Students in Free Courses Study, but Not as Much as Most Students Do

By Mary Ellen McIntire

Most students in free online courses don’t spend as much time doing classwork as do traditional college students, but they do log a significant number of hours, according to a new survey of more than 4,500 MOOC students by Class Central, a website that reviews free courses.

More than 55 percent of the students surveyed said they studied two to five hours per week, and 22 percent said they spent six to 10 hours per week studying.

How does that compare with traditional college students? About 43 percent of first-year residential college students reported spending more than six hours per week studying, according to the Fall 2014 edition of the Freshman Survey, by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, part of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Class Central sent out the survey to about 50,000 subscribers to its newsletter, an effort that yielded a few hundred responses. A professor who teaches a massive open online course offered by Coursera also sent the survey to about 800,000 current and former MOOC students, who made up a majority of respondents, said Charlie Chung, chief editor of Class Central’s blog and the survey’s manager.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-in-free-courses-study-but-not-as-much-as-most-students-do/56935 ]

 

How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education

By Steve Kolowich

After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?

Recently, conversations about “elite” online education has revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else).

So how exactly does online education figure into the future of elite higher education? Judging by what we’ve seen so far, the answer can be divided into three parts.

1. Free online courses for everyone.

MOOCs are the McMansions of online higher education — capacious, impressive-looking, and easy to supply to the masses once professors have drawn up the blueprints.

Families who want to work with the architects directly are not opting for a sequence of free online courses instead of an exclusive residential program that ends with a degree. Even if the MOOCs lose money, wealthier universities can afford to take a hit — especially if it means increasing their visibility in valuable overseas markets.

Despite their flagging hype, MOOCs remain very popular. Top institutions will probably continue to build them.

2. Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.

Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician’s 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.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/How-Elite-Universities/229233/ ]

 

Free Online Courses Keep Retirees in the Know

By Walecia Konrad

Mary Lou Russell has a passion for learning. Since retiring 10 years ago, the 79-year-old former grant maker has taken more than a dozen classes on subjects including classical music and appreciating Andy Warhol. She has attended most of her classes from her Manhattan living room.

“I used to go up to Columbia, down to N.Y.U. and over to New School. I was all over the place with my MetroCard,” Ms. Russell said. “Then I learned about online courses and that has been so freeing for me. I call it the anti-aging vitamin for those of us over 60 who want to stay relevant.”

Taking courses online is well suited for retirees, according to John Blair, 85, a retired engineer in Wayland, Mass. He especially likes the accessibility to top professors at elite universities. He adds that online courses have given him a way to dive into subjects unrelated to engineering, like economics. “By jumping from Yale to Harvard to Stanford to M.I.T., I was able to sample economics courses in a broad way,” Mr. Blair said.

Colleges have been catering to online adult learners for years, often offering video lectures and courses on their websites and posting popular lecture series on YouTube and iTunes. Starting around 2011, the latest iteration of virtual education, massive open online courses or MOOCs, hit the scene. Often free, many of these classes take online learning a step further and provide interactive video features like mini quizzes and student discussion forums.

Online learning has gained momentum from retirees’ increasing comfort with technology. In April 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that 59 percent of adults over the age of 65 use the Internet, a six percentage point increase from a year earlier. In addition, 47 percent say they have a high-speed broadband connection at home. Of the older adults who use the Internet, 71 percent say they go online every day or almost every day.

At Coursera, an education platform started in 2011 that teams with universities worldwide to offer thousands of free online courses, 10 percent of students are in the 60-plus age group. Sophie Vlessing, senior vice president at Kaplan Higher and Professional Education, said that 10 percent of the students who took online courses at Kaplan University were over 50.

[  Full article available at The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/education/free-online-courses-keep-retirees-in-the-know.html ]

 

Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree

By Steve Kolowich

Yale University is creating a master’s program that will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray into “blended” learning.

The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.

It is the second professional school at Yale to try the “blended” model for a graduate program, following the Yale School of Nursing, which opened a partially online doctoral degree in 2011.

Yale has taken an active but measured interest in online education in the past decade. In 2007 it became one of the first elite institutions to post lecture videos online at no charge. In 2011 it began offering online summer courses to small groups of undergraduates for credit. In 2013 it joined with Coursera and started building MOOCs.

But a degree program that includes fully online courses is a step toward a different vision of how Yale and other highly selective traditional universities are likely to incorporate online education. Free online courses might make headlines, but tuition-based professional degrees in high-demand fields such as health care are where online courses, and the companies that help build them, are gaining a foothold.

Other top-tier universities have created online versions of their professional-degree programs, which is something Yale noticed when taking stock of its online presence in 2012. The Johns Hopkins University, for example, offers an online master’s program in public health that delivers about 80 percent of its coursework on the web.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003 ]

 

Meet the New, Self-Appointed MOOC Accreditors: Google and Instagram

Some of the biggest MOOC producers, including Daphne Koller’s Coursera, may have figured out how to get employers to accept free online courses as credentials: Get big-name companies to help design them. [ Neilson Barnard, Getty Images, for The New York Times ]

By Jeffrey R. Young

A big question for MOOCs, the free online courses that hundreds of colleges now offer, is whether employers will take them seriously as credentials. But some of the biggest MOOC producers may have figured out how to jump-start employer buy-in: Get big-name companies to help design them.

On Wednesday, Coursera, one of the largest MOOC platforms, announced that it had teamed up with more than half a dozen companies that will help create capstone projects for its course series. The companies include the tech giant Google as well as Instagram and Shazam—all names likely to entice students looking to get a start in Silicon Valley.

Nineteen colleges now work with Coursera to offer what amount to microdegrees—it calls them Course Specializations—that require students to take a series of short MOOCs and then finish a hands-on capstone project. The serialization approach has proved an effective way to bring in revenue to support the free courses—to get a certificate proving they passed the courses, students each end up paying around $500 in fees.

By helping develop MOOC-certificate programs, companies are giving a seal of approval to those new credentials that may be more important to some students than whether an accredited university or a well-trained professor is involved.

Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, says that teaming up with companies can “really drive home the value proposition that these courses are giving you a skill that is valuable in the workplace.” She says it also lets Coursera play a role in “bridging the gap” between higher education and industry.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/meet-the-new-self-appointed-mooc-accreditors-google-and-instagram/55807 ]

 

How MOOCs are flattening corporate training and education

Corporate training and education is borrowing from massively open online courses to keep employees enriched and up-to-date

[ iStock/Sergey Nivens ]

By Erin Carson

On Friday afternoons, the team at Much Better Adventures, a UK company that helps people plan vacations without having to hunt for lodging, stops what they’re doing and spends some time learning about sustainability via massively open online courses (MOOCS) Coursera and Future Learn.

“We try to improve our understanding of what type of impact our industry and business as a whole is having on the environment and sustainable development,” said CEO Alex Narracott, “Then we use to try and inform that way we develop the business as a whole.”

For the uninitiated, MOOCS are free online courses that are available to whomever wants to take them over the course of many weeks. Often times they’ll include lectures, assignments, and homework, but the rules can differ as to pacing. For example, if you hop on Coursera, you can take a 10-week course from Stanford on machine learning. Or, a 13-week class on Buddhist meditation and the modern world from University of Virginia. Depending on the class and platform, students may receive a certificate of completion. And that certification can work toward the continuing education credits that some professions require.

In the past several years since MOOCs have gained steam, their uses have expanded from individuals brushing up on topics like art or coding in their free time, to the less foreseen use of businesses using them to train or further educate employees.

There are a few reasons why MOOCs can work in a corporate setting. For one, they cost far less than putting employees through something like master’s program, or a college course at a local university.

[ Full article available at TechRepublic: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-moocs-are-flattening-corporate-training-and-education/ ]

 

N.Y. Public Library Plans Face-to-Face ‘Classes’ for MOOC Students

By Steve Kolowich

In a pilot program with Coursera, the New York Public Library plans to organize meet-ups at which people taking massive open online courses can gather and discuss the courses with help from “trained facilitators.”

The partnership is part the MOOC company’s effort to build an infrastructure for in-person learning around its free online courses. Research has suggested that MOOC students who receive offline help earn higher scores on their assessments.

Coursera is not paying the library to provide this service, says Luke Swarthout, the library’s director of adult-education services. The library plans to foot the bill for weekly discussion groups as part of its own public-service mission, he says, adding: “There’s no money exchanging hands between anybody.”

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-york-public-library-plans-face-to-face-classes-for-mooc-students/52147 ]

 

Pitt revisits free open online courses

University of Pittsburgh Nursing Assistant Prof. Michael Beach sits for a portrait in his office surrounded by items referred to in his massive open online course (MOOC) that he offers on Disaster Preparedness. His laptop, playing one of the disaster readiness videos seen in his class material, sits on top of a box of MRE’s. Pitt began offering the free Internet-based classes last year to people around the world. Thousands of people from all over the world took Beach’s course, and it is the first of Pitt’s offerings to launch a second round beginning in late January.
[ Stephanie Strasburg | Tribune-Review ]

By Jason Cato

More than 210,000 people signed up when the University of Pittsburgh offered its first five massive open online courses last year.

Though that was more than 11 times the number of students enrolled at the Oakland campus, there is little chance the broad-based, distance learning courses, known as MOOCs, will soon replace traditional learning, school officials said. There is a good chance, though, that these online courses can teach schools better ways to connect technology and education.

“I think for us at Pitt, we are really focused on using technology to enhance learning,” said Cynthia Golden, director of the Center for Instructional Development & Distance Education. “MOOCs are just one of the tools we have.”

The free, mass classes are designed to offer education online to anyone, anywhere without limits on class size.

On Jan. 27, Pitt started its second round of MOOCs by relaunching the disaster preparedness course offered in 2013. Two other courses from the first round are scheduled to be revisited this year: “A Look at Nuclear Science and Technology” in March and “Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health” in June.

“I learned a lot, and it was lots of work. But I loved doing it,” said Michael Beach, an assistant professor in Pitt’s nursing school who teaches the disaster preparedness MOOC. “Students can do this any time. If they miss a week, they can jump back in.”

Read more:

[ Full article available at The Tribune-Review: http://triblive.com/news/adminpage/5133280-74/moocs-pitt-university ]

 

Credit-for-MOOCs Effort Hits a Snag

By Steve Kolowich

The American Council on Education said last year that it would run an experiment on ways to help MOOC students redeem success in the free online courses for credit at traditional universities. But that project, like earlier efforts to turn MOOC success into college credit, has run into obstacles.

“The wheels turn slowly,” Ray Schroeder, the project’s director, said in an email. “No data has been collected yet.”

The plan was to find a group of universities that would grant credit to successful MOOC students on a trial basis—as long as the students enrolled in tuition-based programs, using those free credits to get a head start toward a traditional college credential. Mr. Schroeder, who is associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and his team would then track those students to see how well the MOOCs had prepared them for traditional coursework.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/credit-for-moocs-effort-hits-a-snag/49573 ]

 

Doubts About MOOCs Continue to Rise, Survey Finds

By Steve Kolowich

Academic leaders increasingly think that massive open online courses are not sustainable for the institutions that offer them and will “cause confusion about higher-education degrees,” according to the results of an annual survey.

The Babson Survey Research Group has charted the growth of online education annually for more than a decade with support from the Sloan Consortium and other partners. The latest survey, conducted last year, asked chief academic officers at 2,831 colleges and universities about online education.

The findings, released in a report on Wednesday, reveal a growing skepticism among academic leaders about the promise of MOOCs. The report also suggests that conventional, tuition-based online education is still growing, although not as swiftly as in past years.

In 2012 the Babson survey asked about MOOCs for the first time. At the time, relatively few academic officers were concerned about whether their institutions would be able to field free online courses year after year—after all, less than 3 percent of them had even begun offering MOOCs at that point.

A year later, there were more doubts about the long-term prospects of teaching free online courses. In 2012, 26 percent of academic leaders disagreed that MOOCs were “a sustainable method for offering courses.” In 2013 that number leapt to 39 percent.

“The chief academic officers at institutions with the greatest experience and exposure to traditional online instruction are the least likely to believe in the long-term future of MOOCs,” wrote I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, the report’s authors.

[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Doubts-About-MOOCs-Continue-to/144007/ ]