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Kevin Carey’s recent book, The End of College, starts with a great story. He introduces us to one of the most famous professors in the world, Eric Lander. His background is about as impressive as it gets. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, led the Human Genome Project, and has expertise in his field that only a few in the world can even hope to approach. But aside from his accomplishments with the genome, he is also known as one of the best teachers at MIT. His class, introduction to Biology, is mandatory, and legendary. He has adoring fans gather around his desk after each class. More importantly, at least as far as the thesis of the book, his class has reached thousands of people around the world, for free, as a MOOC.
Massively Open Online Courses were, a few years ago, trumpeted by companies like Udacity and others as the death knell of traditional education as we know it. Carey, like Malcolm Gladwell in his books, knows that we are wired for stories more than for data and overviews of research. While these latter things are what should be used to ‘prove’ his thesis, Carey’s book depends largely on profiles of the people in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and a few other places who are at the forefront of the MOOC revolution. Sebastian Thrun, who was one of the first to create a MOOC, famously said that in 20 years there would only be a few dozen colleges and universities left.
Since then, the death of traditional brick and mortar education has received a lot of comment from pundits and educators. Most think, as the cliché goes, that rumors of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Instead of MOOCs heralding a Gutenberg-level revolution, most see them as yet another set of bells and whistles that will help some people around the world get exposure to a huge range of topics and subjects, but won’t make much of difference to the way education works in the US. Colleges and universities will continue to bring students to campus and train them for the job market and for graduate school, perhaps with some implementation of MOOC technology, but not much will happen to force schools to either join the on-line revolution or sink into oblivion.
Carey’s book attempts to show how they are wrong. His first chapter is instructive in several senses of the word. Carey himself takes Lander’s MOOC and earns a certificate for completing the same work as first year students at MIT. He has completed all the challenging problem sets and passed each of them. He has reached out to the TAs online for help and participated in online chat rooms with other students from all over the world. To put it simply, he has demonstrated mastery in a challenging MIT class and has a certificate to back it up. He even takes time to visit the class in real time — and comes away thinking online is better. Online, he can hit the pause button during the lecture to write notes in a more complete way than trying to write down words as they stream out in real time. He can concentrate on the class in a quiet way in the comfort of home, instead of being distracted by the student next to him who is focused far more on his phone than what is going on in class. He can hear Lander better and has multiple camera angles to see what he does, instead of seeing him a long way away at the back of a lecture hall.
Carey convinces me that this particular class teaches students the material in ways that are even better than if he were there taking it in person. In addition, Carey also underscores how the new technology, combined with the discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and education science about learning, can help to individualize the experience of taking MOOCs.
I advise anyone who is primed (the last word as it is used in neuroscience) against MOOCs to read this first chapter and then come up with reasons why Carey's experience does not convince you that this class is as good or better than taking the exact same class at MIT. I think if this chapter stood alone as an article it would get many to question their assumptions, and I think this is great. His interview for US News, “It's the End of College As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is a good introduction too.
Much of the rest of the book unfolds in chapters that introduce us to some of the early leaders of the online education revolution. We hear about wonderful professors who have made their work accessible, for free, to people around the world. To give just one example of what this can mean, there is a person in Nigeria who has taken more than 250 MOOCs:
Jima Ngei. Ngei, who lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, has completed and passed 250 MOOCs, all through Coursera, since September 2012. His self-styled education has included courses in English common law and Chinese history, data science and Latin American culture, social epidemiology and the life of Thomas Jefferson, to name a few.
Of course Mr. Ngei is at the very far end of the bell curve of MOOC takers; he has taken and passed more courses than it would take to earn 5 undergraduate degrees. The data shows that people around the world, with neither the opportunity or the money to attend traditional schools in the US, can become “educated citizens” (to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase).
Another way that Carey sees education changing in the not-too-distant future has to do with the way colleges and universities will use deep data to select students in ways that some forward thinking businesses currently do. Jeffrey Selingo, whose own book, College (Un)Bound should be required reading for anyone who wants to get informed about data and education, has this to say about Carey in The WashingtonPost:
In a compelling new book about higher education, The End of College, its author, Kevin Carey, lays out a future where admission to a college is based on the massive amounts of data and information already collected on students from an early age rather than a snapshot made in one moment in time for an application deadline.
“Instead of waiting for applications to arrive, colleges will be able to conduct extensive searches of data that students and parents choose to make available,” writes Carey, who directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation.
Under such a scenario, admissions would become something more akin to how employers now search LinkedIn and other online databases to recruit talent to their organizations rather than wait for an application to arrive in response to a job advertisement. LinkedIn already has lowered the minimum age to join the professional network to 14, partly in an effort to persuade more students in middle school and high school to begin building their profiles. As more students do, the day might not be that far away when a LinkedIn profile becomes the foundation for a college application or the place where admissions officers search for their next class of freshmen.
Both Carey and Selingo believe that looking at a student’s data over many years — not just at transcripts, a set of tests, and an essay — is a far better way to predict success in college. If this all sounds unrealistic, I will simply add a quote from a very smart counselor who shared this with me in a discussion about this issue: “I spoke with an Eli Lilly exec the other day who told me that they almost solely hire from LinkedIn and MOOCs now. Try explaining that to high school students who have never heard of either.”
In some cases, companies are hiring people who do not have a college degree but have the skills they are looking for — coding being one that many are searching for. I know a high school student who was brought in as an intern at Google based upon his MOOC certificates and recommendation from his MOOC professor. I am not saying that admissions will change dramatically in the next year or two, but schools are already using data to predict yield and to recruit prospective students. If they find that these alternatives will help them enroll more and stronger students, then the way students apply to schools may change radically in the next decade.
While I like much of what Carey has to say as he tries to convince readers that colleges and universities will be falling by the hundreds (or even thousands) in the next several decades, he does not convince me that he has proven his thesis. He marshals a lot of evidence to make his case, but he also leaves out at least 5 things that will, I think, undercut any relatively fast transformation of the education landscape in the US.
Habits and beliefs
Many hold a deep and longstanding belief that the US education system — and our way of giving students access to great centers of learning — is the best in the world. It is part of the American Dream, something that many (rightly, I think), hold up as a shining beacon on the hill. The number of students who have flowed in from the rest of the world over the last two decades demonstrates that it isn’t just those in the US who believe the best schools in the world are here, it’s common wisdom. (For those who read much of what I write, you know I always use this last phrase as a way of turning the conversation in a new direction away from the common wisdom.)
We are all guided by habits and beliefs to interpret the world through ideological and experiential frames. There are some (like Dan Ariely and Yuval Noah Hariari), who think that we think most of what we do with anything but rational approaches to issues.
I mention this as most people I know think that traditional education, on a campus, is invaluable preparation for the real world. Some talk about the importance of liberal arts; others about the networking and career building skills that are a part of being in and out of classes among faculty and students and administrators. For many, then, it is "common sense" that on campus experiences make for a much deeper and fuller preparation for what will happen after graduation.
Even if they are confronted with data (for example, over a third of students graduating from college today have no increase in critical thinking skills after 4 years and a degree—see the book "Academically Adrift" for the research on this), there is still the feeling that college should happen on a campus. We are slow to change the way we view things even if confronted with data. There are a majority of US citizens who think that evolution is not the best way to explain how we as humans have come to dominate the planet. I think the evidence is compelling but they do not. My citing data has virtually never changed someone’s mind on this issue. I am not sanguine that a few ‘experts’ who believe that the current way many receive an education today needs to change will be enough to shift the paradigm anytime soon.
Schools Themselves
If Carey believes that the thousands of traditional colleges and universities will embrace the changes he proposes in education lightly then he too is not approaching things rationally. Some do not like to say that higher education is a big business but the way things run at most schools these days it is hard to find out why they think this. Larger and larger administrative bodies tightly run schools. They oversee budges, enrollments and fund-raising. The largest increase in hiring over the last decades has been on the administrative side as schools recognize that they need to be business savvy to keep things afloat. Many schools are already struggling. A few have closed already. What Carey proposes is yet another huge challenge to many school’s survival. As with any business under threat from competitors, there will be efforts to dismiss the data that Carey uses and efforts to undercut any big changes in the status quo. Everyone who works at a brick and mortar school has a stake in on-line options not gaining a large market share. There will be faculty, administrators, alumni and students who will all be on the side of the schools. They will be passionate advocates for what they offer. There will be media blitzes, studies released, and lots more to critique on-line education. Trying to separate the "signal from the noise" (I use the phrase that data guru Nate Silver uses as the title of his great book on this topic) among competing data will be difficult at best. There are billions of dollars at stake, untold thousands of jobs, and communities that will be in trouble too should local schools close. Will schools go the way of the newspapers? They were for many years the traditional way that many found out about the world. With the exception of a few strong brands, on-line resources have largely replaced newspapers.
Seminars and Labs
While I agree with Carey when it comes to the effective dissemination and evaluation of students on-line in introductory classes that are, by and large, lecture based, he does not address how students would complete labs, participate in seminars, or do individualized research on-line. I do not know how some of the things that require hands on activities could be reproduced on line—at least not yet. The labs, equipment and other resources are simply not there for student located all across the globe. Likewise, there is something special that can happen in a small seminar that cannot happen in a large lecture. If what I have said it accurate, then it may be that on-line education will permit student to learn something but that student will still need to travel to traditional campuses to take advantage of the resources there. Student may be able to earn credit and graduate in 2 years and there are some majors and areas of study that could be done completely remotely. But the technology is simply not there yet to give students who are not actually doing experiments and not actually doing group work with others on case studies etc. that have been created that have any data to back up that they are good enough to match what happens on a real campus
Testing Companies
It may not seem readily apparent why testing companies would have a stake in caring if on-line classes earn credit, but they will stand to lose a huge market should this happen. The College Board is responsible not only for the SAT I and 2 tests, but also for the Advanced Placement program. As ETS has lost its market share to the ACT over the SAT I, they have needed to do a number of things to keep their business, non-profit as it is, getting students to pay for tests. The AP program has been increasingly important as many colleges and universities use AP classes and scores to determine admission. Schools all over the US and the world now offer APs. Each of these tests costs over 100.00 dollars so taking 5 or 10 (the typical number for students applying to selective schools) adds up to a lot of money. If student could take MOOCs instead either free or for a lower fee, and get credit for them and be looked at as equivalent or better than APs then the College Board would have another huge challenge to address. In addition the International Baccalaureate program also costs a lot to implement within a school and then they charge for the tests themselves. If student could take MOOCs instead of IBs and these ere also looked at as good or better, the number of student ad schools choosing the IB might drop at well. Like the schools themselves, the testing companies have a vested interest in trying to keep things the way they are and they will have people doing research to try to prove that there exams are better than MOOCs.
Security
The last issue that I think is the one that represents the biggest challenge for giving credit for MOOCs and other on-line learning options centers o security. As the College Board has found in the past several years making sure tests are secure and that cheating isn’t going on has become an issue they still have yet to solve. Student, especially in Asia, have found ways to beat the test and score well. For MOOCs there is currently no way to assure that someone is not hiring an expert to take the MOOC for him or her. While this has not been an issue to date that is only because there is not a credit issue yet. Should schools move toward giving credit there will have to be a great deal of work done to create a way that ensures colleges and universities that the certificate students earn for courses represent the work of each individual challenge. I see this as the biggest problem of all the ones I have cited, as I do not know how security can be assured remotely. If the College Board has problems with people on-site taking the tests I cannot begin to guess how this issue will be solved simply or in a cost-effective way. Given this I would imagine that many schools would use security as the issue to refuse to grant credit.
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If it seems I have now proven that the revolution has been hyped and that the status quo will continue along as it stands with just a few minimal changes then I need to also address how there is some evidence that Carey may be right about the transformative power of MOOCs.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall, to 9/11 and its aftermath, to the sad outcomes of the Arab Spring, almost all pundits have missed the biggest changes headed our way. Taleb calls them Black Swans and I agree with you that we do not have the ability to predict what will happen years from now (let alone this afternoon). On the other hand, I do agree with William Gibson too (who was right about a lot of the things that have come to pass in technology --except he did it as so many visionaries have—through fiction/art): “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
Now that schools are offering degrees on line for masters programs the door is open for schools to start offering credit for undergraduate courses. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education outlines how these programs are already in place at a number of elite schools:
Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.
Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.
Degrees in fields like health care and teaching are in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big chunks of that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go back to school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and others have also started offering online versions of their professional master’s programs.
Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal of professional programs, where the "student experience" is not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.
One well-respected school, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has just announced it will offer an MBA degree via MOOCs. How this will work out and whether this model will be implemented by other schools is something that has yet to be determined, but it does signify that at least some places are taking the MOOC options seriously:
"As with any MOOC, the content is available for free. Learners who wish to earn a credential but have no need for academic credit can pay a small fee, $79 a course, for an identity-verified certificate. Students can also apply to the College of Business and, if accepted, pursue the full M.B.A. degree. Finally, students can choose to take the courses individually for credit, postponing a decision about whether to go for a degree until they are well into the program."
More significantly, at least as far as the large term effects on on-line education versus MOOCs, the first major university, Arizona State, has just announced that it will give a year’s worth of undergraduate credit for MOOCs The President of ASU, Michael Crow, put forward a number of radical changes in his recent book, "Designing the New American University". He has now opened the door for other schools to follow his lead in offering a lost cost option for students to earn credit for their first year of college. This move represents a significant challenge to the education establishment:
Arizona State University, in partnership with edX, this fall will begin to offer credit-bearing massive open online courses at a fraction of the cost of either in-person or traditional online education.
ASU’s faculty members will create about a dozen general-education MOOCs, the first of which -- an introductory astronomy course -- will launch this August. Anyone can register for and take the MOOCs for free, but those who pay a $45 fee to verify their identity can at the end of each course decide if they want to pay the university a separate, larger fee to earn academic credit for their work.
By fall 2016, ASU anticipates it will offer enough MOOCs so that students can complete their entire freshman year online through what edX and the university are calling the Global Freshman Academy.
After completing the courses, students can receive a transcript from ASU showing that they have earned enough credits at the university to transfer to a different program or institution as sophomores. Since the university stresses the MOOCs are just a new form of delivering courses it already offers, the transcripts won’t specify which type of course -- in-person, online or massive online -- students enrolled in to earn the credit.
“What this does is it really opens up new pathways for all students, no matter where they are in the world,” edX CEO Anant Agarwal said in an interview. “There are no admissions requirements -- no SAT scores, no GPAs, no recommendation letters.”
One would think that many in education would be thrilled to hear about this low-cost way for students to earn full credit for introductory courses. The transcript for these courses will look exactly the same as for those who take the courses on campus. Student can earn credit, skip introductory classes and possibly graduate in 3 years. The savings to them would be substantial, and given the student debt crisis it would seem to be a wonderful yet daring innovation.
The reaction to this move has been swift, but not the way I would have thought. Questions about accreditation and whether such courses should count have already been raised. Some educators have already gone on record as calling this attempt to give credit “retrograde”.
Paul L. Gaston, a Trustees Professor at Kent State University and author of Higher Education Accreditation: How It’s Changing and Why It Must, nevertheless called the Global Freshman Academy a “retrograde action” for an institution he praised for its innovation.
“It’s a kind of compromise with the values that they have demonstrated in terms of clear learning outcomes and creating exciting environments for learning,” Gaston said. “I do think it represents a shift in the character of the kind of commitment that ASU has been known for.”
The move by ASU and the reaction represents the conflicts that will be fought in the near and long term. Should MOOCs be incorporated as part of earning credit for degrees not just at ASU, but at many other schools, then things will change I n at least some of the ways Carey predicts. If the education establishment prevails and ASU fails to prove these courses prepare students for success, then MOOCs will still exist as a part of graduate programs and as a way of students and others from around the world of learning skills like coding and learning about an huge range of topics and subjects. They will not, however, become a threat for most of the colleges and universities who see the current model of brick and mortar education not as an outdated paradigm, but as what has made the US system of education the best in the world for the generations.
Carey’s book does repeat itself in its unswerving allegiance to the transformative power of MOOCs. By the last chapter the tone earns the phrase 'religious fervor'. He himself wants MOOCs to become a sort of religious cathedral that will draw acolytes from all over the world. (The religious trope is his not mine.) They will learn from the scripture of the sciences and reason and a new dawn of humankind will begin. Ok, I am exaggerating a bit here, but not by that much. He does invoke religion and belief and that seems a bit over the top.
But if the histories of religious differences throughout history are any guide, the war, at least of words, credit and cost will not be settled without causalities. If I had to guess the changes at the margins that are happening now would have to be embraced by the public at large perhaps based on the inability of most in the middle class and below to afford traditional education on campuses without incurring significant debt. Whether the casualties that may result are the colleges themselves or the MOOCs, is, for me at least, too hard to predict.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I have taken a MOOC and learned a great deal from it. I have also had some debates with educators who think MOOCs are not useful in comparison to teaching students in a classroom. I mention this as I do not wish to pretend that I can approach this topic with anything approaching pure objectivity. All of us have cognitive biases.
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Kevin Carey’s recent book, The End of College, starts with a great story. He introduces us to one of the most famous professors in the world, Eric Lander. His background is about as impressive as it gets. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, led the Human Genome Project, and has expertise in his field that only a few in the world can even hope to approach. But aside from his accomplishments with the genome, he is also known as one of the best teachers at MIT. His class, introduction to Biology, is mandatory, and legendary. He has adoring fans gather around his desk after each class. More importantly, at least as far as the thesis of the book, his class has reached thousands of people around the world, for free, as a MOOC.
Massively Open Online Courses were, a few years ago, trumpeted by companies like Udacity and others as the death knell of traditional education as we know it. Carey, like Malcolm Gladwell in his books, knows that we are wired for stories more than for data and overviews of research. While these latter things are what should be used to ‘prove’ his thesis, Carey’s book depends largely on profiles of the people in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and a few other places who are at the forefront of the MOOC revolution. Sebastian Thrun, who was one of the first to create a MOOC, famously said that in 20 years there would only be a few dozen colleges and universities left.
Since then, the death of traditional brick and mortar education has received a lot of comment from pundits and educators. Most think, as the cliché goes, that rumors of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Instead of MOOCs heralding a Gutenberg-level revolution, most see them as yet another set of bells and whistles that will help some people around the world get exposure to a huge range of topics and subjects, but won’t make much of difference to the way education works in the US. Colleges and universities will continue to bring students to campus and train them for the job market and for graduate school, perhaps with some implementation of MOOC technology, but not much will happen to force schools to either join the on-line revolution or sink into oblivion.
Carey’s book attempts to show how they are wrong. His first chapter is instructive in several senses of the word. Carey himself takes Lander’s MOOC and earns a certificate for completing the same work as first year students at MIT. He has completed all the challenging problem sets and passed each of them. He has reached out to the TAs online for help and participated in online chat rooms with other students from all over the world. To put it simply, he has demonstrated mastery in a challenging MIT class and has a certificate to back it up. He even takes time to visit the class in real time — and comes away thinking online is better. Online, he can hit the pause button during the lecture to write notes in a more complete way than trying to write down words as they stream out in real time. He can concentrate on the class in a quiet way in the comfort of home, instead of being distracted by the student next to him who is focused far more on his phone than what is going on in class. He can hear Lander better and has multiple camera angles to see what he does, instead of seeing him a long way away at the back of a lecture hall.
Carey convinces me that this particular class teaches students the material in ways that are even better than if he were there taking it in person. In addition, Carey also underscores how the new technology, combined with the discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and education science about learning, can help to individualize the experience of taking MOOCs.
I advise anyone who is primed (the last word as it is used in neuroscience) against MOOCs to read this first chapter and then come up with reasons why Carey's experience does not convince you that this class is as good or better than taking the exact same class at MIT. I think if this chapter stood alone as an article it would get many to question their assumptions, and I think this is great. His interview for US News, “It's the End of College As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is a good introduction too.
Much of the rest of the book unfolds in chapters that introduce us to some of the early leaders of the online education revolution. We hear about wonderful professors who have made their work accessible, for free, to people around the world. To give just one example of what this can mean, there is a person in Nigeria who has taken more than 250 MOOCs:
Jima Ngei. Ngei, who lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, has completed and passed 250 MOOCs, all through Coursera, since September 2012. His self-styled education has included courses in English common law and Chinese history, data science and Latin American culture, social epidemiology and the life of Thomas Jefferson, to name a few.
Of course Mr. Ngei is at the very far end of the bell curve of MOOC takers; he has taken and passed more courses than it would take to earn 5 undergraduate degrees. The data shows that people around the world, with neither the opportunity or the money to attend traditional schools in the US, can become “educated citizens” (to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase).
Another way that Carey sees education changing in the not-too-distant future has to do with the way colleges and universities will use deep data to select students in ways that some forward thinking businesses currently do. Jeffrey Selingo, whose own book, College (Un)Bound should be required reading for anyone who wants to get informed about data and education, has this to say about Carey in The WashingtonPost:
In a compelling new book about higher education, The End of College, its author, Kevin Carey, lays out a future where admission to a college is based on the massive amounts of data and information already collected on students from an early age rather than a snapshot made in one moment in time for an application deadline.
“Instead of waiting for applications to arrive, colleges will be able to conduct extensive searches of data that students and parents choose to make available,” writes Carey, who directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation.
Under such a scenario, admissions would become something more akin to how employers now search LinkedIn and other online databases to recruit talent to their organizations rather than wait for an application to arrive in response to a job advertisement. LinkedIn already has lowered the minimum age to join the professional network to 14, partly in an effort to persuade more students in middle school and high school to begin building their profiles. As more students do, the day might not be that far away when a LinkedIn profile becomes the foundation for a college application or the place where admissions officers search for their next class of freshmen.
Both Carey and Selingo believe that looking at a student’s data over many years — not just at transcripts, a set of tests, and an essay — is a far better way to predict success in college. If this all sounds unrealistic, I will simply add a quote from a very smart counselor who shared this with me in a discussion about this issue: “I spoke with an Eli Lilly exec the other day who told me that they almost solely hire from LinkedIn and MOOCs now. Try explaining that to high school students who have never heard of either.”
In some cases, companies are hiring people who do not have a college degree but have the skills they are looking for — coding being one that many are searching for. I know a high school student who was brought in as an intern at Google based upon his MOOC certificates and recommendation from his MOOC professor. I am not saying that admissions will change dramatically in the next year or two, but schools are already using data to predict yield and to recruit prospective students. If they find that these alternatives will help them enroll more and stronger students, then the way students apply to schools may change radically in the next decade.
While I like much of what Carey has to say as he tries to convince readers that colleges and universities will be falling by the hundreds (or even thousands) in the next several decades, he does not convince me that he has proven his thesis. He marshals a lot of evidence to make his case, but he also leaves out at least 5 things that will, I think, undercut any relatively fast transformation of the education landscape in the US.
Habits and beliefs
Many hold a deep and longstanding belief that the US education system — and our way of giving students access to great centers of learning — is the best in the world. It is part of the American Dream, something that many (rightly, I think), hold up as a shining beacon on the hill. The number of students who have flowed in from the rest of the world over the last two decades demonstrates that it isn’t just those in the US who believe the best schools in the world are here, it’s common wisdom. (For those who read much of what I write, you know I always use this last phrase as a way of turning the conversation in a new direction away from the common wisdom.)
We are all guided by habits and beliefs to interpret the world through ideological and experiential frames. There are some (like Dan Ariely and Yuval Noah Hariari), who think that we think most of what we do with anything but rational approaches to issues.
I mention this as most people I know think that traditional education, on a campus, is invaluable preparation for the real world. Some talk about the importance of liberal arts; others about the networking and career building skills that are a part of being in and out of classes among faculty and students and administrators. For many, then, it is "common sense" that on campus experiences make for a much deeper and fuller preparation for what will happen after graduation.
Even if they are confronted with data (for example, over a third of students graduating from college today have no increase in critical thinking skills after 4 years and a degree—see the book "Academically Adrift" for the research on this), there is still the feeling that college should happen on a campus. We are slow to change the way we view things even if confronted with data. There are a majority of US citizens who think that evolution is not the best way to explain how we as humans have come to dominate the planet. I think the evidence is compelling but they do not. My citing data has virtually never changed someone’s mind on this issue. I am not sanguine that a few ‘experts’ who believe that the current way many receive an education today needs to change will be enough to shift the paradigm anytime soon.
Schools Themselves
If Carey believes that the thousands of traditional colleges and universities will embrace the changes he proposes in education lightly then he too is not approaching things rationally. Some do not like to say that higher education is a big business but the way things run at most schools these days it is hard to find out why they think this. Larger and larger administrative bodies tightly run schools. They oversee budges, enrollments and fund-raising. The largest increase in hiring over the last decades has been on the administrative side as schools recognize that they need to be business savvy to keep things afloat. Many schools are already struggling. A few have closed already. What Carey proposes is yet another huge challenge to many school’s survival. As with any business under threat from competitors, there will be efforts to dismiss the data that Carey uses and efforts to undercut any big changes in the status quo. Everyone who works at a brick and mortar school has a stake in on-line options not gaining a large market share. There will be faculty, administrators, alumni and students who will all be on the side of the schools. They will be passionate advocates for what they offer. There will be media blitzes, studies released, and lots more to critique on-line education. Trying to separate the "signal from the noise" (I use the phrase that data guru Nate Silver uses as the title of his great book on this topic) among competing data will be difficult at best. There are billions of dollars at stake, untold thousands of jobs, and communities that will be in trouble too should local schools close. Will schools go the way of the newspapers? They were for many years the traditional way that many found out about the world. With the exception of a few strong brands, on-line resources have largely replaced newspapers.
Seminars and Labs
While I agree with Carey when it comes to the effective dissemination and evaluation of students on-line in introductory classes that are, by and large, lecture based, he does not address how students would complete labs, participate in seminars, or do individualized research on-line. I do not know how some of the things that require hands on activities could be reproduced on line—at least not yet. The labs, equipment and other resources are simply not there for student located all across the globe. Likewise, there is something special that can happen in a small seminar that cannot happen in a large lecture. If what I have said it accurate, then it may be that on-line education will permit student to learn something but that student will still need to travel to traditional campuses to take advantage of the resources there. Student may be able to earn credit and graduate in 2 years and there are some majors and areas of study that could be done completely remotely. But the technology is simply not there yet to give students who are not actually doing experiments and not actually doing group work with others on case studies etc. that have been created that have any data to back up that they are good enough to match what happens on a real campus
Testing Companies
It may not seem readily apparent why testing companies would have a stake in caring if on-line classes earn credit, but they will stand to lose a huge market should this happen. The College Board is responsible not only for the SAT I and 2 tests, but also for the Advanced Placement program. As ETS has lost its market share to the ACT over the SAT I, they have needed to do a number of things to keep their business, non-profit as it is, getting students to pay for tests. The AP program has been increasingly important as many colleges and universities use AP classes and scores to determine admission. Schools all over the US and the world now offer APs. Each of these tests costs over 100.00 dollars so taking 5 or 10 (the typical number for students applying to selective schools) adds up to a lot of money. If student could take MOOCs instead either free or for a lower fee, and get credit for them and be looked at as equivalent or better than APs then the College Board would have another huge challenge to address. In addition the International Baccalaureate program also costs a lot to implement within a school and then they charge for the tests themselves. If student could take MOOCs instead of IBs and these ere also looked at as good or better, the number of student ad schools choosing the IB might drop at well. Like the schools themselves, the testing companies have a vested interest in trying to keep things the way they are and they will have people doing research to try to prove that there exams are better than MOOCs.
Security
The last issue that I think is the one that represents the biggest challenge for giving credit for MOOCs and other on-line learning options centers o security. As the College Board has found in the past several years making sure tests are secure and that cheating isn’t going on has become an issue they still have yet to solve. Student, especially in Asia, have found ways to beat the test and score well. For MOOCs there is currently no way to assure that someone is not hiring an expert to take the MOOC for him or her. While this has not been an issue to date that is only because there is not a credit issue yet. Should schools move toward giving credit there will have to be a great deal of work done to create a way that ensures colleges and universities that the certificate students earn for courses represent the work of each individual challenge. I see this as the biggest problem of all the ones I have cited, as I do not know how security can be assured remotely. If the College Board has problems with people on-site taking the tests I cannot begin to guess how this issue will be solved simply or in a cost-effective way. Given this I would imagine that many schools would use security as the issue to refuse to grant credit.
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If it seems I have now proven that the revolution has been hyped and that the status quo will continue along as it stands with just a few minimal changes then I need to also address how there is some evidence that Carey may be right about the transformative power of MOOCs.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall, to 9/11 and its aftermath, to the sad outcomes of the Arab Spring, almost all pundits have missed the biggest changes headed our way. Taleb calls them Black Swans and I agree with you that we do not have the ability to predict what will happen years from now (let alone this afternoon). On the other hand, I do agree with William Gibson too (who was right about a lot of the things that have come to pass in technology --except he did it as so many visionaries have—through fiction/art): “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
Now that schools are offering degrees on line for masters programs the door is open for schools to start offering credit for undergraduate courses. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education outlines how these programs are already in place at a number of elite schools:
Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.
Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.
Degrees in fields like health care and teaching are in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big chunks of that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go back to school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and others have also started offering online versions of their professional master’s programs.
Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal of professional programs, where the "student experience" is not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.
One well-respected school, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has just announced it will offer an MBA degree via MOOCs. How this will work out and whether this model will be implemented by other schools is something that has yet to be determined, but it does signify that at least some places are taking the MOOC options seriously:
"As with any MOOC, the content is available for free. Learners who wish to earn a credential but have no need for academic credit can pay a small fee, $79 a course, for an identity-verified certificate. Students can also apply to the College of Business and, if accepted, pursue the full M.B.A. degree. Finally, students can choose to take the courses individually for credit, postponing a decision about whether to go for a degree until they are well into the program."
More significantly, at least as far as the large term effects on on-line education versus MOOCs, the first major university, Arizona State, has just announced that it will give a year’s worth of undergraduate credit for MOOCs The President of ASU, Michael Crow, put forward a number of radical changes in his recent book, "Designing the New American University". He has now opened the door for other schools to follow his lead in offering a lost cost option for students to earn credit for their first year of college. This move represents a significant challenge to the education establishment:
Arizona State University, in partnership with edX, this fall will begin to offer credit-bearing massive open online courses at a fraction of the cost of either in-person or traditional online education.
ASU’s faculty members will create about a dozen general-education MOOCs, the first of which -- an introductory astronomy course -- will launch this August. Anyone can register for and take the MOOCs for free, but those who pay a $45 fee to verify their identity can at the end of each course decide if they want to pay the university a separate, larger fee to earn academic credit for their work.
By fall 2016, ASU anticipates it will offer enough MOOCs so that students can complete their entire freshman year online through what edX and the university are calling the Global Freshman Academy.
After completing the courses, students can receive a transcript from ASU showing that they have earned enough credits at the university to transfer to a different program or institution as sophomores. Since the university stresses the MOOCs are just a new form of delivering courses it already offers, the transcripts won’t specify which type of course -- in-person, online or massive online -- students enrolled in to earn the credit.
“What this does is it really opens up new pathways for all students, no matter where they are in the world,” edX CEO Anant Agarwal said in an interview. “There are no admissions requirements -- no SAT scores, no GPAs, no recommendation letters.”
One would think that many in education would be thrilled to hear about this low-cost way for students to earn full credit for introductory courses. The transcript for these courses will look exactly the same as for those who take the courses on campus. Student can earn credit, skip introductory classes and possibly graduate in 3 years. The savings to them would be substantial, and given the student debt crisis it would seem to be a wonderful yet daring innovation.
The reaction to this move has been swift, but not the way I would have thought. Questions about accreditation and whether such courses should count have already been raised. Some educators have already gone on record as calling this attempt to give credit “retrograde”.
Paul L. Gaston, a Trustees Professor at Kent State University and author of Higher Education Accreditation: How It’s Changing and Why It Must, nevertheless called the Global Freshman Academy a “retrograde action” for an institution he praised for its innovation.
“It’s a kind of compromise with the values that they have demonstrated in terms of clear learning outcomes and creating exciting environments for learning,” Gaston said. “I do think it represents a shift in the character of the kind of commitment that ASU has been known for.”
The move by ASU and the reaction represents the conflicts that will be fought in the near and long term. Should MOOCs be incorporated as part of earning credit for degrees not just at ASU, but at many other schools, then things will change I n at least some of the ways Carey predicts. If the education establishment prevails and ASU fails to prove these courses prepare students for success, then MOOCs will still exist as a part of graduate programs and as a way of students and others from around the world of learning skills like coding and learning about an huge range of topics and subjects. They will not, however, become a threat for most of the colleges and universities who see the current model of brick and mortar education not as an outdated paradigm, but as what has made the US system of education the best in the world for the generations.
Carey’s book does repeat itself in its unswerving allegiance to the transformative power of MOOCs. By the last chapter the tone earns the phrase 'religious fervor'. He himself wants MOOCs to become a sort of religious cathedral that will draw acolytes from all over the world. (The religious trope is his not mine.) They will learn from the scripture of the sciences and reason and a new dawn of humankind will begin. Ok, I am exaggerating a bit here, but not by that much. He does invoke religion and belief and that seems a bit over the top.
But if the histories of religious differences throughout history are any guide, the war, at least of words, credit and cost will not be settled without causalities. If I had to guess the changes at the margins that are happening now would have to be embraced by the public at large perhaps based on the inability of most in the middle class and below to afford traditional education on campuses without incurring significant debt. Whether the casualties that may result are the colleges themselves or the MOOCs, is, for me at least, too hard to predict.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I have taken a MOOC and learned a great deal from it. I have also had some debates with educators who think MOOCs are not useful in comparison to teaching students in a classroom. I mention this as I do not wish to pretend that I can approach this topic with anything approaching pure objectivity. All of us have cognitive biases.
https://youtu.be/Z0GFRcFm-aY REM: the end of the world as we know it
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