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.
…

The Minerva Project is an attempt to establish an elite online university

The Minerva Project is attempting to create an elite online university, a move that if successful could accelerate the higher education reform being driven by escalating costs and improving technology.

Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America’s educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry’s sites.

That is, until now.

This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,” and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he’s joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.

A shortage of elite schools

… The demand for elite, American-style education far outstrips the current supply, he explained, not just stateside, but worldwide….  applications from qualified students are skyrocketing, while admissions rates are falling.

The Minerva business model

… The idea is to scoop up those students who are being shut out, whether it’s a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts. Minerva will admit applicants based on their academic chops alone — jocks need not apply — and students would live in urban dorms scattered across the globe’s great cities. They’ll take online courses designed by highly esteemed professors from other established institutions. Meanwhile, tuition would cost “less than half” the price of the standard Ivy league sticker price (so somewhere around $20,000 or below). That, anyway, is the plan.

There are opposing opinions on whether something like this can work, and I can only go on my feeling that some big change is around the corner.  Exactly how it will shake out is probably anyone’s guess, but imposing stringent admission standards would be critical in raising the prestige of any online institution.

The value of peer interaction on a physical campus is cited as one reason online college will always be considered second best.  On the other hand, the argument is made that young people are finding online interaction to be just as important as  face-to-face meetings.  Perhaps related,  it has recently been reported that a smaller percentage of teens are bothering to get their driver’s license these days.

A physical campus helps create a community of scholars who engage in various social, artistic, political, and humanitarian pursuits that are integral to the experience sought by elite students.  But if an individual has the smarts and the initiative, an online community could also offer support for getting this type of experience,  just without the need to go into debt for next 20 years.

Will the Minerva Project be the the first elite online university?  If so, we may have to make room for an online Ivy League.

The Minerva Project

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

Hybrid learning breaks down geographic barriers for Northeastern University

Northeastern University is expanding its brand of co-op business education across geographic regions by investing heavily in hybrid education, with its first branch campus in Charlotte, NC.

The goal is to offer master’s degrees in industries like cybersecurity, health informatics and project management, matching programs with each city’s industries and labor needs, through a mix of virtual learning and fly-ins from professors based in Boston (tuition will be the same as at the main campus).

And it’s not doing it on the cheap

Northeastern, which is spending $60 million to support the expansion, is perhaps the most ambitious of a handful of brick-and-mortar institutions looking to broaden their footprint in new markets and with new methods of instruction….

Northeastern has hired 261 tenured and tenure-track professors in the last five years, about twice as many as in the previous five, and plans to add 200 more in the next three years — all of whom will be based at the home campus in Boston.

Examining traditional assumption that face-to-face is always better than online

“This is a time of huge transition in an industry that hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages,” said Charles P. Bird, a former vice president of Ohio University who helped develop the institution’s online offerings and now works as a consultant. “Higher education is going from traditional face-to-face delivery, and the unexamined assumption that that is good, to thinking about delivering a high-quality online experience, whether fully online or hybrid.”

Drexel University has struggled with a similar enterprise it began in 2009, perhaps miscalculating the importance of local relationships.

“Bill Gates says place is going to matter less and less for universities in the future, but I think that’s wrong,” said Mr. Aoun, Northeastern’s president. “I think a successful university has to be part of a community.”

Savings for students, and the question of quality

Tuition costs for Northeastern’s new hybrid master’s are the same as those for its Boston campus program, but the savings for students will be in time, convenience, and living expenses.  I remember years ago when my husband was planning his return to school to pursue an MBA.  Since online was not an option, we had to price out the potential costs in terms of my lost income and moving expenses.  Today, that equation is quickly changing.

An important question that remains unanswered is about how the quality of online education compares with face-to-face.  Northeastern, ranked 56 on BusinessWeek’s list of business schools , would seem to have a good chance of serving up a high quality experience with its hybrid approach.

Related:

• The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is taking its brand online.
• M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program 

M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program

M.I.T. has enhanced its long-standing free online course program.

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

CREDENTIAL for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught!

While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

“I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

The certificate will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go to support the M.I.T.x platform and to further M.I.T’s mission.

Will employers buy it?

“It seems like a very big deal because the traditional higher education reaction to online programs was, yeah, but it’s not a credential,” said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So I think M.I.T. offering a credential will make quite a splash. If I were still in industry and someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.”

Related:  Is higher education on track to lose its credentialing monopoly?

More classrooms trying Khan Academy, finding it better than group projects

Last week I criticized what I considered the hasty proclamation of a Khan Academy (KA) classroom pilot as a “colossal success”.  Nevertheless, because I am a big fan of Khan Academy and believe in its potential, I am happy to see this.

This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan’s experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

The results so far make me feel cautiously optimistic.

It is too early to know whether the Khan Academy software makes a real difference in learning. A limited study with students in Oakland, Calif., this year found that children who had fallen behind in math caught up equally well if they used the software or were tutored in small groups. The research firm SRI International is working on an evaluation of the software in the classroom.

But look closely at what was happening in this class before KA.  Students would work in groups for days at a time trying to solve just one problem, an exercise that didn’t seem to help them master the fundamentals.

In the past, math class at the Summit schools was always hands-on: the class worked on a problem, usually in small groups, sometimes for days at a time. But getting an entire class of ninth graders to master the fundamentals of math was never easy. Without those, the higher-level conceptual exercises were impossible.

So what exactly were they really getting out of this teacher-supervised, time-consuming group work? This is a question many parents and mathematicians have been asking.

KA offers students a new, engaging way to learn the basics.  It also tracks data that provides teachers with precise individualized information on each student’s progress.  Good, because this allows teachers to do what they can do best.

Ms. Tavenner says she believes that computers cannot replace teachers. But the computer, she recognizes, can do some things a teacher cannot. It can offer personal feedback to a whole room of students as they work. And it can give the teacher additional class time to do more creative and customized teaching.

The thing is, I’m a little wary of giving teachers more time to oversee days of creative group projects with questionable learning goals.  I’d rather see teachers focus on taking advantage of Khan data to proactively address individual learning gaps, letting them be the expert humans interacting with and teaching students in ways no machine can.

How to get a free education

Unfortunately, this free education comes without the credentials.  Only traditional institutions of higher learning can offer those.  For now.

Marc and Angel Hack Life put together a list of 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free, ranging from Khan Academy  to Open Yale Courses  to my new favorite, Bio’s Best.

Those people who take the time and initiative to pursue knowledge on their own are the only ones who earn a real education in this world.  Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entrepreneur or historical figure you can think of.  Formal education or not, you’ll find that he or she is a product of continuous self-education.

Have fun!

Related:  Is higher education on track to lose its credentialing monopoly?

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