Online Higher Ed

There’s an online-learning boom going on in higher education. The focus is on a relatively new model that promises to teach tens of thousands of students at a time for free, with a mix of short Web videos and automatically graded (or peer-graded) assignments. These new offerings are called massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

MOOCs evolved from earlier efforts to put university lecture notes online for free, public use. Back in 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started an ambitious effort to post lecture notes and other materials from all of its courses. No one called it a substitute for attending college, and one of the goals was to help teachers and professors elsewhere see models for designing their curricula. A handful of other universities also started so-called OpenCourseWare efforts, but it didn’t spark a revolution.

But free courseware efforts were a kind of long fuse, it turns out, for a blast that would come years later. YouTube emerged in 2005, making it free to distribute video to the masses. And broadband Internet access gradually became more widespread. Some universities began filming their lectures and posting some of them to YouTube channels, but the videos often felt tedious and hard to watch — presenting a view from the back row of learning.

It took someone outside of higher education—a former hedge-fund analyst named Salman Khan—to popularize a more Web-friendly way to teach online. In 2006 he started Khan Academy, full of short video clips (about 11 minutes each) on more-discrete topics than a typical college lecture. There are no classrooms or talking heads shown in these videos. Instead, Mr. Khan’s voice narrates as he draws and writes notes on a digital whiteboard.

Meanwhile, a few other professors were quietly experimenting with opening up their university courses to students online, essentially letting people audit for free from a distance. The freeloaders could participate in online discussions, and some even turned in homework.

A Stanford University computer-science professor named Sebastian Thrun was inspired by Khan Academy to create a free version of a course he was co-teaching about artificial intelligence. The idea got plenty of press coverage, and more than 160,000 students signed up — a number so large it got the attention of venture-capitalists in Silicon Valley. The boom was on.

Thrun started Udacity to offer MOOCs by professors at prestigious universities around the world. And two other Stanford professors, from the same department as Thrun, started Coursera, which began teaming up with highly selective colleges and universities to offer MOOCs. By the spring of 2013, Coursera had signed up 62 university partners and registered more than 3 million students from across the globe. Udacity, which has more than 160,000 students, recently partnered with San Jose State University for a pilot program of credit-bearing courses.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology jumped in as well. Along with Harvard University, it founded a nonprofit called edX to provide a platform to offer MOOCs. The two universities committed $60 million to start the project, and a handful of other universities have since joined in.

Most MOOCs offer their content for free but charge a small fee for a certificate to prove successful completion. Even the certificates carry no college credit, however.

But that might be changing. In February 2013, the American Council on Education, a Washington-based membership group of higher education institutions, recommended five Coursera courses for credit, as part of a program meant to help colleges decide whether to accept courses from unaccredited providers. San Jose State University is one of a few institutions that have experimented with offering credit to students who pass MOOCs, provided they pay the college a $150 fee.

Many reformers see MOOCs as a way to address a range of pressing problems in higher education. Some hope to bring down the cost of traditional classroom delivery by using “flipped classrooms,” in which students are assigned free lecture videos for homework, while class time is used to discuss the video material and do interactive exercises. Others hope that MOOCs will lead to low-cost alternatives to traditional campuses.

MOOCs face major challenges, however. Completion rates are often tiny—typically around 10 percent—
in part because many people sign up for the free courses but then never actually tune in. And cheating is a concern. MOOC providers have set up methods to proctor tests for those who want a verified certificate of completion.

These new online courses apparently played a role in the controversial ouster—and then reinstatement—of the University of Virginia’s president, Teresa Sullivan. In the days and weeks before her dismissal in 2012, members of the university’s board of visitors traded emails suggesting that they thought Sullivan was moving too slowly to explore MOOCs.

Meanwhile, plenty of colleges offer what is now seen as the old-fashioned version of online education. Such courses more closely mimic the classroom experience: They are led by individual professors who teach 20 to 30 students at a time and grade their homework by hand. For-profit colleges such as the University of Phoenix were early to this model, as were some state institutions, such as UMass Online, founded some 10 years ago. Those online courses are often not much cheaper than traditional courses, for students or the institutions that deliver them.

To help colleges move faster to offer traditional online degree programs, a few companies have emerged in recent years to pay for and help manage the programs’ creation, in exchange for a cut of future tuition revenue. Among those companies are the publishing and technology conglomerate Pearson and 2U, an education technology company formerly called 2tor. In general, the lines separating publisher, professor, university, and software company appear to be blurring as more courses move online.