Harvard online learning: ‘five years from now will look very different from what we do now’

Last week Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their new partnership, known as edX, will offer free online courses.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.

Coursera and Udacity, two other MOOCs (massively open online courses) from elite universities have also recently been announced.  This online thing seems to be taking off, accompanied by ardent predictions from educators.

“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,” said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard …

“Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation.…

President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”…

Online learning is not brand new, but David Brooks makes a point about the recent entry by the most selective institutions:

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures….

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Rescrambling.  Makes me think of this.

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
…

High school online classes expand in Westchester County

Eight school district in Westchester County are participating in a pilot program offering BOCES-sponsored online classes to their high school students.  The courses were designed by local teachers and make use of  ”blended” learning, including both virtual and in-person experiences.  Initially limited to four elective courses, plans call for expansion in future years.

Although this might seem like a low-risk way for the schools to try online learning, I am left with some questions about this initiative.

• What are the costs, both in terms of money and lost opportunity?
• How will results be assessed?  Is saving money the main criteria?  Will the outputs be measured in quantifiable ways?
• Although it seems like a good idea to try online teaching with what appear to be relatively light-weight electives, are there plans to go online with core courses also?  What about AP courses, where offering students more options could be a real way to take advantage of the efficiencies of technology?

It turns out that New York lags behind some other states in K-12 online learning initiatives, which actually could be an advantage if it means that we will learn from the experiences of other states who have taken a leading position in this area.

A reason for New York’s relatively slow start in online learning

Nationally, online learning is taking off. As of late 2010, online learning opportunities were available to some students in 48 states and Washington, D.C., according to the nonprofit International Association for K-12 Online Learning. Twenty-seven states plus Washington also had at least one full-time online school operating statewide. New York was one of the last states to finalize a set of distance-learning standards in 2011.

Martabano said that as a result, students in New York have had limited access to online courses compared with their peers around the country — though there have been recent advances.

You can read the article after the jump.

Nose under the tent – top business school goes online

The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is taking its brand online.

While online programs are still mostly seen as the purview of for-profit schools, like the University of Phoenix and Capella University, UNC is hoping to change that image.

The business school this Monday launched an online M.B.A. program with 19 students, dubbed MBA@UNC, that will offer the same core curriculum as its regular full-time M.B.A. program. It is the first online program of its kind from a top-20 U.S. business school….

UNC officials say that admissions standards for the new program are just as high as for an on-campus M.B.A. UNC students in the class of 2012 had a median Graduate Management Admission Test score of 700 and a grade point average of 3.3.

The cost is $89,00, just under the $98,000 for the on-campus program.  Meanwhile, other top schools seem to be in a wait and see mode.

So far, other top schools, including Harvard and the University of Chicago, say they don’t have formal plans to create their own programs.

While the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, has offered “a handful” of hybrid or fully online versions of short electives in recent months, they’re still “experimental at this stage,” said Carla Hayn, senior associate dean for the fully employed M.B.A. and executive M.B.A. programs. “We’re wading very gently into these waters.”

Ms. Hayn said “there are other aspects to education”—such as networking and learning to read social cues, “that are kind of hard to get online.”

UNC Makes Risky Online Bet

Online degree from London School of Economics for $5,000

University of Michigan Professor Mark Perry points out that a degree in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE) can be had in three years and for $5,000.  Distance learning, that is.  Then he asks:

Why go to Harvard or Yale, where just one college class costs about $3,500, or almost as much as the entire BS degree from LSE?  Is this the college degree of the future?

I do think this will be a common option for the college degree of the future, driven primarily by cost issues.  If the LSE online program were to impose admission standards as stringent as those of its traditional campus cousin, it would probably elevate it to a higher prestige level.  We may soon see online university programs with selective admissions standards develop into an elite class of schools that attract top scholars.

From the comments:

…much of what you learn in college does not come from class. one of the benefits of being at a world class university is the exposure to the other students and to the faculty. much of the most interesting stuff i learned in college came from doing projects with faculty outside of the curriculum.

This is a valid point, and I’m sure I could come up with many more reasons to go with the tried and true certification methods instead of the online option.  However, ten years from now I may finder far fewer reasons.  Sometimes I wish my children were much younger and not going through the college process now.  Higher education may become much more affordable for our grandchildren.  At least we can hope.