Universities Abroad Join Partnerships on the Web

Universities Abroad Join Partnerships on the Web

 Over the last year, elite American universities have raced to stake out a place in the new world of free online courses — and now, universities around the globe are following suit.

This week, the two largest ventures providing what are known as MOOCs — massive open online courses — are announcing new partnerships with leading universities in Canada, Mexico, Europe, China, Singapore, Japan and Australia, and signing additional American universities.

Coursera, founded by two Stanford University computer professors, is adding 29 universities — including École Polytechnique in France, the National University of Singapore, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and National Autonomous University of Mexico — to its current 33 partners.

Meanwhile, edX, a nonprofit venture started by Harvard and M.I.T., is doubling its university partners to 12, adding Rice University, the Australian National University, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and, in Canada, McGill and the University of Toronto.

“We have had an international student community from the very beginning, and bringing these leading universities, from North America and Europe and the Asia Pacific, into the edX organization will help us meet the tremendous demand we are experiencing,” said Anant Agarwal, the president of edX.

The rush into a still-experimental field comes as no surprise to William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton and founding chairman of Ithaka, a nonprofit concerned with education and information technology.

“One of the characteristics of academia is that nobody wants to be left behind,” he said. “There’s great promise here, great potential, but we need more careful research, and there has not been sufficient attention to that, partly because a lot of the people creating these courses are missionaries, and missionaries are not by and large interested in testing their message.”

Coursera, which has attracted 2.7 million students to its 222 courses since it was started last spring, has recently had growing pains. This month, its course Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Applications, offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology, was suspended because of technical glitches. And last weekend, one month into his Microeconomics for Managers course, Richard B. McKenzie, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine, quit, telling students that “because of disagreements over how to best conduct this course, I’ve agreed to disengage from it, with regret.” The course is continuing, with his materials.

Among Coursera’s new partners are a Spanish business school, several United States public universities, including the University of California campuses in San Diego and Santa Cruz, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and the California Institute of the Arts.

With the array of international partners, Coursera will offer courses in Spanish, Chinese, French and Italian.

“We are equally excited about the prospects of bringing higher education to places where access is limited, and of giving established educational institutions opportunities to raise their impact both on and off campus,” said Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, in a statement.

Both Coursera and edX are moving to help students earn college credit for their free online courses, for a fee, using identity-verified certificates, proctored exams and the American Council on Education’s recommendations, which many universities consider for transfer credit.

EdX, which began with a single M.I.T. electrical engineering course taught by Dr. Agarwal, now offers about two dozen courses, a roster that will grow to 50 to 100 next fall.

EdX expects to serve a billion students worldwide over the next decade on its open-source educational platform, Dr. Agarwal said. About 700,000 individuals are using the platform now, he said, with more than 900,000 course enrollments.

As important as providing free access to students worldwide, Dr. Agarwal said, is edX’s goal of using the platform for research on how students learn, and better on-campus pedagogy.

So far, most MOOCs have had dropout rates exceeding 90 percent.

Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/education/universities-abroad-join-mooc-course-projects.html?ref=education&_r=0

By TAMAR LEWIN

www.languagecorpsasia.com

Universities Reshaping Education on the Web

Universities Reshaping Education on the Web.

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland.

And some of them will offer credit.

“This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”

Because of technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.

To date, most MOOCs have covered computer science, math and engineering, but Coursera is expanding into areas like medicine, poetry and history. MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.

“The fact that so many people are so curious about these courses shows the yearning for education,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. “There are going to be lots of bumps in the road, but this is a very important experiment at a very substantial scale.”

So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade. But the University of Washington said it planned to offer credit for its Coursera offerings this fall, and other online ventures are also moving in that direction. David P. Szatmary, the university’s vice provost, said that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments and work with an instructor.

Experts say it is too soon to predict how MOOCs will play out, or which venture will emerge as the leader. Coursera, with about $22 million in financing, including $3.7 million in equity investment from Caltech and Penn, may currently have the edge. But no one is counting out edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Udacity, the company founded by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford, who taught the artificial intelligence course last year.

Each company offers online materials broken into manageable chunks, with short video segments, interactive quizzes and other activities — as well as online forums where students answer one another’s questions.

But even Mr. Thrun, a master of MOOCs, cautioned that for all their promise, the courses are still experimental. “I think we are rushing this a little bit,” he said. “I haven’t seen a single study showing that online learning is as good as other learning.”

Worldwide access is Coursera’s goal. “EPF Lausanne, which offers courses in French, opens up access for students in half of Africa,” Ms. Koller said. Each university designs and produces its own courses and decides whether to offer credit.

Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it. 

Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/education/consortium-of-colleges-takes-online-education-to-new-level.html?ref=education

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