and thorny questions for the traditional model of a university. "We've crossed the tipping point," says Professor Agarwal. The courses being launched in the autumn, he anticipates, will have at least 500,000 students - and probably many more. As an example of how courses might be delivered, the MITx prototype taught an electronics course using an interactive virtual laboratory, e-textbooks, online discussions and video lectures. Assessment of the course, which took 10 hours per week, was entirely automated. "This could be the end of the two-hour lecture," says Professor Agarwal. "You can't hit the pause button on a lecturer, you can't fast forward." Recorded lectures - available at the push of an iPad - could be more like text books, with universities using the best available. Assessing large numbers of online learners raises a big practical challenge - and edX is a laboratory to see how this can be developed. Michael Smith, dean of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences, describes the "incredibly important research opportunity" provided by edX.
Office of the Executive Director | Date Released:6/20/12
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Top US Universities put their Reputations Online "We will collect enormous amounts of data from the edX platform about how students are interacting with the courses and online tools and assessments." Degrees of degree Professor Agarwal wants to include social sciences and humanities subjects, which would require free-text answers - and he raises ideas such as peer marking among students as one approach. This might seem difficult now - but Professor Smith says online practices are constantly advancing. "People interact with and receive information in new ways today, compared with even a few years ago. Universities like Harvard need to be in that space." Accrediting such courses is another tricky area. The online courses are promised to be as rigorous as anything else from MIT or Harvard - but successful students will get a "certificate of mastery" and not a degree or any formal university credit. It's being set at arm's length from what's on offer for the paying customers. If students on campus are paying $50,000 (ÂŁ32,000) per year, it's going to be difficult to give away qualifications to online learners without charge. High fees The edX project has the good fortune to have two wealthy parent institutions and getting a financial return won't be a pressing necessity. But Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, says the expansion of online courses will raise difficult questions about what mainstream universities offer for such high fees.
Office of the Executive Director | Date Released:6/20/12
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Top US Universities put their Reputations Online Because if the content of university courses becomes freely available, what is it that students are paying for? Is it the interactions with staff? Or is it the time with other students? Is it something to put on a CV? "This is causing universities to rethink their value to students," says Professor Koller, who is from Stanford University's computer science department. The most prestigious universities are always going to have enough demand for places - but the emergence of high-quality online courses could be tougher for middle-ranking institutions. Why would you pay high fees to sit through a mediocre lecture, when you could go online and watch world experts at another university, even if it's in another country? "The universities in the middle will really have to think about their proposition," she says.
Office of the Executive Director | Date Released:6/20/12
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