The changes to higher education are coming daily.
First comes the news that students taking free online courses from Harvard and MIT through EdX will be able to take a proctored exam at 450 testing centers in 110 countries.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-offers-proctored-exams-for-open-online-course/39656
The BIG issue of course, is if these courses will be accepted by others, mainly employers and other universities. Employers probably count the most. If employers are willing to hire candidates who have web badges or certificates instead of university degrees, the market value of a college degree will plummet.
I believe the market will test this by hiring a few folks and seeing what happens. The for-profit world is better (and has had much incentive0 to determine the real results of different experiments.
My guess is that free online course badges won’t prove to be any better or worse that a college degree when it comes to learning. We have MOUNTAINS of evidence that you get As in college and not have a clue (as Eric Mazur discovered of his Harvard physics students) and we have equally compelling research that tells that intrinsic motivation far outweighs any possible change in pedagogy. In other words, if a student wants to learn, teaching methods make little difference. For the student who wants to learn in a free MOOC, she will, for a student who wants to be a college surface or strategic learner (See, for example, Ken Bain’s new book, What the Best College Students Do, Harvard 2012), 4 years on a college campus will still result in nothing really being learned.
So the big choice for colleges is whether to accept transfer credit from MOOCs. If they do, then students will be able to drastically able to reduce costs (take a few free courses instead of summer school and still get a regular college diploma.
The first step has happened. Some Austrian and German universities already do, but Colorado State University-Global campus has become the first US university to accept a Udactiy course for credit.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-First-for-Udacity-Transfer/134162/
This is only the Colorado State online campus, but if other colleges agree to take this credit the implications are serious.
If students can take this free Introduction to Computer Science and get transfer credit, why would they need to pay Stanford $6000 for the same product? Part of the answer will be that extra learning is offered on the Stanford campus, but Stanford had better figure out a way to demonstrate that extra learning (and justify is enormous additional cost) in a hurry.
Jose, what possibile incentive would brick and mortar institutions of higher learning like the beloved “Farm” have to hasten the devaluation of its own product? I have no doubt that a self motivated student studying online will beat out a hungover college sophomore trying to get the lecture hall to stop spinning. YEt, the business of Higher Education is driven by economic considerations. Aside from “economies of scale” one might achieve by increased numbers of students (since Amazon.com’s ever scalable server farms will be housing the software).
Or is this theologian of the humanities woefully misconstruing how this would play out on the ground?
Yes, in a way there is a mystery here. MIT and Harvard are assuming (I think correctly for a while) that the MIT degree and the MIt experience will be worth the money. They have a long line of folks waiting to get in. But their product is largely a brand. You get the degree that opens doors. People assume you have learned something, but mostly they assume that Harvard only lets in smart people, so you must be capable (and clearly inHs you were since you got it.)
I think that harvard and the big boys really want to make this available to the many people who can’t afford to come. I think this is a good thing.
But in the long-term we don’t know. Remember that the newspapers gave away news for a while too, and then realized opps, if we give it away, folks won’t buy the newspaper. A few (like the Ny Times) have been able to re-monetize their product, but most just never recovered.
While working at Portland State, I was following Oregon’s legislative push to include Western Governors University (WGU) in our state system and at the same time, begin to count “life experience” or “prior learning” credits. I’m hoping that the MOOCs actually make WGU irrelevant, as the WGU model is very suspect and will lead to more students with debt and no degree. However, I’m wondering what you think about accreditation, as it seems that the combination of badges with prior learning credits, will make it difficult for an employer to know what a degree from a particular school actually means so what will “accredited mean.” At this point, accreditation has become wrapped up with financial aid access, but what happens when the accredited universities are accepting badges and prior learning credits? Are we going to see the end of accreditation? If so, what happens to financial aid? (Sorry if you address this in your book, I just started reading it and will be at your talk in Worcester).
That is a great question. I tend to look at this firstly from the view of economic value: if employers continue to hire Harvard grads because they have the Harvard brand, then (at least for now) it matters little if they learned anything at Harvard. That won’t work for badges. For MOOCs or WGU, employers will expect to test (perhaps literally) what students have learned and decide if they are qualified. IF students meet expectations, they will hire more of them. (I point out that at my own institution, we literally test potential staff employees –even our own graduates– as part of the interview process.)
Accreditation has been a proxy for learning. Employers assume there is more learning at accredited schools–and that was probably true.
The financial aid question is interesting. Ultimately, this might represent an alternative to accreditation. At the moment accreditation is a poor (but improving) system that hardly looks at what students learn. Since almost everyone passes, it is not much leverage. Financial Aid could be huge leverage.
If we get to a place where we are accountable for what students have learned, then it will become an internal matter about the most effective way to get them to that point. These are tough questions.