'Massive open online courses (MOOCs),' reported a recent Scholarly Kitchen posting, 'have been a topic of increasingly frantic conversation in higher-education circles over the past year.' Over the past weeks, they have also seen frequent coverage at the New York Times, most notably in articles placed prominently in the paper editions.
On the front page, Tamar Lewin's 7 January report 'Students rush to Web classes, but profits may be much later' began this way:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.
The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company's partners, 33 elite universities.
In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.
Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.
All of this could well add up to the future of higher education—if anyone can figure out how to make money.
Concerning that problem of developing a business model, Lewin describes Koller and Ng as believers in education as a right, not a privilege, and reports that they 'proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide.' She adds that some Coursera partners are not hurrying to turn a profit. But she also quotes Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, one of the partners: 'We don't want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.'
On the business section front page a week later, in the article 'California to give Web courses a big trial,' Lewin and John Markoff told of an NSF-backed initiative in which San Jose State University will work with Udacity. The reporters suggested that courses could be offered to hundreds of thousands in California. They noted that university professors have never before collaborated with an MOOC provider, and they called the program 'an attempt to overcome the biggest failure of open online courses today—their 90 percent dropout rate.'
A week after that, inside the A section, Lewin's 'Public universities to offer free online classes for credit' reported that Arizona State University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Arkansas system and dozens of other public universities will convert certain online courses to MOOCs. If the program 'succeeds in attracting thousands of degree students,' Lewin wrote, 'the new revenue stream could be a lifeline for public universities hit hard by declining financial support from states.'
Then, on the cover of the 27 January Sunday Review section, a commentary from Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman began this way:
Lord knows there's a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty—by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.
With anecdotal examples, Friedman emphasized that he was both predicting and describing a planetwide revolution in 'teaching, learning and the pathway to employment.' Two days later, the Times published a set of five letters, all from academics. H. Kim Bottomly, president of Wellesley College, called Friedman's optimism 'well founded' and predicted that MOOCs 'will improve the world in many ways.' But the four others argued that drawbacks limit the promise. William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, asserted, 'This is no revolution. It is the rich getting richer because they have the wealth and the brand to do so.' Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch, president of the Modern Language Association of America, closed with a suggestion addressing Friedman's planetwide vision:
If we want a better-educated global citizenry, should we not foster a multitude of professors with different views who can share deep critical thinking in a community of learners such as only the embodied experience of the classroom can yield? Rather than renting space and computers in Egyptian villages, let us train teachers, lower costs of higher education and widen its reach, in American cities and Egyptian villages alike.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
