Leveraging its high-powered cloud computing system, campus leaders said Friday they will start offering for-credit courses to the world. The announcement comes a week after Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they started a nonprofit company to offer free courses by its faculty. Stanford, Princeton and other universities also have formed a similar company that is boosted by millions in venture capital. Purdue officials hope its online attempt, called PurdueHUB-U, will not only become a force in advanced distance education, but turn into a money maker as students from other countries seek learning opportunity from Purdue’s renowned faculty.
Online education is dialing up to be a significant factor in the futures of colleges and universities across the country, including Binghamton University. Administrators are continuing to explore ways to integrate technology and the classroom. Recently, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Binghamton’s department of Continuing Education & Outreach (CEO) reported that at BU, about 44 percent of total student enrollment of 7,230 during the 2011 summer and winter sessions was associated with distance learning courses. Between 2003 and 2011, summer and winter sessions have served 12,986 students through 666 distance learning courses.
William Gibson, the American-Canadian science fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace, is well-known for having stated “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” The quote succinctly points to the gradual dissemination of new technologies that start with first adopters but can take years to spread more widely. To borrow from Gibson, in recent weeks it has become increasingly clear that the future of education is here, though it is not evenly distributed. The emerging model flips the current approach of expensive textbooks, closed research, and limited access to classroom-based learning on its head, instead featuring open course materials, open access to scholarly research, and Internet-based courses that can simultaneously accommodate thousands of students. The concern is that other countries are becoming first adopters, while Canada lags behind.
What value the certificate ends up having — if any — will be up to the market. But the fact that online classes are new and unfamiliar doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be recognized as meaningful. Now, having MIT and Harvard involved in online education makes it a lot more likely the classes offered by edX will be rigorous, and that the credentials it awards will be taken seriously. The long-standing higher-education formula — four years at a high-cost residential college — has served many students well, and will continue to do so. But tuition increases that far outpace inflation have become unsustainable. Institutions should continue to experiment with ways to bring down prices, and if innovation stalls, the government should be ready to use the leverage of federal aid to nudge schools along.
Florida’s next House Speaker says increasing the number of college graduates will require online universities. Online schools won’t replace traditional universities, Rep. Will Weatherford said, but make higher education more accessible and affordable. Online learning and online classrooms, he said, is the key to growing an educated community, a strong nucleus of young people who have earned post-secondary degrees and a pool of smart people attractive to top businesses or companies looking for new places to locate.
Dalton Conley’s research on how social and economic opportunities are distributed has prompted him to get involved in bringing college-level teaching to students who need an education that costs next to nothing. “Spreading education to populations that currently don’t have access to it might do some good in the world,” he says. That reasoning led Mr. Conley, a prominent sociologist, to accept the post of dean of arts and sciences at the online University of the People, which has access as its motivating rationale. The international, tuition-free, nonprofit institution, founded in 2009, is a pioneering effort in e-learning and peer-to-peer learning. Using open-source technology and coursework provided gratis by well-regarded institutions, it offers two- and four-year degree programs in business administration and computer science.
Innosight Institute – a non-profit think tank co-founded by innovation expert Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School – today released the report “Classifying K-12 blended learning,” which defines the emerging phenomenon of mixing online learning into brick-and-mortar schools. “Today, more than four million students are participating in some kind of formal online learning program, often blended into the traditional schoolhouse” The white paper is co-authored by Innosight Institute Senior Education Research Fellow Heather Staker and Executive Director of Education Michael B. Horn. It identifies the four models of blended learning and provides working examples.
Adding some technology to the educational process is one thing, but truly revolutionary learning experiences take a deeper sort of innovation, which you can see at a program at Duke working for change in Haiti. We all know what a traditional college classroom looks like: students in rows stare glassy-eyed at the professor who drones on, paying more attention to the equations he’s writing on the board than the students he’s supposed to be teaching. No wonder many are proposing using digital technology to “flip” the classroom. In flipping, students do the homework before class, typically reading course materials or watching videos of lectures online. Class time is spent on individual or small group tutoring, with the lesson plan set by the student, concentrating on areas he didn’t understand. In the future, I’ll talk about cheap, easy, low-tech, no-frills ways to make any classroom (or even a stale business meeting) do cartwheels.
Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are growing. It’s a good time to consider how they may change education. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this month they have joined forces in a not-for-profit venture, edX, to offer free online versions of their classes. They will spend $60 million on the project. Having an Internet connection is the only requirement to take a class, but the university’s insist the institutions’ academic rigor will remain. Certificates of mastery will be available for those who demonstrate knowledge of course material, but not in either university’s name. EdX is not unique.
Educational publishing has gotten a lot of attention in the recent past, from controversy over rising prices to digital advances. Another trend is the proliferation of tools for educators to create and publish their own content. TED brings us one such tool, launched at the end of April: TED-Ed, “lessons worth sharing.”
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. This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education:…
In an unprecedented move among highly ranked traditional law schools, the Washington University Law School has unveiled a fully online master’s degree program in U.S. law. The program will be designed and taught by Washington Law faculty using a platform developed by 2tor, a Maryland-based online education provider. It will begin enrolling students in January 2013. The St. Louis-based law school says the new online program is meant primarily for practicing lawyers in foreign countries as a way for them to get credentialed as experts in American law without having to quit their jobs and move to the United States to take classes. The program does not offer a path to a J.D., and is not designed to prepare students to take the bar exam — although the American Bar Association (ABA), the sector’s most powerful regulatory body, has “acquiesced” to allowing graduates of the online program to sit for the bar exam in about a dozen states.
If the current higher education sector is bloated and overpriced, what will students do? Will they simply forgo education entirely? Or will something else spring up? Well, something else seems to be springing up. Conventional colleges may be overpriced and underperforming, but those 19th century methods of teaching and learning are being challenged by 21st century alternatives. Case in point: the Harvard/MIT EdX model. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced they’re putting 60 million dollars into an open-source online education program. A list of courses will be announced this summer and will be implemented in the fall, but the bottom line is that people all over the world will be able to study subjects taught at MIT and Harvard for free, and get “certification” — though not an actual diploma (yet) — if they pass certain tests.
“Flipping the classroom” means using class time differently than you would in the traditional mode of instruction — which is to say this: Why waste class time lecturing/presenting during class meeting times when you can ask students to listen to lectures via video outside of class, and then use class time for interaction with students, hands-on group activities, group problem solving, in-class writing, etc.? “Flipping the classroom” means flipping the usual mode of learning — instead of lecturing in class and assigning homework for outside of class, you flip it: lecture gets done outside, homework inside.
Is the mechanization and the webication of higher education inevitable? As everyone is too aware, college is expensive and debt on student loans now exceeds a trillion dollars. With free lectures available from professors at Ivy League universities that students around the world clamor to get into, and with robots able to take over some of the functions of human instructors, might not administrators — watching the bottom line of their budgets — conclude there is less and less a need for faculty, for professors who need health benefits, office space, sabbaticals and so forth?
Free, Open Course With Dr. Curt Bonk: Motivating students and creating community within blended and online learning environments are crucial to academic achievement and success. This open course will provide both theoretical concepts and practical tools for instructors to improve motivation, retention, and engagement within blended and online courses.
Course Objectives:
• Identify and apply relevant motivational strategies and instructional techniques
• Construct thinking skill options for different types of learners and subjects
• Design and share innovative thinking skill activities as well as unique cooperative learning
• Map and apply instructional models and ideas to online learning tools
by Tony Bates, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources
This post is focused on guidance to instructors or faculty who are new to teaching online, or who have had a poor experience of teaching online because they were not following what I call best practices (which will be covered to some extent in these posts). These posts then are really to get you started. If you are an experienced and successful online teacher, then you may want to look at another post, ‘Designing online learning for the 21st century‘, which might be considered the next step or level in online course design. However, in this and following posts on this topic the focus is on getting started or on checking whether best practice is being followed in your existing courses.
As Steve Rothschild, an entrepreneur who teaches at Worcester, Mass.-based, Clark University’s entrepreneurship capstone course told me, “Programs like edX will revolutionize college education.” In his view, students will be able to get basic knowledge that forms the foundation for capstone classes like the one that Rothschild teaches from programs such as edX. Those free courses could take the place of community colleges. And if name-brand four-year colleges were willing to transfer edX credits from students who spent, say, two years taking those courses – the students would be able to cut their tuition bills by 25% to 50% compared to taking two years at a community college and two years at a name-brand one.
In the end, from this exercise I learned that online learning will require considerable investment in time and energy of academics before it really hits the mark. While an 11 year old is far from the right test subject, the notion of taking someone out of their element to see what a learning experience is really like is insightful. Lectures need to be redesigned with pause in mind. The purpose of assessment has to be completely rethought. But when it comes down to it, the subject matter is broadly accessible and one can imagine that younger and younger students will delve into what we previously thought of as University-only course material.
In what is nearly a biannual rite of passage, Harvard undergraduates—nearly one thousand of them—flock to Sanders Theatre to attend “Justice,” a course taught by government professor Michael J. Sandel every other year that challenges students to consider difficult moral dilemmas. But even with the lofty enrollment figures, Harvard students make up only a small portion of people engaged in the course. In the five years since the course became publicly available online, more than 15,000 viewers from around the world have “taken” Sandel’s course, according to the course’s website. Virtual students have the opportunity to watch all of Sandel’s lectures and post their thoughts on discussion forums. Now, as a result of the Harvard-MIT partnership announced last Wednesday, ”Justice” will be just one of many Harvard courses open to the general public online.
After a whirlwind nine months that has witnessed a rapid rebirth of online education at elite U.S. universities in the form of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, Harvard University threw its hat into the ring Wednesday — along with the largest investment yet in technology aimed at bringing interactive online education to hundreds of thousands of students at a time, free. Harvard will be piggybacking on MITx, the platform the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed for its own MOOCs, the universities jointly announced. The combined venture will be a nonprofit called edX. Harvard and MIT together have committed $60 million to the project, which is likely more than the combined venture funds raised by Coursera, Udacity and Khan Academy.