Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

 
A few months ago, free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.

In a major development on Tuesday, a dozen highly ranked universities said they had signed on with Coursera, a new venture offering free classes online. They still must overcome some skepticism about the quality of online education and the prospects for having the courses cover the costs of producing them, but their enthusiasm is undimmed.

But at universities that have not yet seized a piece of this action, the response ranges from curiosity to fear of losing a crucial competition. When University of Virginia trustees ousted their president last month — a decision they later reversed — one reason cited was concern about being left behind online. (Virginia was included in Tuesday’s announcement.)

“There’s panic,” said Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. “Whether it’s senseless panic is unclear.”

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, let colleges reach vast audiences at relatively low cost, but they have not yet made money from them. And if it becomes possible in years to come to get a complete college education from an elite institution online, free or at relatively low cost, experts wonder whether some colleges will find it harder to attract students willing to pay $20,000, $40,000 or even $60,000 a year for the traditional on-campus experience.

Online classes have been around for years, with technology evolving to include multimedia features and interaction among students and faculty. What is new is the way top colleges are jumping in with free courses — in effect, throwing open the doors digitally.

So far, most people signing up live in foreign countries. But MOOCs will become more appealing to domestic students when they give course credits toward a degree, something the elite universities have not yet done. The University of Washington says it plans to do so, and it may be just a matter of time before earning credits becomes standard.

“The people who should be worried about this are the large tier of American universities — especially the expensive private schools — that are not elite and don’t have the same reputation” as the big-name universities now creating MOOCs, said Anya Kamenetz, an author who writes on the future of higher education.

Residential colleges already attract far less than half of the higher education market. Most enrollment and nearly all growth in higher education is in less costly options that let students balance classes with work and family: commuter colleges, night schools, online universities.

Most experts say there will always be students who want to live on campus, interacting with professors and fellow students, particularly at prestigious universities. But as a share of the college market, that is likely to be a shrinking niche.

The elite universities will be best able to compete with low-cost alternatives because their large endowments make them less dependent on tuition income, and they can lower their effective prices through generous financial aid, said John Nelson, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service who analyzes higher education finances.

Analysts say that universities will inevitably try to make money from MOOCs, whether by charging tuition or not. Software companies working with colleges have looked into advertising, or selling information on students to prospective employers.

William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, noted that a few public colleges, including his system’s University College, already offer mostly online courses. In the future, he said, the standard class will be a hybrid of in-person and online elements, which Maryland is experimenting with.

“We think this approach can cut costs by about 25 percent,” he said, “enabling each professor to work with more students, while producing a clear improvement in learning outcomes.”

For a decade, Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative has created free online courses. But for many educators, Stanford fired the starting gun last fall, with a free online course in artificial intelligence that drew 160,000 students.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a free class project, MITx, in December. The next month, a Stanford professor who helped teach the artificial intelligence class founded Udacity, a company offering free courses in partnership with colleges and professors.

In April, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan joined forces with Coursera to offer free classes. In May, Harvard teamed with M.I.T. to create a similar venture, edX.

In the last week, more universities signed on with Coursera.

“Our participation was finalized literally over the weekend,” said J. Milton Adams, vice provost at the University of Virginia, which listed five free courses. “I’m going to have some unhappy faculty members saying, ‘Why can’t my course be on there?’ ”

A version of this news analysis appeared in print on July 18, 2012, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free..

How did you come to teach the first course?

I just backed into it. M.I.T. asked me to look for a teacher for the MITx prototype course. I talked to some of my colleagues, who are much better teachers than I am, but I couldn’t get anyone to agree to do it. Many of them said it couldn’t be done in three months. But I’m really impatient, I like to get things done, and I’ve started enough companies to know that you can do things that big companies wouldn’t think was possible.

The debut course was “Circuits and Electronics.” Why that one?

It was not my first choice at all. A computer science or digital course would have made more sense, but “Circuits” was something I could teach. It’s one of the hardest courses at M.I.T. You need differential equations and calculus, and we had to develop online simulated laboratories.

We’re starting slowly, with four to six courses in the fall and maybe a dozen in the spring. We hope to offer computer science, biology, math, physics, public health, history and more.

Did you expect so much demand?

With no marketing dollars, I thought we might get 200 students. When we posted on the Web site that we were taking registration and the course would start in March, my colleague Piotr Mitros called and said, “We’re getting 10,000 registrations a day.” I fell off my seat and said, “Piotr, are you sure you’ve got the decimal point right?” My most fearful moment was when we launched the course. I worried that the system couldn’t handle it, and would keel over and die.

Granted, there are no papers to grade, and assignments aren’t free-form, but how does one professor handle so many students?

We had four teaching assistants, and my initial plan was that they would spend a lot of time on the discussion forum, answering questions. One night in the early days, I was on the forum at 2 a.m. when I saw a student ask a question, and I was typing my answer when I discovered that another student had typed an answer before I could. It was in the right direction, but not quite there, so I thought I could modify it, but then some other student jumped in with the right answer. It was fascinating to see how quickly students were helping each other. All we had to do was go in and say that it was a good answer. I actually instructed the T.A.’s not to answer so quickly, to let students work for an hour or two, and by and large they find the answers.

The discussion forum has many interesting features, like karma points. If someone posts a question, and another student votes it up, which is like “liking” the question, the student who posted it gets karma points. Or if a staff member checks an answer as correct, the student gets a big bonus of points. If you get a large number of karma points, you get some of the privileges of an instructor, like closing down a discussion when people have come to the right answer.

How does this all work with a global enrollment?

It’s been amazing. You’d see someone post in Brazil looking for other students in Brazil so they could meet and have a study group at a coffee shop. Facebook sites for the course popped up, not all in English. There are people in Tunisia, Pakistan, New Zealand, Latin America. And a professor in Mongolia has a group of students taking the course. He got them all a little laboratory kit, so they’re doing the experiments live along with the course.

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?

A large number of the students who sign up for MOOCs are browsing, to see what it’s like. They might not have the right background for the course. They might just do a little bit of the coursework. Our course was M.I.T.-hard and needed a very, very solid background. Other students just don’t have time to do the weekly assignments. One thing we’re thinking of is to offer multiple versions of the course, one that would last a semester and one that could stretch over a year. That would help some people complete.

EdX operates under an honor code, with no way to verify that the student who registered is the one doing the work. Is that likely to change?

It’s quite possible employers would be happy with an honor certificate. We’re looking at various methods of proctoring. We have talked about people going to centers to take exams. There are also companies that use the cameras inside a laptop or iPad to watch you and everything else that’s happening in the room while you take an exam, and that may be more scalable.

So what is the future of edX?

When there are more courses, I could imagine people taking several of them, and putting them together, getting the certificates, and using it something like a diploma. I think the courses will get better and better, but we don’t know how they’ll be used.

And because we will have all this data on how students actually use our materials, there are opportunities for research on learning. We can watch how many attempts students made before they got an exercise right, and if they got it wrong, what they used to try to find a solution. Did they go to the textbook, go back and watch the video, go to the forum and post a question?

Our goal is to change the world through education.

This interview has been edited and condensed.