Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online

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1 January 19, 2011 Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online Courtesy of Taylor Walsh By Marc Parry Foundations and universities have spent a fortune producing freely available online course materials. This week a new book, Unlocking the Gates (Princeton University Press), takes stock of that movement by focusing on some of its most high-profile players and their online successes and failures. The author, Taylor Walsh, is a research analyst with Ithaka S+R, the research division of the nonprofit Ithaka consulting group, which supported the project together with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Chronicle asked Ms. Walsh to discuss what she had learned about the online ventures of MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and other universities. Q. Your book opens with two online-education busts that date back to the late 1990s: Fathom, led by Columbia University, and AllLearn, which included Oxford, Princeton, Stanford. and Yale. What was the influence of those failed ventures, designed to make money from noncredit courses, on the subsequent movement to give away online course materials at places like Yale? A. As opposed to seeing recorded versions of their courses as a product to sell, they saw it as a service to offer. That's the main take-away from Fathom and AllLearn: that at this moment, enrichment courses, no matter how prestigious the institution they come from, aren't a viable product to sell if you expect to make money, and that perhaps the true power here lies in the ability to share openly and the ability to give it away. Q. After interviewing over 80 people and surveying the open-education landscape, can you generalize about what impact the movement has had? Your book includes a striking quote from Ira Fuchs, a former program officer who oversaw the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) grant at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: "If you take away OCW completely, I'm not sure that higher education would be noticeably different." 1 22 January 2011

2 A. What's most striking to me is how difficult these projects have found it to gauge the impact of an open and free resource. They're really carving out new territory. And they're working without existing benchmarks and metrics. I think it's really important that those sorts of benchmarks and metrics be developed, as do the project leaders. Q. Some of these projects are very popular, but is there evidence of their learning effectiveness? A. That's part of what makes the OLI [Open Learning Initiative, based at Carnegie Mellon University] so unique, is that built into the environment itself, that accomplishes the teaching, is the mechanism for assessment.... They have given a control group and a variable group the same final, and found that the students using OLI aren't hurt in the slightest by not having had the same level of in-person instruction that the system did just as well, if not better, at teaching them this material.... Beyond those two studies, there really hasn't been a systematic appraisal of learning outcomes based on openly available material writ large. No one disputes that these open-courseware initiatives have done much good. But it's impossible, with the currently available data, to determine how much good. Q. The project that seems to have the most potential the interactive, feedbackdriven courses from Carnegie Mellon has low usage rates relative to other programs. You also write that it has run out of discretionary funds for new Carnegie Mellon courses. Discuss these challenges, and where you see OLI going. A. There's not much "edu-tainment" to be found in the Carnegie Mellon courses. It's really about wanting to learn introductory statistics, and going step-by-step through these modules influenced by cognitive science. It's not going to attract the volume of usage, or necessarily the attention from reporters, that a much more easily consumable humanities lecture video might.... The concept of a sophisticated learning environment, in which a learner can really master concepts without the support of a live instructor I think that will endure. If anything, we'll see more of it. The ability to deploy an environment like that could really allow universities to teach a great deal of students at a very high level of efficacy and quality, while saving space and faculty time. Q. You write that "the selective universities that have been the trailblazers in developing these courseware materials for the general public have been among the most reluctant to use them to reform their own pedagogical approaches." Do you think such colleges will ever embrace for-credit e-learning in a serious way? A. There are some signs of change, particularly coming out of highly selective public universities: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill [moving] their introductory Spanish course to online only, and then the project out of California to pilot a set of online courses that could be used to teach undergraduates throughout the UC system. Should experiments like those go well, that could really constitute a major vote of confidence in the medium of online teaching January 2011

3 Q. You write that projects at Columbia and MIT arose in part because those universities did not want to be eclipsed online. And later, other universities may have resisted joining the OpenCourseWare Consortium because they did not want to be seen as following MIT. How did competition among colleges influence the projects in your book? A. [Early on] there wasn't yet any right answer as to what a university presence online would be. There was a bit of a race to get there first, and to set that standard. That motivated a lot of these efforts in that earliest phase. With the free projects that followed, they seem to learn from and engage in healthy competition with one another. New players want to do something distinctive. As new ideas arise, those that have been there for a while tend to evolve accordingly.... When MIT OCW started, it was very textbased.... The great success of the Open Yale Courses project, and all the attention that Yale's received from the press and from users for how beautiful and user-friendly its video content is, may have pushed MIT toward exploring more video for itself. Comments [selected only] 1. jwr12 - January 20, 2011 at 09:19 am Thank you for the story, but I still am wondering what the answer to the question in the headline is. Why give the courses away? I understand that some people think that this is a noble thing. And I guess it is. But there are questions. 1) Is this give away a Trojan horse which ultimately will allow "elite" institutions to simply replace local ones? 2) Is this model reconcilable with a diverse set of learning institutions, or is it a kind of educational "dumping," by which products produced by historically privileged institutions (and backed by corporate endowments) undersell and eventually eliminate the little guy? Setting the standard that knowledge should be free and given may sound democratic, but is it really? Or is it another way of saying that knowledge production only belongs to those who can afford to do so, in a kind of noblesse oblige? 7. maxbini - January 21, 2011 at 12:51 Without specifying the point you are making I was thinking around it in the background. The two points are linked - economic value and the vocational outcomes of the credential are often equated. Administration (and students) often seem to see the costs of a course as tied to its perceived vocational outcomes. Even if Liberal Arts courses are seen as cheaper to run they are also often seen as taking enrolments away from other courses with higher fees. (I am thinking from an Australian perspective but believe this is replicated globally.) My perspective, which you do seem to share but correct me if I am wrong, is that it is a mistake to consider short-term employment outcomes as against a versatile education January 2011

4 Most reports on what employers want of graduates that I have seen have stressed being able to learn on the job and with changing circumstances and new technology and approaches. 9. lisamm - January 21, 2011 at 11:05 am This will be an interesting read, I'm sure, but Walsh's assertion that "enrichment courses, no matter how prestigious the institution they come from, aren't a viable product to sell if you expect to make money" is simply false. Harvard Extension offers successful noncredit enrichment courses, and Penn recently offered a highly successful non-credit enrichment course. Their efforts demonstrate an indisputable viability in the marketplace. Keep in mind that open courses were neither funded nor designed to generate revenue streams. In my opinion, one of the most interesting recent developments with the OER projects is their move to become more social, albeit in a relatively unstructured way. Yale, NYU and MIT, for example, have added/are adding Open Social to some of their open courses. I think it's only a matter of time until schools can identify viable business models to support more social OER initiatives designed to demonstrate clear learning outcomes. 10. lpavlova - January 21, 2011 at 11:15 am I watched Princeton's initial forey into for-profit educational courseware as an alumna. The courses were relatively inexpensive and quite interesting, featuring a few general education courses from well known faculty that could appeal to a wide audience. Their subsequent incarnation was in the form of freely available courseware that is particularly well advertised to alumni and what I consider a very effective pitch at supporting the wider network of supporters for the University. This establishes a very broad base of what is known as "Princeton in the nation's service" and includes continuing education and outreach. As for some of the others, I can vouch for the continuing usefulness of MIT's OCW system. As a professional and an adjunct I continuously go back to their course offerings to tap into knowledge in disciplines related to mine, which helps me develop the means of communitating with colleagues in a multi-disciplinary fashion. This is a value (to the University and to society) that may not be easily measured, but that is there nevertheless. When I was working on a grant application with some faculty from MIT I found it phenomenally helpful to look at their course material as a way of understanding further their disciplinary strengths. I guess what I would like to emphasize is the usefulness of fostering intra-disciplinary communication and knowledge sharing to education and research institutions (and that includes the scholarship generated in the humanities) January 2011

5 11. drkull - January 21, 2011 at 01:10 pm I agree with jwr12. Moreover, why should it matter how a course is delivered? Are students paying for premium content, an educational experience, a credential, or for convenience? If anything, shouldn't the online option reflect an increase in price-percourse as the offering now includes the added value of an online component? Does this trend reflect the problematic perspective that continues a primarily financial view that regards students as customers? The "free-market" position is flawed because academe is already a regulated industry (e.g. accreditation boards), moreover academe is not just another industry, but THE industry that undergirds all others in national innovation, competition and productivity outcomes. Online delivery of education is a major industry disruption; we need to proceed carefully and not confuse value with its financial measure. Offering courses for free feels to me like a loss-leader strategy to capture market share and achieve industry dominance, not a sincere effort to provide education to those with limited means January 2011