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Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have forced universities to reconsider their value in light of free high-quality education available online. Coursera, a private company founded by two Stanford professors has been at the forefront of that movement, actively courting new institutions of higher education to their portfolio and trying to monetize the effort by certifying courses for college credit. Now they’re expanding that model to K-12 teacher professional development.

The courses will be free to teachers, and for those who want a verified certificate, there will be a $50 fee. Coursera will verify that the teacher actually completed the course and participated fully along the way.

“In speaking to school administration leaders, I was hearing over and over that many districts today don’t have the resources to deliver good professional development,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera. For teachers, Ng said offering professional development online gives them more choices and could save districts money.

Coursera is partnering with schools of education at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt University. In addition, the company is expanding its network of trainers beyond universities to include cultural institutions like the Exploratorium and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

“It was the most natural thing in the world,” said Deb Howes, director of digital learning at MOMA. “It’s impossible to reach all the teachers who need and want our information, so when Coursera said they had this idea, we said absolutely, great, because we have so much to share with teachers.”

The MOMA course is called the “Art of Inquiry” and uses art as a lens to help teachers learn how to instruct students to describe the world around them, infer information from primary sources, and foster conversations based on inquiry. “How do you train your students to look more deeply and make connections between what they’re seeing and experiencing” — that’s the question the course will try to answer. It’s a four-week course aimed at teachers of grades four to 12.

[RELATED READING: Five Big Changes to the Future of Teacher Education]

Howes said the museum has been offering professional development for teachers on a more limited scale for many years and working with Coursera will give them a much bigger platform to share what museum trainers have learned along the way.

“It’s an experiment with new ways to provide equally compelling experiences for teachers,” said Bronwyn Bevan, the associate director of programs at the Exploratorium, another institution offering courses. The Exploratorium has a long history of training teachers in hands-on science learning. The museum will offer courses on how to bring tinkering to elementary and middle school learning, as well as a course on integrating engineering into middle school. The Exploratorium’s in-person teacher training courses reach about 500 teachers a year and are very hands on. Bevan says the museum is excited to find ways to offer the unique Exploratorium experience virtually.

Coursera has been offering advice to the participating partners on how to organize and shape a class meant for tens of thousands of students. “Teaching a MOOC you have to be far more organized than you do in a regular class because students can’t interact with you, the faculty, directly,” Ng said. “That demands a greater level of clarity in anything you say as compared to an on-campus class.” He also emphasized short, dynamic video clips and frequent interactive quizzes to keep learners engaged.

But can a MOOC-like professional development course offer the same benefits as in-person training? Norton Grubb, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the most common and cheapest form of professional development districts currently offer is a one-size-fits-all lecture provided by an outside consultant on a topic that teachers can’t control.

“What works best are groups of teachers within a school working with one another on a particular problem,” said Grubb. “The important part is the interaction among the teachers which is something that’s very hard to replicate on a MOOC or any kind of online program.” Many of the issues teachers face in the classroom are site specific and can best be solved over a longer period of time with a dedicated effort by a group of peers, he said. Grubb doesn’t think the one-size-fits-all approach is good, and he’s wary of the MOOC approach until it has been proven to work.

[RELATED READING: Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?]

But teachers say they are already learning a lot from peers online through social media; they’re connecting to one another and forming learning communities that spread around the globe. “I think there are some things we can do to spread expertise with this thing called the Internet and well-designed virtual learning communities that could actually break down these barriers that exist between teachers,” said Barnett Berry, founder of the Center for Teaching Quality, a non-profit that has been incubating teacher ideas around online professional development for several years.

Berry supports the idea of MOOCs for professional development in theory because he’d like to see teachers be able to choose and direct their own learning. But he thinks success hinges on skilled virtual facilitators who both know the subject matter and how to foster high quality discussion and communication online in order to make it work well. And he doesn’t stop there — he’d like to see a lot of things change including more time for teachers to collaborate within schools, share practices and observe one another.

A lingering question around Coursera’s new efforts will be whether districts accept the new courses as Continuing Education Units, which are used to determine where teachers fall on the pay scale and help them to maintain teaching credentials. Those decisions will be made locally, but will raise questions about how to ensure teachers complete the courses themselves and how they should be counted within existing systems.

Watch How Free Online Courses Are Changing Traditional Education on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For those still trying to piece together all the different definitions and scenarios of a MOOC (massive open online courses), this PBS Newshour segment presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of this phenomenon.

From the financial angle, MOOC startups are still trying to figure out how to make money. Udacity is getting revenue from several companies like Google to provide specialized courses. Coursera is charging potential employers for providing names of high-scoring students.

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Coursera, students, and other professors who question the wisdom of these classes weigh in.

Student Tracy Lippincott’s perspective on teacher-student connection:
“The thing that I really miss is actually personal contact with the professor. I like to be able to get personalized advice from the person who’s in charge, and maybe just a little of like a thumbs-up, you know, just a little bit of positive reinforcement.”

Sebastian Thrun on his view of lecturing:
“It’s not my lecturing that changes the student, but it’s the student exercise. So our courses feel very much like video games, where you’re being bombarded with exercise after exercise after exercise. That’s very different from the way I teach at Stanford, where I’m much more in a lecturing mode.”

Stanford professor Susan Holmes:
“I don’t think that you can give a Stanford education online, in the same way as I don’t think that Facebook gives you a social life.”

Coursera, which is seeking authority to give college credit for their courses (as opposed to just certification), is working with a company called ProctorU to verify student identity and participation. Correspondent Spencer Michels demonstrates in this video how online testing would work, and how the system they’ve devised is meant to prevent — or at least curtails — cheating.

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Not too far in the future, students may be faced with an entirely different set of choices than they do today. No longer might college or career straight after high school graduation be the two only and divergent paths in front of them. No longer may a four-to-six-year commitment to a highly esteemed institution be the fastest way to a fruitful career or a rich network.

With online education quickly gaining momentum, the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is not only shaking up higher education to the core — its value, its status, its cost — the movement is also changing how young people envision their education and their future.

Sebastian Thrun, whose free, online artificial intelligence class for Stanford last year enrolled more than 175,000 people and launched the MOOC movement, foresees a radically different future for students. Thrun, who founded Google X, the incubator for projects like the Google self-driving car and Google Glass, co-founded Udacity, a free online school that offers higher ed classes computer science classes — everything from Programming Languages to How to Build a Startup.

“Right now you go to college for four, six, seven years, and it’s a big commitment over a long period of time,” Thrun said in an interview earlier this week, which will be shown in an upcoming PBS Newshour story. “But in the future, learning will be lifelong, and it will happen in very small chunks. If you have an interest, a problem, if you need a skill, you’ll go find it and learn it. Things like degrees and classes and so on, will be replaced by entire sequences of achievements in the learning space but also in the kinds of things we can do in the project space.”

Thrun believes that some kids may not even have to graduate from high school — especially if they know from an early age that they’re interested in a field like engineering. “Probably at the of 13 or 14, they’re already great at engineering, they’re proficient on different systems and they’re able to demonstrate it.”

And rather than having higher education be tangentially related to some future idea of a job, Thrun believes that equation will change.

“I’d love to see a time when job choices we make reinforce education,” he said. “We don’t put education first and job second, but the job begins much much earlier in a way to motivate the education.”

A HEAD START

The founders of Coursera, another MOOC that offers free online courses from more than 30 universities, including Princeton, Columbia, and Duke, believe the existence of MOOCs will give students a head start toward finding their career path and areas of interest before they commit to a major in college.

“They can spend less time wandering around aimlessly looking for what’s right for them both in discipline and difficulty level. They can do risk-free exploration both in discipline and in difficulty level to find the thing that’s right for them,” said Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera. “The biggest opportunity here is to make considerable progress toward a degree before they have to make a commitment to going to school to complete it.”

What’s more, students who typically have an “undermatching” problem — they aim for colleges that are less selective than what they might aspire to and are thus less likely to get a degree — can have the experience of taking classes from top-notch universities and see a different option for themselves.

“They can take these courses and say, ‘Wait a minute, I can aspire to these colleges, to Stanford, Princeton or Columbia, and therefore I’m going to try to apply there.’” Koller said. “We hope it opens the door to a much higher success rate for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

And for students who already have every intention of applying to top-tier universities, these online classes can be used for the college admissions process, said Andrew Ng, another Coursera co-founder. “What better way to prove to a college admissions officer that you’re ready?” he said.

BIG CHANGES

No one can predict what will come of the top-ranked schools with the availability of online classes. But if there’s any hand-wringing about the changes, Thrun said people should consider what’s happening now.

“Go to a high school now, look at how many kids don’t learn math not because they’re not capable of understanding math, but because of the way it’s conveyed to them, the classroom setting, the fixed speed for all — it’s the wrong recipe for these kids,” he said. “Is that what we aspire to maintain? Or should we be creative about this?”

But he’s hopeful.

“I’m a big optimist,” he said. “Especially that in the U.S., every time we engage in a debate if what we’re doing is right or wrong, we end up in a better place. And that better place will strengthen us.”

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By Jill Rooney

What does the future look like for online college students? With the explosion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) — including today’s announcement of U.C. Berkeley joining edX, and Coursera adding courses from 12 universities, including CalTech and Duke — the one fact we can say for certain is that online higher education is here to stay.

These are not just big names being added together: the numbers also tell the story. More than 6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, according to a Babson survey [PDF] for the Sloan Consortium.

While some wonder whether this is the end of traditional higher education, others are considering what an average college student’s life will be like in the future. In his Atlantic article Selling the College Experience to Students Who Take Classes Online, Conor Friedersdorf imagines a future in which savvy colleges and universities take advantage of new technologies to expand their operations across the country through virtual branches. Theoretically, these branches would offer some physical locations, where elite colleges could “leverage a respected brand into a profitable events business.”

He provides a description of “Yale West,” in which students in southern California could take advantage of networking possibilities such as “the monthly cocktail hour at the Soho House in West Hollywood, the group surfing lessons offered each summer in Huntington Beach, the ongoing lecture series, and the promise of a Culver City based student recreation center and study hall.”

Another such prediction Friedersdorf posits, just a couple years away:

The University of California decides on a new push to integrate its distance learning students into locally based intramural sports, a Web based student newspaper, and locally based black, Latino, and LGBT supporters, for starters. Go to a soccer field in San Diego on a Saturday and you might find students enrolled at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, but living in Mission Beach, squaring off against one another, and later that night watching a highlight of the match that someone captured on a smart-phone and uploaded to the University of California Extension Learning Gazette.

Such a reality might resolve one of the more frustrating contradictions of campus life for many undergraduates: being confined to campus environs narrows students’ experiences to only that specific region and prescribed lifestyle. A more broadly interpreted definition of the idea of a “campus” could turn the whole world into a learning environment. A college experience rooted in online courses that take advantage of all the possibilities of program enrichment that exist within larger communities could benefit students in untold ways.

Opportunities to diversify course curricula are also ripe with possibilities. In many ways, the actual work of a college student will probably not change all that much: Students will certainly have to work at their computers, listen to lectures and read chapters, conduct research, write notes on material, and write papers and take exams. Regardless of what new technologies emerge, there will still be plenty of work to keep students busy.

But what will likely change is the experience of learning. Imagine, for example, an online art course taken by students from around the country. The professor could choose a theme, such as “Family Life as Depicted in 19^th Century Paintings,” and students could visit their local art museums to find examples of the theme in real artworks. Students could post images of the paintings they find (with permission, of course), and share the works of local artists to the student body at large. The shared images would probably run the gamut of works by local artists to those done by the great masters, depending on the museum the student visits.

Certainly there would be more diversity than one would find in a standard art history text; plus this would allow students to compare many different aspects of the work, such as regional themes. Such learning experiences may not only be more engaging than listening to the standard slideshow/lecture format of most art history courses.

The average school day for a future college student may then be more than just consuming knowledge by sitting in front of a computer, which seems to be the most envisioned common scenario about the expansion of online higher education. As Friedersdorf pointed out in The Atlantic, colleges in the future will likely use the flexibility of online learning to explore many different ways to expand their physical campuses across the country or even the world—and hopefully, their faculty will do that as well.

Flickr:M.Keefe

By Katrina Schwartz

The sudden growth of free, top-shelf online education sites has the potential to democratize high-caliber education that’s long been reserved for only those who could afford it.

But as these new sites begin to blaze a new path to the possibility of a level playing field, it’s still unclear whether taking courses in subjects like artificial intelligence or game theory will eventually lead to employment.

Are certificates of online course completion from venerable institutions viable substitutes for diplomas and degrees from the same brick-and-mortar four-year universities? Though professors who teach these Massive Open Online Courses are well respected in their fields, is their stamp of approval enough to land a job?

If any job market would be receptive to a non-traditional educational path, one might think it would be Silicon Valley. There are plenty of examples of tech tycoons like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of school or otherwise bucked the system only to become wildly successful. It’s a hub that values creativity and technical skills and might seem a likely environment where a company might be willing to hire a person on the basis of their knowledge rather than where where they got their degree.

If that’s somewhere on the horizon, it’s not necessarily happening yet. When contacted about these online education sites — courses taught by professors at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley — many companies directly refused to talk about how their human resources departments would view a non-traditional candidate. Many had never even heard of Coursera, edX, or Udacity.

But recruiters who did agree to go on the record said that, for the most part, companies big and small looking for computer engineers want employees with college degrees from schools known for their computer science programs. “I couldn’t personally help them,” said Robert Greene, founder of technical recruiting firm GreeneSearch, when he heard the profile of a potential job applicant who had taken all the courses for a computer science degree, from a free site like Coursera or edX. “I work with startups so they want someone with experience and if not that, then a degree from a top school,” he said.

In fact, for start-ups, it’s especially important for programmers to have high pedigrees because those big-name degrees play a big role in acquisition negotiations, he said. “They will value at a top notch engineer at $1 to $3 million in evaluation,” said Erin Wilson, division manager of Jobspring Partners, Silicon Valley. “In that sense I think Coursera will take a long time to catch up to a top-notch degree.” Wilson himself is enrolled in a Coursera Computer Science 101 class — just for fun. He’s “stoked” to learn from Stanford professors, but has no illusions that it will lead him to a different job.

Still, Wilson said there are anomalies in the Valley — not all great programmers went to the top 25 computer science schools. And although he doesn’t think that getting in the door will be easy without an official degree of some kind, he said the idea that down the road when educational models are less fixed, a hard worker with a free online education that comes with practical skills could make the cut.

In the meantime, large, well-established can afford to be picky – places like Google, Groupon and Facebook mostly take applicants from the top 25 computer science programs. Wilson said there’s an “element of elitism in the Valley” that would be hard to overcome.

The skepticism was palpable from those interviewed who know the Silicon Valley job market well. There’s a sense that free education could not be great education. “If you are a smart student some school will take you and you’ll get a degree,” Greene said. “In the Valley, the education is usually a pretty good barometer.”

Companies in finance and banking had similar responses. “Generally we would not look at someone without college experience,” said Rebecca McGovern, executive assistant at the global private investment firm H.I.G Capitol, and the person in charge of recruiting for their San Francisco office. “A college degree is very fundamental — a weeding out process,” she added. She said no H.I.G office would take someone without a four-year degree.

It’s possible that these nascent education sites, many of which offer more than computer science and engineering classes, are too new to have gained traction. Instead, they are being confused with for-profit certificate programs that don’t always have a good reputation.

In this anecdotal and limited survey, the current conclusion seems to be that employers don’t trust these new educational sites yet. Regardless of the names behind them — whether the school or the professor — the four-year degree and the on-campus experience are still highly critical.

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

• COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to use crowd-sourcing algorithms to help ensure accuracy in peer grading, a move that will also  help professors manage such large-scale classes. What’s more, Coursera’s partner institutions will use the online learning platform to enhance in-class teaching. Based on a Department of Education study that shows online learning can be as effective as classroom learning, the participating universities will offer a mixture of interactive and static learning to explore the best way for students to retain the information. CERTIFICATION: As with the popular Stanford courses, students will not get academic credit from the participating institutions, but will receive a certificate of completion from the professor.

• MITx –> edX. MIT took its OpenCourseWare platform to the next level with MITx, which offers full professor-taught courses online (not just class materials), but after just one course this spring (Circuits and Electronics), MITx entered an agreement with Harvard, and is now part of edX. The two universities will use the MITx platform to bring in a wider array of classes to the site. What’s key here is the software for the platform is open-source, so other universities can use it too. The more universities add content, the more compelling a choice edX becomes amidst the growing number of offerings. Both schools have invested heavily in the project — each gave $30 million to a non-profit organization that they will co-manage. Edx will feature video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and a lot of peer interaction. CERTIFICATION: Certificates of mastery will be given to students who demonstrate knowledge of course material.

• UDACITY. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who offered the first set of free online Stanford classes last year, which drew 160,000 registrants (22,000 finished the class), left a tenured position at the university to start Udacity, which focuses on computer science. Thrun taught an online artificial intelligence course for free at Stanford last fall with Dr. Peter Norvig, another artificial intelligence expert. Their course drew 160,000 students, with 22,000 students finishing the class. That inspired Thrun to start Udacity, which pulls in outside experts like Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, to teach courses. They do not operate under the auspices of a university, although some of their guest-lecturers do teach at other universities. Their course offerings are aimed at practical computer science skills, like how to build an app or search engine. CERTIFICATION: Students receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course signed by the instructor.

• UDEMY. Staying away from high-profile academic names, this site tagline is “the university of you.” Courses can be taught by anyone, and most are free, though some cost a small fee ranging between $5-$250. Whether or how much to charge is up to the instructor. The course offerings on Udemy are broad; they’ve got non-traditional courses like “Tournament Poker Theory” (cost $39) or “Yoga For Weight Loss” (cost $39), in addition to traditional academic subjects like computer science, business, and marketing. The site encourages anyone to become an instructor and build name or brand recognition.
• P2PU. Similar to Udemy, Peer-2-Peer University uses the open education model to allow users to learn from others on the web or design and teach courses. Course offerings are broad, but there is some attempt to categorize by offering “schools” of web development, mathematics, social innovation, and education. The courses are totally free and P2PU gives out badges in recognition of completion. Again, the model requires a significant amount of participation and collaboration from students, including grading each others’ assignments.
• MINERVA PROJECT. Billing it as the “first elite American University to be launched in a century,” Minerva CEO Ben Nelson, who was formerly CEO of Snapfish, intends to launch a full-fledged, “Ivy League-quality” online university by 2014. Rather than offering separate courses, the university will offer a complete college education with an accompanying degree. The cost is yet undetermined, though Nelson has said it will cost significantly less than most college degrees cost today. The Minerva Project has drawn attention from investors and is trying to draw the best professors possible by giving out Minerva Prizes to the best college-level teachers that come with a cash reward.