Date: May 21, 2012 3:58 PM
Author: Jerry P. Becker
Subject: Top-Ranked Universities to Offer Free Courses Online
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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wednesday, April 18, 2012. See
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-start-up-teams-with-top-ranked-universities-to-offer-free-courses/36048
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Online-Education Start-Up Teams With Top-Ranked Universities to Offer
Free Courses
By Nick DeSantis
Last fall, two Stanford computer-science professors helped create an
online course-hosting platform that opened some of the university's
classes to the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of students
enrolled free of charge. Their start-up company, which grew out of
that effort, now seeks to give millions a taste of top-quality
education by expanding its platform to other elite universities.
Coursera, the online-education outfit founded by Stanford professors
Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, will grow its course platform through
official partnerships with three more top-tier institutions, the
company announced today. Princeton University, the University of
Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford
will use Coursera's technology to offer a mix of classes including
computer science, business, and literature. The young company already
serves seven courses, and about 30 more will be rolled out later this
week and through the summer.
The courses are offered free to anyone online, though students cannot
earn university credit. Ms. Koller said Coursera will leave the
choice to award unofficial credentials like certificates of
accomplishment up to its partner institutions. And students cannot
interact with the professors directly-for feedback, they can use an
online forum to ask and rank questions, where popular submissions
rise to the top. Quizzes embedded in the course videos test students'
understanding of the material as they go along.
Ms. Koller said that in addition to opening courses to the entire
world, Coursera's platform could allow professors to build a better
face-to-face experience by "flipping" their classrooms. Under this
model, interactive classroom instruction replaces the traditional
lecture, which is presented in other formats for students to absorb
outside of class.
"Our vision is that this kind of technology is going to improve the
experience for both populations," she said.
Ms. Koller pointed to her own experience using the flipped classroom
to explain why students would choose to pay top dollar to attend
institutions like Stanford and Penn instead of simply getting their
education free using Coursera's platform. She said one of her classes
has long been recorded and televised, partly because of Stanford's
need to support students who take courses through a
continuing-education program at the university. Attendance would
typically drop to about 30 percent of enrollment by the third or
fourth week, she said.
When she moved to the flipped classroom model about three years ago,
she threw out the lecturing. Instead, she used the classroom time to
talk about common problems popping up in quizzes, offer group
problem-solving exercises, and invite guest lecturers. She made
attendance optional, recorded the sessions, and didn't cover any
material that was required for the exams.
Though her colleagues cautioned that attendance would plummet even
further, Ms. Koller said attendance hovered around 70 percent of
enrollment-about double what she had before she flipped her
classroom. A colleague in biochemistry tried the same thing and got
similar results, Ms. Koller added.
Coursera's technology could allow other professors to achieve similar
success with their on-campus classes while expanding their reach
online, she said.
"You're not going to get the two to be equal," she said. "They're
each going to be better than where they are now."
Other emerging providers of huge open online courses, such as Udacity
and MITx, have so far limited their offerings to computer-science
courses because the assignments can be automatically graded by
computers, making it easier to teach hundreds of thousands of
students at once. Coursera, meanwhile, plans to power classes in
computer science, as well as courses in the humanities-though the
company is still developing plans for the humanities classes. Ms.
Koller said those courses could use a peer-assessment model in which
some of the grading gets outsourced to students, who would use
rubrics as guides to judge their peers' work.
"They didn't want this to be an engineering-centric effort," Ms.
Koller said of her company's partner institutions.
The company's founders said they have limited their partnerships for
now because Coursera is a small company, with about a dozen
employees. They plan to focus on teaming up with top institutions,
because those colleges have the highest concentration of talented
faculty members working across disciplines-though they added that
discussions with other potential partners are continuing. (Two of the
classes listed on Coursera's Web site, "Computer Vision" and
"Software as a Service," are taught by professors from the University
of California at Berkeley, but Ms. Koller described Coursera's
relationship with that institution as "experimental.")
To keep growing, Coursera will pull from a rich venture-capital
investment provided by two prominent firms. Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers and New Enterprise Associates have invested $16-million in
the company.
The influx of cash will allow the company's founders to focus on
growing the platform instead of worrying right away about how to turn
thousands of visitors into a reliable revenue stream. Ms. Koller and
Mr. Ng were reluctant to discuss the company's business model because
they said they're considering a range of options. One possibility
could be to connect certain students who have opted to see job
advertisements with potential employers. Whatever money-making
strategy the company chooses, Coursera's founders said they will
respect student privacy and not sell that data to employers.
Though the students who take these courses will not enjoy the
official distinctions awarded to traditional students at Coursera's
partner institutions, Ms. Koller said she believes the association
with top-ranked colleges could help the company's global students
stand out.
"This is not Stanford credit, it's not Penn credit," she said. "But I
think the fact that this course has a level of academic excellence
that is in some ways approved by these top universities is something
that speaks to people."
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--
Jerry P. Becker
Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
625 Wham Drive
Mail Code 4610
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610
Phone: (618) 453-4241 [O]
(618) 457-8903 [H]
Fax: (618) 453-4244
E-mail: jbecker@siu.edu