Online Learning in HE
There was more news this week from the US about free online access to university courses. This time Coursera, the online platform created by two academics from Stanford, announced that a new bunch of universities including the University of Edinburgh have signed up to make some of their courses available on the platform.
Coursera is one of several new ventures that are now offering high quality courses from leading universities online for free. There's also Udacity - another US venture with Stanford links that's offering free online courses. The first Udacity course - Introducing Artificial Intelligence - got 160,000 students in 190 countries. There's also a new joint venture from MIT and Harvard called edX. MIT have done free courseware for some time but it's new edX venture will make online classes and courses available for free using a new online platform.
Coursera, Audacity and edX are interesting because they seem to be different from some earlier online learning initiatives. Like the Khan Academy, they're part of a new wave of education startups - HE meets Silicon Valley.
It's interesting that most of these initiatives seem to be US based. Perhaps the huge cost of university education in the US has something to do with it, though I'm not sure people in the US will decide to forgo a traditional university and do a free online course instead, not in the short term anyway. I could see though that the culture in US universities might be slightly different - a bit more commercial than in the UK and perhaps more willing to make the connection between a belief in the principle of free access to high quality learning and the kind of risk taking entrepreneurship found in Silicon Valley technology companies.
Another interesting thing is that although studying one of these free courses doesn't get you a degree and doesn't get you one-to-one tuition, it does get you a certificate and I bet that over time these will begin to have some value - these will become increasingly valuable as employers become more aware of them.
There was an article in the Guardian about Coursera earlier in the week and it made another interesting point about online learning reducing the need for large lectures and creating more time for one-to-one tutoring. If you're a student at university why go in to a lecture when you can watch it online, read accompanying lecture notes online and join an online discussion? Some would argue that the valuable face-to-face interaction happens in the tutor group, not the lecture theatre.
The thing that strikes me the most though is how these new initiatives compare with the UK's Open University. That's a distance learning initiative that was totally groundbreaking when it was started back in the 1960s - it was set up to use modern communications to bring Higher Education to people who couldn't attend traditional campus universities. But now it almost seems like the OU will have to start to compete with these new initiatives. Why would you pay for an OU degree when you can study courses from MIT for free and get a certificate which while it doesn't have the currency of a traditional degree, will still carry some weight with employers? And if like many people you're simply studying for its own sake then it's even harder to see why you'd pay. How does the OU compete with that?
