The Challenge of the MOOC

It is hardly original to observe that we live in the Information Age, or that the internet appears to be changing everything.

Which makes it all the more surprising that one reads so little about how our colleges and universities are preparing for the advent of the massive, open, online course - the  MOOC.

Considering how few of my well-informed friends know anything about MOOCs, I'm not exactly sure how I stumbled upon them.  Perhaps the word simply got lost in the flood of information in which we are all daily immersed.  Or perhaps, having been a public school teacher and administrator, the news hit me close to where I have lived.

At any rate, when I started hearing about MOOCs, I knew I'd have to do some personal research.  So this May, I enrolled in a ten-week course on Global Climate Change through Coursera.org - the largest of three consortia offering college level instruction, online, for free.

Having completed this course - I chose the MOOC equivalent of auditing - I can pronounce myself impressed.  The course was taught by two engaging professors from the University of British Columbia, Dr. Sara Harris and Dr. Sarah Burch.  They offered online lectures as well as substantial reading assignments, interactive "labs", weekly quizzes, and stimulating discussion groups in the form of comment threads.

For those who preferred to earn a certificate, there were two assigned papers and a comprehensive final exam.  And a fee of $39.

That's not a typo.  $39.

Thousands of students, from all over the planet, signed up for this MOOC.  Around 1900 of us audited the course all the way to the end, while another 750 earned the certificate. 

I learned a lot - as I'm certain most of my fellow students did.

To be sure, I've taken more demanding courses.  But I've also taken courses - both undergraduate and graduate - which were considerably easier.  In other words, this MOOC offered a genuine educational experience, comparable in difficulty to a typical undergraduate course.

The MOOC represents a new thing under the sun.  At a time when individuals, families, and governments are groaning under the weight of ever-mounting college costs - too often for instruction of doubtful quality - it would be remarkable if the MOOC didn't find a valued place within the educational marketplace.

Thus far, the three consortia offering MOOCs have focused on recruiting outstanding teachers from many of the world's top universities.  Coursera, which started at Stanford, offers courses from, among other schools, Harvard, MIT, UVA and Oxford.

Moreover, while most MOOCs are not yet accorded college credit, that door has begun to open.  In February, the American Council on Education (ACE) announced that five MOOCs - two math courses from UCal-Irvine, two biology courses from Duke, and a calculus course from the UPenn - qualified for college credit.

ACE's decision is the foot in the door.  It seems inevitable that - given today's competitive economy - large employers will soon begin devising ways of assessing the actual knowledge and skills of potential employees, rather than contenting themselves with mere paper transcripts. 

In time, assessing actual knowledge and skills - instead of transcripts - will provide an opportunity for a new category of entrepreneurs - and pink slips for a lot of HR drones.

More to the point, corporate and other employers - as well as the self-employed - will almost certainly take advantage of MOOCs as a means of upgrading the skills and knowledge of current employees - at little or no cost.

In time, even state licensing agencies - such as those which supervise costly and burdensome continuing ed programs - will have to get on board.

In the long run, MOOCs seem certain to shake traditional institutions of higher learning to their foundations.

When world-class teachers, from world-class universities, are available at little or no cost, how much longer can society be expected to continuing paying tens of thousands of dollars per student, per year for college instruction which is often mediocre and subject to grade inflation, and which, in the end, offers no proof of actual knowledge?

Would it not be more effective, and far less costly, to develop sophisticated means of assessing knowledge and skills - and allow individuals in need of new knowledge to acquire it by any available means?

Yet, if low-cost, self-directed education becomes an acceptable alternative to traditional university education, why wouldn't MOOCs run most bricks-and-mortar colleges out of business?

In some cases, the answer is - almost certainly - that they will.  Not every college or university will prove sufficiently adaptable to adjust to the rise of high-quality, free, online education.

Yet others will - quite possibly by meeting the challenge of the modern with the wisdom of tradition.    

In Britain's Oxford and Cambridge, the prevailing model of undergraduate education involves face-to-face meetings between one scholar and from one to three students.  No method of teaching is remotely as effective as this intimate, face-to-face, tutorial approach.

Up until now, the labor-intensive tutorial model has been ill-suited to American universities, committed as they are to educating enormous numbers of young people.

The rise of online education - with its ability to deliver high-quality, basic instruction to virtually unlimited numbers of students - might solve this problem.  Perhaps - in the near future - the American university will be able to use online lectures, peer-led discussion groups, and peer evaluation of research to free up instructional time for one-on-one, tutorial instruction.

In future, the choice might not be the  modern or the traditional, but a marriage of the best of both.

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Coursera's "Climate Literacy:  Navigating Climate Change Conversations" will be offered in a new session starting September 30.