Flickr: UTCI Library

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.

TB

Udacity office in Silicon Valley, ground zero for MOOCs.

Less than 10 percent of MOOC students, on average, complete a course. That’s the conclusion of Katy Jordan of Open University, who published her analysis, pulled together from available data of some Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

But do completion rates matter?

It’s not that course completion rates don’t inform observers about the nature of MOOCs, said Michelle Rhee-Weise, who follows higher-ed developments in online and blended learning as an education senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly Innosight Institute). But with no negative academic consequences from dropping out, that information is less about the effectiveness of the courses themselves, and more about the reasons people might be enrolling, she said.

Among those reasons:

1. 1.  Just because MOOCs give free access to higher education courses doesn’t mean their work is being ignored by the for-profit sector of an online learning industry estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Rhee-Weise said. That can make MOOCs a fruitful observation ground for those who are looking for ideas to infuse into their own online learning efforts.
2. 2.  “If you just think about the openness of these platforms, there are people who just want to see what’s going on, see how others teach the same subjects they do, as well as competitors who might want to steal some ideas and use them in their own platforms,” said Rhee-Weise, who said she has enrolled in a handful of MOOCs for research purposes without intentions of completing them.
3. 3.  There is a range of data that shows students enrolled in MOOCs and in other online post-secondary courses skew far older than the traditional on-campus college student. In online degree programs, that phenomenon often relates to professionals looking to change careers, get promoted within their current one with the attainment of an additional degree, or merely weave new skills into their work.
4. 4.  While MOOCs can’t offer the promise of automatic promotion that degree programs can provide, they can offer a much lower-risk path to new workplace skills. Some students might lift specific skills out of courses without following through to completion. Meanwhile, Rhee-Weise questioned whether those who were completing MOOCs had been given any direct career incentive.
5. 5.  “Are they boosting their CV? Are they changing their career track?” Rhee-Weise said. “I would love to know how this is tracking and helping in some way with employment. … It seems like a way in which we could blur the gap between unemployed college graduates and unfilled employment opportunities.”
6. 6.  Low completion rates may actually point to students enrolling because they recognize the unusual opportunity afforded by MOOCs. Whereas students in traditional college courses likely wouldn’t enroll in a course they knew they might fail to complete if they were paying full tuition, the lack of those concerns could stir some to enroll before they consider the full demands of a course.
7. 7.  And even with severe student dropoffs, the idea of MOOCs serving a wider swath of students than traditional college courses is still authentic, Rhee-Weise said. A small fraction of a courseload of 10,000-30,000 students completing a course still boasts more students than even a large lecture hall on a college campus.

MORE ON THE ANALYSIS

The analysis, which Jordan has continued to update since initially posting it in the middle of February, currently considers the enrollment and completion rate data of 24 MOOCs in all, including 20 offered from different universities over the Coursera platform. Twelve universities are represented, with individual course enrollments ranging from 10,000 to 180,000. Courses are color-coded on a scatter plot, based on whether they are scored automatically, by peer grading, or a combination of both.

Courses with automatic scoring tended to have somewhat higher completion ratings than courses with peer grading. There was very little correlation, however between the number of students enrolled and the completion rate, nor between the duration of the course and the completion rate. A typical course enrollment is roughly 50,000 students.

THE FUTURE OF MOOCs?

While Rhee-Weise said she didn’t believe MOOCs should be evaluated based mainly on course completion rates, she did express some overarching doubt about whether MOOCs were really a revolutionary change in higher education, as some creators intended.

“I’m not totally convinced yet that MOOCs will necessarily be completely disruptive to higher education,” said Rhee-Weise of the Innosight Institute, an organization founded upon forwarding the principal of disruptive innovation in education and healthcare. “I think in general we think they have the hallmarks of disruption. But what’s interesting is these are all emerging from the [universities] themselves, and when we have seen disruptors have success, they’ve come out of autonomous units” outside the formal education system.

MyEdu

Despite a deeply held belief that success in college is crucial for success in life, the traditional path students assume they’ll take is more an exception than the rule, according to a new report.

Though most students believe the college path — high school, college with chosen major, internship, job — will smoothly go from one phase to the next, the reality is quite different for many students. And as a result, stress and anxiety is causing them to make haphazard decisions about their education.

Switching majors, falling behind the academic schedule, and feeling disenfranchised by the conventional college system are becoming institutionalized student experiences, states the report [PDF] from MyEdu, an Austin, Texas-based company that offers online tools to help college students manage their academic lives and career opportunities.

So how to fix it?

Though many believe access to online courses through one of the proliferating MOOCs, study author Jon Kolko suggested online learning represents the wrong application of the right technology. Instead, he says the same kinds of algorithms that contribute to a self-paced math course, for example, should instead be used to evaluate a student’s progress in traditional college courses. For example, he envisions MyEdu and its competitors (such as Koofers, Princeton Review, and HeyCampus) offering tools that can take a student’s performance and feedback from a general education course and suggest or rule out potential majors.

“I don’t think computers are that good for learning, but they’re really good for this administrative side of things,” said Kolko, MyEdu’s vice president of design, who is planning on using feedback from the study to hone its tools and inspire new ones. The company currently has profiles of about 300,000 students who are mostly enrolled in large state institutions in Texas and elsewhere in the American Southwest. The company makes its revenue by providing data about those students to career recruiters.

On a larger—if more unrealistic—level, the simplest way to help students be more productive and less anxious in college may be to alter the typical path of their common experiences.

For example, in its analysis of 14 in-depth interviews with college students and more than 1,000 surveys completed by a representative sample of MyEdu users, the report found that students were most influenced by nontraditional academic experiences like study-abroad trips, internships, and mentorships. But while those experiences often lead to the identification of a long-term life goal, they generally come toward the end of college, and don’t leave time for a change of course in study, at least while an undergraduate student.

Kolko accepted the suggestion that encouraging students to enroll in apprenticeships, service initiatives, or gap year programs might help more of them find their goals more quickly and lead to a more efficient path through college. But he said the stigma attached to an indirect path to college would likely keep most from considering them, so instead colleges should look at ways to make the path to a degree more flexible.

“I don’t think it’s fair at all, or even legitimate, to expect an 18-year-old to exit high school knowing what they want to study,” Kolko said. “But if we’re not going to change the way the game works, we need to give them the information to make that decision more proactively, and we need to make those decisions less binding.”

MyEdu

This isn’t to say students don’t take college seriously—in fact the report finds most believe the college experience will determine what happens during the rest of their lives. But that sense of finality often leads to mistakes like choosing a major based on ease of completion, relying on parents who themselves did not go to college for college advice, and making any sort of big academic choice before it’s necessary.

Here’s a look at the report’s four primary findings:

COLLEGE PREDETERMINATION: Students believe the path from college to career is relatively linear and rigid—choose a college, choose a major, get an internship, get a job—and then aren’t mentally prepared to work around roadblocks to that path when they arise.

FORCED TO DECIDE: Students often feel they have inadequate time to make informed decisions about their academic future, and thus resort to less substantive reasons to guide that process, such as the plans of their friends and the opinions of their family.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: 37 percent of students labeled themselves as “nontraditional” because they could no longer meet the cost, time, or other requirements of conventional colleges and universities.

APPEARANCES VS. REALITY: Most students feel empowered to apply to jobs and internships and believe how to effectively show their unique skills; instead they are more skilled at generic cover letter and resume writing than at selling their best talents.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

As tech tools continue to proliferate with new launches and new products, it’s difficult to predict what will stick and what won’t. A recently released report by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) tries to sift through the fads and find the few that will have a real impact on education in the next few years.

What’s worth noting? Sometimes what seemed impossible only a few years ago has already become a new trend. The 2013 NMC Horizon’s Report on Higher Education, which brings together international experts in education and technology, attempts to take the pulse of emerging technologies in higher education and predict where the field will move in the near, middle and far term.

The report points to MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, as the big change agent in the higher ed landscape, but it also reaches a little further, bringing 3D printing and wearable technology into the mix.

KEY FACTORS

The panel considered some key factors influencing whether technologies take hold, identifying a move towards “open” content and the ability to share, manipulate, and mold. Even more critical for institutions of higher education is the rise of MOOCs. As more elite institutions align themselves with one MOOC organization or another, university leaders are considering the idea of “micro-credit” as an alternative to the traditional credits given at brick and mortar universities.

[RELATED READING: For the Future Student, Higher Education Will Be Redefined]

Equally important to information access are skills that employers expect recent graduates to bring with them — like communication and critical thinking. These skills are often augmented by real-world or informal learning experiences that move beyond the college lecture hall. Acknowledging that the trend of personalization and taking it a step further, the report also notes the increasing importance of learning analytics. Colleges will need to follow a student’s digital footprint to better tailor their educational experience. And all of this means a different role for university instructors. Students have much better access to knowledge through technology which necessitates that professors become mentors, collaborators, facilitators and ultimately not the center of the learning experience.

CHALLENGES

By and large the biggest barriers to implementing technology in higher education are the institutions and people who run them. Employers increasingly recognize that digital media literacy is an important skill set in the coming decades, but university faculty are neither equipped to teach those skills nor especially proficient themselves in many cases.

Lack of digital fluency is affecting scholarly collaboration, as well. Social media, blogging, link backs and other tech-based publication methods are not well understood or recognized by older, traditional faculty and administration. It’s far easier to continue with the status quo and too often professors trying new things are seen as teaching outside their role. This stodgy mentality stifles innovation.

The panel also found that while there is a hunger for more personalized learning, the demand is not well supported by the technology. The mechanics of earning analytics are still in the nascent stages. Collecting, collating, and understanding the sheer volume of data is overwhelming to most at traditional universities. Many college instructors are not using technology in their research or in their teaching. It would take a larger cultural shift before many technologies could be considered widespread.

[RELATED READING: Can Free, High-Quality Education Get You a Job?]

Lastly, the competition that MOOCs are bringing to the long-held university system is challenging the value of higher education. Many argue the competition is exactly what slow-moving universities need to change, but others wonder if the instruction offered by MOOCs reaches the same caliber. “As these new platforms emerge, however, there is a need to frankly evaluate the models and determine how to best support collaboration, interaction, and assessment at scale. Simply capitalizing on new technology is not enough; the new models must use these tools and services to engage students on a deeper level,” the report notes.

NEAR-TERM PREDICTIONS (WITHIN THE YEAR)

Both MOOCs and tablets will be widely adopted in university settings within the year. The popularity of MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity and edX are undeniable with enrollment in some classes exceeding 100,000 students. Unparalleled access excites many people, but raises questions. “One of the most appealing promises of MOOCs is that they offer the possibility for continued, advanced learning at zero cost, allowing students, life-long learners, and professionals to acquire new skills and improve their knowledge and employability,” notes the report.

As for tech hardware, tablets fit well with the university lifestyle. They’re light, portable, and allow students to interact with the lesson and their networks at the same time. Competition in the tablet space has increased, driving down the price and pushing the limits of capability. The report predicts tablet manufacturers will continue to offer more robust options for less money.

MID-TERM (TWO TO THREE YEARS)

A big prediction here is the rise of games and gamification to encourage students to participate with material in deeper ways. Educational gaming might seem like old news to some, but most often gaming comes up in a K-12 context. Now the same benefits are being applied to older students and more complicated subjects. Most of the excitement centers on gamification – integrating mechanics of games into non-game situations to inspire creativity and productivity. The strategy works well for many businesses and is gradually making its way onto college campuses.

Similarly, the report predicts that learning analytics will find a foothold in higher education in the next few years. “Student-specific data can now be used to customize online course platforms and suggest resources to students in the same way that businesses tailor advertisements and offers to customers,” the report said. Universities are already using big data to improve advising and help offer advice and strategies to struggling learners to improve retention. The data can also help universities to better allocate resources, fill holes and accurately understand how well they are serving students.

LONG TERM (FOUR TO FIVE YEARS)

The rise of the Maker movement has helped launch 3D printing back into the NMC Horizons predictions where it first appeared in 2004. The emphasis on design learning and DIY culture make 3D printers appealing.

Wearable technology will take off on college campuses as thin film technology makes it possible for screens to mold around body curves. And these devices aren’t just cool. “Wearable devices are also proving to be effective tools for research because they use sensors to track data, such as vital signs, in real-time. Although wearable technology is not yet pervasive in higher education, the current highly functional clothing and accessories in the consumer space show great promise,” the report says.

Enstitute

Going to college used to be the prescribed path to success, but today, students are considering different options. The cost of a college education is soaring and many students are graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. One response to the high cost of secondary education are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by companies like Coursera or edX that offer free online courses taught by well-known professors, but the jury is still out on how employers will view qualifications from MOOCs.

Students are now considering whether work experience should come even before college education. What if applicants already had a solid footing in the industries they hope to enter? That’s the mission of Enstitute, a New York City-based non-profit that’s promoting the idea of learning by doing.

Co-founder Kane Sarhan developed Enstitute based on his personal experiences in college and in apprenticeships. He was a high achiever in university, but never felt very connected to what he studied until he started getting real-world experience through internships. Suddenly, the marketing terms used in class became relevant and there was a reason to understand them. His apprenticeships helped him get real-world job experience that he parlayed into a first job with more responsibility and higher pay than some of his peers who had graduated from top universities.

His friends started coming to him asking for advice and he tried to help them out by connecting them to entrepreneurs in his circle. The hunger for those connections, for real skills and practical experience, was so strong that Sarhan decided to institutionalize the apprenticeship experience.

“We sat down with about a dozen HR departments before we started the program and they said the traditional indicators that they use for recruiting are starting to fail,” Sarhan said. Hiring managers saw promise in Enstitute because new employees would come to them with practical skills – they wouldn’t have to spend valuable time retraining even the smartest entry-level applicant.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Enstitute, which raised funds to support their students from private investors, Microsoft Bing, and the Kauffman Foundation, welcomed its first class of 11 fellows in September of 2012. They’ve each been placed in a tech start-up where they’ll work and learn for two years. They rotate between different divisions of the company, learning each aspect of the business before being given one area of focus. Enstitute does weekly check-ins with fellows to follow their learning progress and monthly check-ins with the host-companies to make sure the experience remains substantive.

Fellows also have six to eight hours of coursework per week, a mixture of online and offline work. Enstitute partners with SkillShare, Treehouse, GeneralAssembly, as well as private corporations like the Economist and MOOCs, which provide the courses meant to solidify the foundations of what they’re doing on the job. The courses also focus on things like critical thinking and problem solving, written communication, verbal communication and presentation, as well as elective subjects in liberal arts, competency in basic business technology, and front- and back-end development.

[RELATED: For the Future Student, Higher Education Will Be Redefined]

In its pilot year, fellows get paid $200 per week and are given free room and board at a loft Enstitute rents in New York. The first year’s fellows have not had to pay for the education, but in the future, Sarhan predicts there will be a nominal fee of $1,500 per year to cover the cost of online courses. He also expects the weekly stipend paid by companies to increase. The first eleven fellows are an exceptionally driven bunch, he said, and most already have experience with tech start-ups.

WILL THEY GET JOBS?

Sarhan is intently focused on trying to make sure Enstitute fellows emerge from the program as competitive candidates for good jobs at companies of all sizes. He’s confident that the on-the-job skills they’re learning from their internships already put them a step above peers emerging from elite institutions with little experience.

But he’s also making connections with as many companies as he can, selling the Enstitute model. He’s creating a recruiting pipeline with employers on the other end who know exactly the kind of experience they’re cultivating. Additionally, the “credential” that fellows receive from Enstitute is what amounts to a real-world portfolio of their work. They can demonstrate the projects they

[RELATED: Should Work Experience Come Before College Education?]

worked on during their apprenticeships, recommendations from their entrepreneur-mentors, peers and Enstitute staff, as well as the results of their online coursework. Taken together, Sarhan hopes it will paint a compelling picture of competence.

THE FUTURE FOR ENSTITUTE

The company is currently accepting applications for their next set of fellows and have added digital media/advertising and non-profit/social good apprenticeships to the industry list they offer.

“At scale we see Enstitute working with any small to medium sized company in this country to place an apprentice, so anyone can learn on the job,” Sarhan said. That means flower shops or restaurants or auto body shops could all teach their trade through an apprenticeship. The founders want to take the program global, connecting international fellows to companies in their own communities. Sarhan said he’s committed to keeping the program affordable and getting apprentices paid through the company. He doesn’t think anyone should have to go into debt to find their career path.

Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, who launched Udacity, free online higher-ed classes, sees this kind of new model emerging for what comes after high school.

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,” Thrun said. “We don’t put education first and job second, but the job begins much much earlier in a way to motivate the education.”

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.