Sometimes the
changes in our society feel like a hurricane with swirling winds changing the
way we live and work. As enrollment growth tapers off at community colleges
around the country, the brief breath is less the eye of a hurricane and quite
possibly more like the beginning of a tsunami – where the tide rushes out to
sea before it comes crashing ashore and changes the landscape forever.
I recently read
an article in Time Magazine that opened my eyes to MOOCs – massive
open online courses. It is education at scale. We have heard for years that
top-tier universities like Stanford, MIT, and others were putting their best
courses from their best faculty on the Internet for free. It has finally
happened – and in a big way. Leading professors are taking the best of what
they know in brain research and how people learn and are integrating it with
what they know about instructional course design and assessment.
Three major
ventures are leading the way. The for-profit Coursera is the largest, with 198
courses already offered with resources from 33 colleges like Princeton,
Stanford, Duke and others. Udacity is also a for-profit that has 14 courses offered
while EDX is a non-profit led by MIT, Harvard, Texas and Cal-Berkeley. The
courses are free and gaining in popularity. More than 640,000 students enrolled
in the first 13 courses and now more than 1.4 million students have taken
courses from Coursera – that’s a lot of papers to grade.
I learned more
about how these MOOCs are designed when I later came across a TED talk from one of the co-founders of Coursera.
Here I learned that MOOCs utilize peer and self-grading and found that they are
highly correlated with faculty grading. The courses start on a given day with
real homework and real deadlines. They receive a certificate of completion at
the end of the course, but not college credit as we know it today. A week after
I read the Time article, I read an article that said Antioch University had signed a license agreement
with Coursera to use their MOOCs to build new bachelor degree programs.
MOOCs aren’t
likely to replace college as we know it in our lifetime. Rather, they are
likely to very quickly become the next component in an increasingly diverse
portfolio of community college enrollment. Just like online courses have carved
out a 10 percent to 25 percent share of community college enrollments in the
last 15 years, MOOCs and the certification of their competencies toward degrees
are likely to do the same in half that time. We already certify previous
student learning through AP credit, SAT, ACT, Credit for Prior Learning,
ACE-DANTES and other means. Community colleges had best start thinking about
MOOCs as well – for the wave will be crashing ashore before we know it.
