The Halls of Academe Go Global
Today’s New York Times brought to my attention a new movement in North America that may globalize and transform the world of higher education.
A decade ago a few efforts were made to move good university courses online, making them available free to anyone with a computer and reasonably fast access to the Internet.[1] Like many pioneering ventures, viability had not been sufficiently tested in the marketplace. The new movement seeks to learn from those early experiments and succeed where they failed.
In the meantime the marketplace has changed. At least in North America and Western Europe, faster computers and Internet connections are commonplace, and they are spreading in the developing world, India, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. The boundaries of post-secondary education are stretching and becoming permeable; its accessibility is more equitably distributed. The proportion of the world’s population that has grown up with computer technology is larger. New learning opportunities are being created for students of any age around the world.
One such enterprise indicates the power of the new movement. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced the formation of a consortium called edEx, offering free online courses taught by faculty from both institutions. Other universities are expected to join them.
A similar project is already underway. Coursera hosts courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of Pennsylvania. Athabasca University is a publicly-supported online Canadian university.
Their common aim, as Coursera puts it, is to change “the face of education globally.” The intention is not only to extend higher education by making it available without cost to students of any age, but also to experiment with methods of learning and teaching to discover what works best, to improve feedback from students to faculty, and to offer faculty a better platform to customize courses and optimize the learning experience of their students. (Accomplishing the last aim depends on some success in realizing the first three.) Students who successfully complete a course will receive a certificate and a grade, but no formal credit toward a degree.
The best education has never drawn a solid line between teacher and student, teaching and learning. The most successful teacher learns from her students, and students commonly learn more from each other than from the person teaching the course. Without denigrating the profession of teaching, it can fairly be said that a good course is best conceived as a community of learning.
The new ventures are well funded and appear to be competently led. The Harvard-MIT program has commitments of $50 million from both institutions. Its leadership will be in the hands of Anant Agarwal, director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Michael D. Smith, dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences.
The pace of new technology is dizzying. As the Times article indicates, “The technology for online learning, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.”
One might well ask whether the new technology, more adaptable to quantitative fields like mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence, lends itself as well to the humanities and arts. For example, how can the quality of student work in literature, philosophy, history or dramatic arts courses be assessed? That is still an open question and an opportunity for research.
Traditionally faculty grade the work of their students (and occasionally vice versa). Can good assessment be accomplished by peer review, use of natural language software, crowd-sourcing?[2] Having taught at a college that gave up the venerable conventional grading system for written evaluations,[3] I shake my head in doubt. But stranger and more unlikely things have been done.
[1] Columbia University introduced “Fathom” in 2001, in cooperation with the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and others. It lost money and folded in 2003. Yale, Princeton and Stanford started “AllLearn,” which failed in 2006.
[2] Crowd-sourcing is a term awkwardly gathered from combining the words “crowd” and “outsourcing.” It involves distributed problem-solving: gathering a large number of diverse and motivated people to help accomplish a task that cannot be completed single-handedly or by a small group. An early example, before the dawn of computers: In the late 19th and early 20th century, editors of the Oxford English Dictionary issued an open call for volunteers to help index all words in the English language and example quotations for all their usages. They received over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years. See Simon Winchester’s wonderful book, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998).
[3] Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts opened its doors to students in 1970. It continues to thrive, and is a member of a Five College Consortium with Amherst, Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts.