Revolution Hits the Universities
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down,
but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful
about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online
higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of
poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or
improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a
billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing
has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the
massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed
by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and companies like Coursera and Udacity.
Last May I wrote about Coursera
— co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and
Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo
Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people
were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other
elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214
courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.
Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence
lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard
are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000
students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T.
intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of
M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said.
Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still
tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I
am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much
broader demographic. Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid. For
relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian
village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet
access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any
Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in
the world, subtitled in Arabic.
YOU just have to hear the stories told by the pioneers in this industry
to appreciate its revolutionary potential. One of Koller’s favorites is
about “Daniel,” a 17-year-old with autism who communicates mainly by
computer. He took an online modern poetry class from Penn. He and his
parents wrote that the combination of rigorous academic curriculum,
which requires Daniel to stay on task, and the online learning system
that does not strain his social skills, attention deficits or force him
to look anyone in the eye, enable him to better manage his autism.
Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in which he wrote: “Please tell
Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old boy emerging from autism.
I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your course] was my first real
course ever. During the course, I had to keep pace with the class,
which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can benefit from having
to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.”
One member of the Coursera team who recently took a Coursera course on
sustainability told me that it was so much more interesting than a
similar course he had taken as an undergrad. The online course included
students from all over the world, from different climates, incomes
levels and geographies, and, as a result, “the discussions that happened
in that course were so much more valuable and interesting than with
people of similar geography and income level” in a typical American
college.
Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The
Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a
class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of
Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000
students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free
course in introductory sociology. ... My opening discussion of C.
Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a
close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by
line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in
the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I
usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however,
within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came
alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there
were thousands. ... Within three weeks I had received more feedback on
my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which
significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”
Agarwal of edX tells of a student in Cairo who was taking the circuits
course and was having difficulty. In the class’s online forum, where
students help each other with homework, he posted that he was dropping
out. In response, other students in Cairo in the same class invited him
to meet at a teahouse, where they offered to help him stay in the
course. A 15-year-old student in Mongolia, who took the same class as
part of a blended course and received a perfect score on the final exam,
added Agarwal, is now applying to M.I.T. and the University of
California, Berkeley.
As we look to the future of higher education, said the M.I.T. president,
L. Rafael Reif, something that we now call a “degree” will be a concept
“connected with bricks and mortar” — and traditional on-campus
experiences that will increasingly leverage technology and the Internet
to enhance classroom and laboratory work. Alongside that, though, said
Reif, many universities will offer online courses to students anywhere
in the world, in which they will earn “credentials” — certificates that
testify that they have done the work and passed all the exams. The
process of developing credible credentials that verify that the student
has adequately mastered the subject — and did not cheat — and can be
counted on by employers is still being perfected by all the MOOCs. But
once it is, this phenomenon will really scale.
I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by
taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the
world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from
Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh —
paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will
change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new
world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”
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