Massive Open Online Courses — MOOCs, for short — are causing fear in the world of higher education.
MOOCs have a long lineage of nontraditional distance learning programs like correspondence courses. Empire State College in the State University of New York system, for example, was founded in 1971 and has awarded degrees to more than 60,000 graduates since it started. Its mission statement declares, "Whether online or face to face, or a combination of both, learners decide how, when and where to study."
While MOOCs are perceived as game-changers, though, these programs were not. What sparks attention to MOOCs "free and online" has been enhanced digital capacity, worldwide participation and the interest and involvement of elite institutions like Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Brown and Stanford, which appear out to educate not just thousands of students, but millions.
One such program, Coursera (www.coursera.org), was started in Silicon Valley in 2012 by Professors from Stanford University. Its courses have attracted over a million participants from all corners of the world. Sixty-two universities are members of Coursera. Participation has been denied to colleges and universities that are not considered the "elite."
Not to be left out, MIT and Harvard organized EdX to host classes from 12 universities.
SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher said the 64-campus system will launch "Open SUNY" next year. It will be a network of online courses available to all its students, regardless of which campus they attend or where their financial aid comes from. Zimpher has a grand vision: "No institution in America — not even the for-profits — will be able to match the number of offerings and the quality of instruction. In three years, we will enroll 100,000 degree seeking students in Open SUNY, making us the largest public online provider of education in the nation."
What makes MOOCs a "disruptive innovation" is that no one knows what they will lead to, how it will be paid for and how it will affect existing institutions of higher education.
At a time when one year at a university can cost $50,000 or more, these programs offer access to top lectures on the cheap. But will universities like Harvard and Stanford allow this to happen for long? Are MOOCs an assured way of getting a good education?
An editorial in the New York Times on California's public universities declared that online education "cannot be counted on to revive a beleaguered public system whose mission is to educate a great many freshmen who need close instruction and human contact to succeed."
Despite the ability to reach millions of students around the world, MOOCs have yet to realize what one would assume would be their full potential — providing college degrees for users and income for schools. Coursera is not generating revenue. It is considering certification fees, but no one has come up with a sure way of even grading MOOCs students.
Jane Robbins in "The Ethics of MOOCs" from www.InsiderHigherEd.com may be right in saying, "MOOCs reminded me of nothing more so much as the old-time community college, or the best big-city adult education: cheap (in this case free); open to all comers; populated by a diverse mixture of the curious, the self-improving, and the job-skill-enhancing; generally taught by committed faculty; a free-form educational resource to be dipped in and out of according to need or want."
If Robbins is right, why are elites like Harvard and SUNY rushing to stake out a position on this new frontier? Do they see something that Robbins doesn't, or are they just afraid of being left out of what may be the next big thing? With so many coming in, MOOCs seem to be the future and we must make sure our home for higher education doesn't become as Moody's predicts, a loser in a MOOCs world.
Paul M. Bray's e-mail is secsunday@aol.com