MIT and Harvard Offer Courses Online for Free

Could Massive Online Open Courses be the future of education?

By Chelsi Robichaud, Staff Writer

Education is finding new ways to adapt to technology changes, and mass open online courses (MOOCs) are an ever-growing trend. Universities are joining in on this technological revolution, and more classes are becoming available online for the public.

edX is one of these programs. As a product of MIT and Harvard, edX provides lectures viewable online from both universities. MIT has been offering courses for free in an open-based format since 1999, and published 2,150 courses in the year 2012. The first edX lecture was given by Anant Agarwal on circuits and electronics. Today he is the president of edX.

The Education Crisis: Are We Crying Wolf?

Creation of websites like edX may offer opportunities of learning for people who couldn’t afford to pay tuition. It offers an answer to the question: What if you could receive course credits without paying tuition? According to Agarwal, this is exactly what our education system needs.

“Our education system certainly needs work. I think the cost has spiralled out of control and student debt is at a trillion dollars. Clearly something is broken,” says Agarwal. “We can do one of two things: we can improve the quality dramatically and offer much more to the learners, or we can reduce the cost in the denominator.”

The idea that our education system is broken is not a new concept. Students around the world have been experiencing effects of this “brokenness” for a number of years.

In 1994, Malcom Tight, previously a professor at Warwick University, wrote: “while higher education has suffered both internal and external stresses, these are no more than might have been expected in an activity of its scale and complexity during a period of considerable economic, social and technological change”.

Tight reports that the problems of higher education are directed at “teaching standards, the relevance of research, the growth of the graduate schools, the decline of the liberal arts ‘great books’ curriculum, racism on campus, the influence of military and industrial funding, and the corrupting effects of college sports activities”. While all of these factors are still relevant today, it is undeniable that debt is central in this crisis—and perhaps indicates a shift in concerns over the past two decades.

One of the questions that continues to plague our current education system includes: Will students be able to continue paying high tuition fees, or will there be a change in the system?

According to Clay Shirky, an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, a change is on the rise.

“Quae Non Possunt Non Manent. Things That Can’t Last Don’t,” writes Shirky in a blog post on the topic. “The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.”

The problem, according to Shirky, is that universities will lose their benefits if they lower costs. But would it be possible for classes to be held primarily online, and for free, without losing those perks? David Bell, a professor at Duke University, writes: “[Online courses] will be part of new hybrid instructional models taking better advantage of the possibilities offered by networked collaborative technologies.”

This view is not held by Bell alone. During his interview with the Economist, Agarwal similarly states: “I think what you’re going to see happen in the future is more of a mix. Where you have a four year degree program maybe it should be a two year program [with] students [coming] into a university having taken some online courses.”

While nobody can accurately predict the future of a system reform in education, these are not unprecedented beliefs. Technology is changing, and the world in which information is shared will change with it.

Internationalization and business

While edX writes on their website that they are a “not for profit, open source platform, collaborative” and “financially sustainable,” people like Bell seek to understand their motives more deeply.

“There must be something else behind the surprisingly rapid realization on the part of elite universities that they absolutely have to get into this game,” Bell writes in his article Impact, or the Business of University (available on Project Muse). “I think it is clear that a major motivation behind the rapid development of MOOCs is quite simply the following: this is a market.”

However, many universities are apprehensive about MOOCs for a number of reasons. First, the number of applicants for enrollment a university receives every year may, in fact, dwindle in response to being able to receive all of their courses online for free. The other main issue is how a less expensive option would be highly seductive for students who struggle to pay their tuition every year.

These two factors would certainly appear detrimental to the university’s business. Or would they?

Bell suggests the contrary. In his article, he cites Simon Marginson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, who writes: “Open courseware has the same logic as the winner-takes-all markets in celebrity actors or top movies or music discussed by Cornell sociologist Robert Frank. A tiny handful of producers and products dominate the global market, overwhelmingly. There is only one Elvis, and only one Harvard.”

And popularity, indeed, does bring in revenue. MOOCs are becoming more and more popular, especially in this past year. Thinking about university and internationalization, Nigel M. Healey, a professor at Trent University, writes that “a profit-maximising business, the ultimate explanation for the internationalisation of a company is that it increases long-term profits, either by reducing production costs and/or increasing market sales.”

According to Healey, while these trends of internationalization are happening in the field of higher education, they are not yet stable.

MOOCs remain internationalizing. They offer possibilities for students located internationally to pursue studies with some of the best institutions like Harvard or MIT with edX. With more interest world-wide from foreign students, universities may expect an increase in international interest in their programs. As Bell states, “it has long been the case that the most prestigious American universities are in a market to sell their “brand,” that is, to attract the most and the best applicants not only locally, but increasingly globally.”

Perhaps, then, MOOCs are the way of the future.

However, Healey predicts problems in understanding the amount of students enrolling into these courses. “The data are not routinely collected by national ministries of education or their agencies,” he explains. “And, to a lesser extent, because many of the online providers are private, for-profit institutions.”

Without being reviewed by education boards, a fear exists that the information given to the public could be slightly misunderstood.

High School Students and Credit

But this education process isn’t only for university-level students. Agarwal reports that people as young as high school students are taking the courses, and receiving credit for their work.

“Andover high school in the Massachusetts area had a dozen students take edX courses online,” Agarwal says, “and they got high school credit for doing that.”

The students claim edX helps to prepare them for the self-motivated work style of a university or college education, and believe that it offers what most high school classes can’t: a good idea of what awaits them in their post-secondary education.

“When you talk about exposure to different ideas and points of view…I just think about the different depths [needed] to enter into that college environment,” says Nancy Duclos, staff member at Andover high school.

Online vs. On campus

But will online courses be enough to give students a well-rounded education?

According to the website, edX is “committed to research that will allow us to understand how students learn, how technology can transform learning, and the ways teachers teach on campus and beyond”.

Shirky, however, writes that “the fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them.”

According to Shirky, the real issue is that people will be left without a means to achieve their goals if they lose their conduit—in-class university education.

In addition, there is a concern that online education won’t be able to present students with the same atmosphere they have in class. Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, writes: “[Online education] tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms.”

Jean-Paul Restoule, a professor at the University of Toronto and a teacher with Cousera, similarly believes that there is a definite disadvantage to online courses.

“You can’t have that conversation,” Restoule says. “Basically all the communication is one way attempt or  reactive with marking dialogue and trying to engage.”

In his experience, Restoule has  prompted dialogue through discussion forums and in their course assignments. However, discussion forums online are not always enough, Restoule admits,  as certain students won’t participate in these groups, which is not so different from formal in-class education.

Though MOOCs may be limiting, with less student-teacher interactions than in-class, formal university education, Restoule suggests that classes be brought outside, perhaps on tours of the city or various places that touch on the course.

The pressure with MOOCs is not always merely on students, however, but the teachers themselves.

“You almost feel pressured to make the very best lecture you’ve ever done because its’ going to be saved for posterity,” Restoules says. “I think that is very intimidating and probably why we’ve scraped most of our first takes.”

However, teaching an online course is not only anxiety and pressure.

“What’s been really meaningful is unsolicited emails, letters, cards and that sort of thing that people have sent to say they got a lot out of the course,” Restoule says. “I’ve run into people and I don’t even know who they are. I meet them in the street and they say: ‘I’ve been taking your course, it’s great!’”

Indeed, MOOCs like Coursera and edX can still offer a number of benefits. MOOCs may be helpful for people with disabilities or accessibility issues, or even for those who are shy and can more easily put themselves forward in an online discussion board.

Though MOOCs like edX are still limited in certain senses, such as teacher-student activity, Bell believes that these websites will continue to become more stable in the future, with more universities taking centre-stage when it comes to online learning. He states:

“From this chaotic mixture will emerge a few winners, and at that later stage, a more stable set of standards in shared digital platforms”.

Photo courtesy of begincollege.com & vimeo.com