Being able to pay for college is an important long-term financial goal for most parents.
The UW Flexible Degree will combine traditional face-to-face courses with online programs.
Roll out of this new program is planned for as early as this fall.
The unique nature of the Flexible Degree will allow the UW to lower the net tuition cost to students in a number of ways.
Related: MOOCs combined with prior learning assessment equals college credits
Connecticut has done this for years with their Charter Oak State College (http://www.cosc.edu/). Back in the 90′s, I served as an evaluator for their competency program. It has hardly been transformative.
Charter Oak is still around. It appeals to a certain demographic, but has hardly been transformative.
I just feel like these fads keep cycling around. The certifications ala MOOC – how different will this really be, in the end, from the industry certifications that arose in the last 20 years? People were all rushing to get Java certified, Cisco-certified, Microsoft-Developer-certified – until they realized that the certifications didn’t buy much with employers, who wanted to see real experience. I think MOOCs will find their place, mainly in the tech world, and that niche will be people in Asia who want to get hired by the body shops in Bangalore, companies who want to train some employees in a particular high tech skill such as data mining on the cheap, software developers who have been laid off and need to put some new skills on their resume, and people such as myself who need to get up to speed in a difficult area (I see Coursera may soon offer a course on natural language processing which might help me with some work I need to do). I think MOOCs will put the most pressure on the for-profit sector, on corporate training companies and of course companies like Kaplan.
Traditional college students are not going to enroll in MOOCs. They don’t want online courses, they don’t want 3 year degree programs, and they don’t have any life-based competencies to assess. Think of any college-bound senior that you know. Can you think of a single one who WANTS to sit at home learning online in a MOOC instead of having the full college experience? I think as money becomes a problem, students will save by choosing public over private, using CCs if possible (but that is a problem because of the waiting lists), and increasingly choosing schools closer to home. Which is kind of the way it was back when I was in college, back when kids didn’t all think they had to go to Harvard.
