Subject: sloan-c digest: February 03, 2011
SLOAN-C Digest for Thursday, February 03, 2011.
1. From Today's Inside Higher Education
---------------------------------------------------------------------Subject: From Today's Inside Higher Education
From: Donald Spicer <dspicer@usmh.usmd.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 09:52:41 -0500
X-Message-Number: 1
Online Courseware's Existential Moment
February 3, 2011
Historically, universities such as Columbia, Oxford, Yale, Princeton and
Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have defined
their value by exclusivity as much as by excellence. The institutions
positioned themselves as purveyors of an important public good - a
corps of graduates fit to run a nation - but the classrooms and
curriculums that ostensibly transform talented high-schoolers into
cardholding members of the adult elite have been walled off from the
general public.
In the Internet age, walls are everywhere falling in academe. Online
education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become
commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities,
which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling farflung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State
University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their
online programs. The University of California is
considering<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/03/califo
rnia> using online
education<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/26/califor
nia> to help recoup the revenue lost to massive
cuts<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/11/brown_budg
et_proposal_in_california_slashes_higher_education_spending> in
state funding.
But at elite private universities, the online revolution has unfolded
differently. At first, several top institutions tried selling their course
materials online through websites such as Fathom and AllLearn, but
stopped upon discovering that not many people were willing to pay
for online courses that did not lead to a diploma. Faced with the
choice of either offering degrees online at a price or giving away
courses for free, the elites took the road less traveled: they would
publish the raw materials - and in some cases videotaped lectures - for
certain courses on the Web, but would not offer online pathways for
their coveted degrees.
Has it made a difference? And where does that unmarked road lead,
anyway? Those questions lie at the heart of Unlocking the Gates: How
and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their
Courses<http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html> (Princeton
University Press), a new book by Taylor Walsh.
On the one hand, hundreds of millions of non-enrolled visitors, from
nearly every country, have availed themselves of free online
courseware from top American universities, explains Walsh, a research
analyst at Ithaka S+R. Some are professors at foreign universities
looking to model their own curriculums on the best of the West. In this
light, free online courseware might be seen as a game-changing effort
to level the playing field of international higher education.
On the other hand, absent the measures inherent to actual, degreegranting programs, there is no way to tell how much actual learning
these expensive projects are creating. "If you take away OCW
completely," said Ira Fuchs, former vice president at the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, of MIT's celebrated OpenCourseWare
project<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/07/29/open>,
"I'm not sure that higher education would be noticeably different." In
that light, free online courseware might seem little more than
noblesse oblige of a sort that is, not coincidentally, a boon to elite
universities' overseas branding and recruiting efforts.
In Unlocking the Gates, Walsh profiles current online courseware
projects at MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at
Berkeley, and India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced
Learning. She also reviews the cautionary tales of Fathom and
AllLearn, the profit-seeking harbingers of the Open Educational
Resources (OER) movement, and thus lays out the conundrum facing
their nominally successful offspring: As pressure mounts on online
courseware projects to demonstrate their value and/or become selfsupporting, will the world's premier universities be able to stay above
the fray of online degree programs and pay-to-play course materials?
Can they afford to stay pure, righteous, and unaccountable?
Inside Higher Ed recently caught up with Walsh to explore these
questions and others. The interview was conducted asynchronously
and online; Walsh received no money, and Inside Higher Ed received
no academic credit.
Q: Elite universities like to bill their free online courseware as a gift to
the world. But one of your themes in Unlocking the Gates is the
incredible strategic benefits of such projects in crucial overseas
markets. Among top U.S. institutions, are open educational resources
as much about international branding as altruism?
A: You're right that raising their global profiles has certainly been one
strategic benefit that some participating institutions have garnered
from their open courseware efforts. Yale in particular comes to mind
as a university that is unabashedly invested in expanding its global
reach, and the Open Yale
Courses<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/20/yale>
(OYC) project can be understood as a tool to aid in that effort. But
international branding is only one internal benefit that parent
universities have derived from the development of open courseware.
Though often designed primarily for external audiences, these projects
have also made an impact closer to home, aiding efforts to improve
alumni relations, recruit prospective students, and provide a welcome
study aid (and a kind of enhanced course catalog) for the university's
enrolled student population.
It is also important to note that not all participating universities have
leveraged their online courseware projects to the same degree. The
impact an initiative has on public perceptions of its parent university
can be linked to the extent of institutional branding on the site. The
OYC site makes extensive use of the Yale name, logo, and even colors,
rendering the site's institutional affiliation unambiguous - so good
press for OYC is good press for Yale. In contrast, Carnegie Mellon has
consciously elected not to use the university's name in that of its open
courseware effort (called simply the "Open Learning Initiative"),
perhaps missing an opportunity to indelibly align the host university
with the positive attention that its courseware program has received.
Q: How important to the future of OER projects is the development of
measures for finding out how much students are learning from free
online course materials?
A: Your question raises the issue of assessment here, which poses a
critical challenge to the open courseware community. For free and
open resources that consist exclusively of published lecture materials,
web analytics data can indicate how much traffic a site receives and
from where -- but anecdotal feedback or voluntary survey
participation have so far been the only means of gauging whether
users find this material meaningful.
But if the goal of an open courseware effort is to truly encourage
student learning at a distance, assessment is crucial. That's what
makes the Open Learning Initiative so compelling: this Carnegie
Mellon-led effort embeds assessment mechanisms within the online
course environment itself, such that the system is always collecting
data on student learning to feed back to the course developers. Yet
the OLI's approach to courseware design is incredibly costly, and has
required that courses are totally redesigned for web-based delivery - a
process that not all universities will be able or willing to undertake.
Q: You write about how anxieties over profitability helped sink early
attempts by elite universities to publish their course content online.
You also show how the current projects owe their success largely to
their willful avoidance of moneymaking business models. But the
sustainability issue is now very real for each of the projects you
profile. Which do you think is the most vulnerable to dwindling
financial support from its original bankrollers, and which is the least
vulnerable?
A: I think it's not a question of choosing a winner or loser, but rather
of understanding how each of these programs will adapt to changing
circumstances. Many of the initiatives profiled in Unlocking the Gates
were launched using outside foundation money (MIT
OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, and Carnegie Mellon's Open
Learning Initiative), and project leaders were always aware of the
temporary nature of that funding - it was for start-up purposes only,
not continuing operations. Now that those initial grants have been
spent, these initiatives have already begun to adapt in a variety of
ways. Some projects have redoubled their efforts to secure internal
support from their host institutions; for instance, MIT's general
Institute budget has been supporting half of OCW's annual operating
costs for years, based in part on the conviction that the program is
sufficiently embedded in the life of the university as to merit ongoing
support. The OLI, on the other hand, has continued to seek and
receive outside grants from a range of foundations, shifting the focus
of its course development away from core Carnegie Mellon courses
and toward courses aimed at a community college population, aligning
itself with the new direction of funders' priorities.
Q: Projects such as the MIT OpenCourseWare are often credited with
providing curricular building blocks for foreign universities. But the
president of Saint Michael's College last year told
me<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/22/opencoursew
are> that he has considered encouraging his faculty to adopt online
courseware from places like MIT and Yale. How likely is it that we'll see
faculty at mid-tier U.S. liberal arts colleges adopting online courseware
from top institutions?
A: That's a great question. One significant strength of liberal arts
colleges has traditionally been their focused attention on high-quality
undergraduate education, and it will be fascinating to see whether
there are ways to incorporate new technologies into this kind of highly
personalized instruction. It is certainly possible to imagine the use of
courseware resources to supplement - or even supplant - the role of
the textbook in certain introductory courses. But it remains to be seen
whether large numbers of liberal arts colleges will choose to structure
some of their teaching around a core lecture series developed
elsewhere. This kind of cross-institutional sharing would require that
the users overcome any "not invented here" bias that might dissuade
them from adopting another professor's courseware.
Q: Webcast.berkeley offers an interesting example of a high-profile
OER project that grew up without huge angel investments or any
particular model in mind. With technology such as lecture capture and
iTunes U. becoming more popular, are we going to see a boom in
"grassroots" OER projects?
A: I think that boom has already happened. Over 350 colleges and
universities from around the world are now participating in iTunes U,
over 75 maintain their own dedicated channels on YouTube EDU - and
these figures are only continuing to climb.
With so much open content being created and shared through a
variety of outlets, this is a very exciting time for online learning. But
one of the challenges raised by this growing corpus of available lecture
materials is that of demonstrating the value or impact of each new
offering. In this next phase of development, the open courseware
community - whose ranks are growing nearly every day - may have to
grapple with difficult questions like: Do we really need yet another
recording of Economics 101? And if so, how do we distinguish our
version from all the others?
For the latest technology news and opinion, follow @IHEtech on
Twitter<http://www.twitter.com/IHEtech>.
---------------------------------------Donald Z. Spicer
Assoc. Vice Chancellor and CIO
Univ. System of Maryland
301-445 2729 office
301 445-2783 fax
301-980-3593 cell
ECAR Senior Fellow
443-534-3034
END OF DIGEST
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