The movement of “Massive Open Online Courses,” which began with elite universities making their courses available online to the masses, is rapidly moving into the trenches of public higher education.
On Thursday, 10 large public university systems including the giant state systems of New York, Tennessee, Colorado and the University of Houston announced plans to incorporate MOOCs and platforms offered through for-profit Coursera into their own teaching.
The plans vary widely. Some institutions will focus on improving prep courses for students coming into the system, others on matriculated students both online and on-campus, and still others will be developing their own MOOCs to teach students at other institutions in their states. At least one system, Tennessee, plans a version of an experiment cropping up at schools around the country: having students take in-person and customized MOOC-like versions of the same course, and comparing results.
But overall, the announcement is the latest ramping up of higher education’s MOOC experiment, which launched in earnest barely a year ago as a way to sample elite college courses. But it is now tangibly affecting the large public institutions that do much of the heavy lifting of American higher education. The latest batch of partners also includes the Universities of Georgia, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Mexico and West Virginia University.
“We noticed the vast majority of ours students were people who already had degrees and wanted to continue their education,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “We really wanted to move the needle on fundamental educational problems” of access and affordability. Because Coursera does not produce its own content or administer degree courses, “you have to work within the framework of the institutions that are actually good at that,” she said.
The announcement also shows the extent to which, for cash-strapped university leaders and policymakers, the MOOCs and the platforms they are built on offer an irresistible promise of doing more with less to scale up education and help students move more efficiently toward a degree.
“It’s been a challenge in reduced financial capacity to offer all the courses all the time that every student needs to complete a degree,” said SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. “That’s what slows students down our inability to provide degree-required courses students need at exactly the speed they want them.”
