Kevin Carey’s recent book, The End of College, starts
with a great story. He introduces us to one of the most famous professors in
the world, Eric Lander. His background is about as impressive as it gets. He’s
won a Nobel, led the human genome project and has expertise in his field that
only a few in the world can even hope to approach. But aside from his accomplishments
with the genome, he is also known as one of the best teachers at MIT. His class,
introduction to biology is mandatory, and legendary. He has adoring fans gather
around his desk after each class. More importantly, at least as far as the
thesis of the book, his class has reached thousands of people around the world,
for free, as a MOOC.
Massive Online Open Courses were, a few years ago, trumpeted
by the companies like Edacity and others as the death knell of traditional
education as we know it. Carey, like Malcolm Gladwell in his books, knows that
we are wired for stories more than for data and overviews of research. While
these latter things are what should be used to ‘prove’ his thesis, his book
depends largely on profiles of the people in Silicon Valley, Cambridge and a
few other places who are at the forefront of the MOOC revolution. Sebastian
Thern, who was one of the first to create a MOOC famously said that in 20 years
there would only be a few dozen colleges and universities left after a couple
of decades.
Since then, the death of traditional brick and mortar education
has received a lot comment from pundits and educators. Most think, as the
cliché goes, the death has been greatly exaggerated. Instead of MOOCs heralding
in a Gutenberg revolution most see it as yet another set of bells and whistles
that will help some people around the world get exposure to a huge range of
topics and subjects but won’t make much of difference to the way education
works in the US. Colleges and universities will continue to bring students to
campus and train them for the job market and for graduate school, perhaps with
some implementation of MOOC technology, but not much will happen to force
schools to either join the on-line revolution or sink into oblivion.
Carey’s book attempts to show how they are wrong. His first
chapter is instructive in several senses of the word. Carey himself takes Lander’s
MOOC and earns a certificate for completing the same work as first year
students at MIT. He has completed all the challenging problem sets and passed
each of them. He has reached out to the TAs on line for help and participated
in on line chat rooms with other students from all over the world. To put it
simply, he has demonstrated mastery in a challenging MIT class and has a
certificate to back it up. He even takes time to visit the class in real time
and comes away thinking on-line is better. On line he can hit the pause button
during the lecture to write notes in a more complete way than trying to write
down words as they stream out in real time. He can concentrate on the class in
a quiet way in the comfort of home instead of being distracted by the student
next to him who is focused far more on his phone than what is going on in
class. He can hear Lander better and has multiple camera angles to see what he
does instead of seeing him a long way away at the back of a lecture hall.
Carey convinces me that this particular class teaches students
the materials and delivers it in ways that are even better than if he were
there taking it in person. In addition, Carey also underscores how the new
technology, combined with the discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and
education science about learning can help to individualize the experience of
taking MOOCS.
I advise anyone who
is primed (the last word as it is used in neuroscience) against MOOCs to read
this first chapter and then come up with reasons why Carey's experience does
not convince you that this class is as good or better than taking the exact
same class at MIT. I think if this chapter stood alone as an article it would
get many to question their assumptions and I think this is great. His interview
for the US News, “It's the End of College As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is a good introduction too.
Much of the rest of the book unfolds in chapters that
introduce us to some of the early leaders of the on-line revolution. We hear
about wonderful professors who have made their work accessible to people, for
free, to people around the world. To give just one example of what this can
mean, there is a person in Nigeria who has taken more than 250 MOOCs:
Jima Ngei. Ngei, who
lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, has completed and passed 250 MOOCs, all
through Coursera, since September
2012. His self-styled education has included courses in English common law and
Chinese history, data science and Latin American culture, social epidemiology
and the life of Thomas Jefferson, to name a few.
Of course Mr. Hgei is at the very far end of the bell curve
of MOOC takers; he has taken and passed far more courses than what most
students take to earn 5 undergraduate degrees. The data out there shows that
people around the world, who have neither the opportunity or the money to attend
traditional schools in the US can become “educated citizens” to use Thomas
Jefferson’s phrase.
Another way that Carey sees education changing in the not
too distant future has to do with the way colleges and universities will use
deep data to select students in ways that some forward thinking businesses
currently do. Jeffrey Selingo, whose own book, College (Un)Bound should be required reading for anyone who wants to get
informed about data and education. He has this to say about Carey in The Washington Post:
In a compelling new
book about higher education, The End of College, its author,
Kevin Carey, lays out a future where admission to a college is based on the
massive amounts of data and information already collected on students from an
early age rather than a snapshot made in one moment in time for an application
deadline.
“Instead of waiting
for applications to arrive colleges will be able to conduct extensive searches
of data that students and parents choose to make available,” writes
Carey, who
directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation.
Under such a scenario,
admissions would become something more akin to how employers now search
LinkedIn and other online databases to recruit talent to their organizations
rather than wait for an application to arrive in response to a job
advertisement. LinkedIn already has lowered the minimum age to join the
professional network to 14, partly
in an effort to persuade more students in middle school and high school to
begin building their profiles. As more students do, the day might not be
that far away when a LinkedIn profile becomes the foundation for a college
application or the place where admissions officers search for their next class
of freshmen.
Both Carey and Selingo believe that looking at a student’s
data over many years, not just at a transcripts and a set of tests and an essay
is a far better way of predicting success at a college. If this all sounds unrealistic I will simply add a quote
from a very smart counselor who shared this with me in a discussion about this
issue: “I spoke with an Eli Lilly exec the other day who told me that they almost
solely hire from Linked In and MOOCs now. Try explaining that to high school
students who have never heard of either entity.”
In some cases, companies are hiring people who do not have a
college degree but have the skills they are looking for—coding being the one
many are searching for. I know a high school student who was brought in as an
intern at Google based upon his MOOC certificates and recommendation from his
MOOC professor. I am not saying that admission will change dramatically in the
next year or two, but schools are already using data to predict yield and to recruit
prospective students. If they find that these alternatives will help them
enroll more and stronger students then the way students apply to schools may
change radically in the next decade.
While I like much of what Carey has to say as tries to
convince readers that colleges and universities will be falling by the hundreds
or even thousands in the next several decades, he does not convince me that he
has proven his thesis. He marshals a lot of evidence to make his case, but he
also leaves out at least 5 things that will, I think, undercut any relatively
fast transformation of the education landscape in the US.
Habits and beliefs
The belief that many hold that the US education is the best
in the world and that our way of giving students access to great centers of
learning is deep and longstanding. It is part of the American Dream and
something that many, rightly I think, hold up as a shining beacon on the hill.
The number of students that have flowed in from the world over the last two
decades demonstrates that it isn’t just those in the US who believe the best
schools in the world are here--it’s common wisdom. For those who read much of
what I write this last phrase is always used as a way of turning the
conversation in a new direction away from the common wisdom
We are all guided by habits and beliefs to interpret the
world through ideological and experiential frames. There are some like Dan Ariely and Yuval Noah Hariari,who think that we think most of the time with anything but
rational approaches to issues. I mention this as most people I know think that
traditional education, on a campus, is invaluable preparation for the real
world. Some talk about the importance of liberal arts; others, about the
networking and career building skills that are a part of being in and out of
classes among faculty, students and administrators. For many, then, it is
"common sense" that on campus experiences make for a much deeper and
fuller preparation for what will happen after graduation. Even if they are
confronted with data (for example, over a third of students graduating from
college today have no increase in critical thinking skills after 4 years and a
degree—see the book "Academically adrift" for the research on this),
there is still the feeling that college should happen on a campus. We are slow
to change the way we view things even if confronted with data. There are a
majority of US citizens who think that evolution is not the best way to explain
how we as humans have come to dominate the planet. I think the evidence is
compelling but they do not. My citing data has virtually never changed
someone’s mind on this issue. I am not
sanguine that a few ‘experts’ who believe that the current way many receive an
education today needs to change will be enough to shift the paradigm anytime
soon.
Schools Themselves
If Carey believes that the thousands of traditional colleges
and universities will embrace the changes he proposes in education lightly, then
he too is not approaching things rationally. Some do not like to say that
higher education is a big business but the way things run at most schools these
days it is hard to find out why they think this. Larger and larger
administrative bodies tightly run schools. They oversee budges, enrollments and
fund-raising. The largest increase in hiring over the last decades has been on
the administrative side as schools recognize that they need to be business
savvy to keep things afloat. Many schools are already struggling. A few have
closed. What Carey proposes is yet another huge challenge to many
schools' survival. As with any business under threat from competitors, there
will be efforts to dismiss the data that Carey uses, followed by efforts to undercut any
big changes in the status quo. Everyone who works at a brick and mortar school
has a stake in on-line options not gaining a large market share. There will be
faculty, administrators, alumni and students who will all be on the side of the
schools. They will be passionate advocates for what they offer. There will be
media blitzes, studies released, and lots more to critique on-line education. Trying
to separate the "signal from the noise" (I use the phrase that data
guru Nate Silver uses as the title of his great book on this topic) among competing data will be difficult at best. There are
billions of dollars at stake, untold thousands of jobs, and communities that
will be in trouble too should local schools close. Will schools go the way of
the newspapers? They were for many years the traditional way that many found
out about the world. With the exception of a few strong brands, on-line
resources have largely replaced newspapers.
Seminars and Labs
While I agree with Carey when it comes to the effective
dissemination and evaluation of students on-line in introductory classes that
are, by and large, lecture based, he does not address how students would
complete labs, participate in seminars, or do individualized research on-line.
I do not know how some of the things that require hands on activities could be
reproduced on line—at least not yet. The labs, equipment and other resources
are simply not there for students located all across the globe. Likewise, there
is something special that can happen in a small seminar that cannot happen in a
large lecture. If what I have said it accurate, then it may be that on-line
education will permit students to learn something but that students will still
need to travel to traditional campuses to take advantage of the resources
there. Students may be able to earn credit and graduate in 2 years and there are
some majors and areas of study that could be done completely remotely. But the
technology is simply not there yet to give students who are not actually doing experiments
and not actually doing group work with others on case studies etc. that have
been created that have any data to back up that they are good enough to match
what happens on a real campus
Testing Companies
It may not seem readily apparent why testing companies would
have a stake in caring if on-line classes earn credit, but they will stand to
lose a huge market should this happen. The College Board is responsible not
only for the SAT I and 2 tests, but also for the Advanced Placement program. As
ETS has lost its market share to the ACT over the SAT I, they have needed to do
a number of things to keep their business, non-profit as it is, getting
students to pay for tests. The AP program has been increasingly important as
many colleges and universities use AP classes and scores to determine
admission. Schools all over the US and the world now offer APs. Each of these
tests costs over 100.00 dollars so taking 5 or 10 (the typical number for
students applying to selective schools) adds up to a lot of money. If students could take MOOCs instead, either for free or for a lower fee, and get credit for
them and be looked at as equivalent or better than APs, then the College Board
would have another huge challenge to address. In addition, the International Baccalaureate
program also costs a lot to implement within a school and then they charge for
the tests themselves. If students could take MOOCs instead of IBs and these were
also looked at as good or better, the number of student and schools choosing the
IB might drop at well. Like the schools themselves, the testing companies have
a vested interest in trying to keep things the way they are and they will have
people doing research to try to prove that their exams are better than MOOCs.
Security
The last issue that I think is the one that represents the
biggest challenge for giving credit for MOOCs and other on-line learning
options centers -- security. As the College Board has found in the past several
years making sure tests are secure and that cheating isn’t going on has become
an issue they still have yet to solve. Students, especially in Asia, have found
ways to beat the test and score well. For MOOCs there is currently no way to
assure that someone is not hiring an expert to take the MOOC for him or her.
While this has not been an issue to date, that is only because there is not a
credit issue yet. Should schools move toward giving credit there will have to
be a great deal of work done to create a way that ensures colleges and
universities that the certificate students earn for courses represents the work
of each individual student. I see this as the biggest problem of all the ones
I have cited, as I do not know how security can be assured remotely. If the College
Board has problems with people on-site taking the tests I cannot begin to guess
how this issue will be solved simply or in a cost-effective way. Given this I
would imagine that many schools would use security as the issue to refuse to
grant credit.
*********************************************************************************
If it seems I have now proven that the revolution has been hyped
and that the status quo will continue along as it currently stands (with just a few
minimal changes), then I need to address how there is some evidence that
Carey may be right about the transformative power of MOOCs.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall, to 9/11 and its aftermath,
to the sad outcomes of the Arab Spring, almost all pundits have missed the
biggest changes headed our way. Taleb calls them Black Swans and I agree with him that we do not have the ability to predict what will happen years from now
(let alone this afternoon). On the other hand, I do agree with William Gibson
too (who was right about a lot of the things that have come to pass in
technology --except he did it as so many visionaries have—through fiction/art):
“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
Now that schools are
offering degrees on line for masters programs, the door is open for schools to
start offering credit for undergraduate courses. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education outlines how these programs are already in place at a
number of elite schools:
Paid
online courses for professional graduate programs.
Yale University recently unveiled a
new master’s program for aspiring physician assistants, offered through its
medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of
the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale
has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree
in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.
Degrees in fields like health care and
teaching are in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big
chunks of that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go
back to school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to
claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins University,
Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and others
have also started offering online versions of their professional master’s
programs.
Online does not fundamentally threaten the
appeal of professional programs, where the "student experience" is
not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll
are working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations
and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding
parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.
One well-respected school, The University of Illinois Champaign Urbana, has just announced it will offer an MBA degree via MOOCs. How this will work out and whether this model will be implemented by other schools is something that has yet to be determined, but it does signify that at least some places are taking the MOOC options seriously:
"As with any MOOC, the content is available for free. Learners who wish to earn a credential but have no need for academic credit can pay a small fee, $79 a course, for an identity-verified certificate. Students can also apply to the College of Business and, if accepted, pursue the full M.B.A. degree. Finally, students can choose to take the courses individually for credit, postponing a decision about whether to go for a degree until they are well into the program."
More significantly, at least as far as the large term effects on on-line education versus MOOCs, the first major university, Arizona State, has just announced that it will give
a year’s worth of undergraduate credit for MOOCs The President of
ASU, Michael Crow, put forward a number of radical changes in his recent book,
"Designing the New American University". He has now opened the door
for other schools to follow his lead in offering a low cost option for
students to earn credit for their first year of college. This move represents a
significant challenge to the education establishment:
Arizona State University, in partnership with
edX, this fall will begin to offer credit-bearing massive open online courses
at a fraction of the cost of either in-person or traditional online education.
ASU’s faculty members will create about a
dozen general-education MOOCs, the first of which -- an introductory
astronomy course -- will launch this August. Anyone can register for and
take the MOOCs for free, but those who pay a $45 fee to verify their
identity can at the end of each course decide if they want to pay the
university a separate, larger fee to earn academic credit for their work.
By fall 2016, ASU anticipates it will offer
enough MOOCs so that students can complete their entire freshman year online
through what edX and the university are calling the Global Freshman Academy.
After completing the courses, students can
receive a transcript from ASU showing that they have earned enough credits at
the university to transfer to a different program or institution as
sophomores. Since the university stresses the MOOCs are just a new form of
delivering courses it already offers, the transcripts won’t specify which
type of course -- in-person, online or massive online -- students enrolled in
to earn the credit.
“What this does is it really opens up new
pathways for all students, no matter where they are in the world,” edX CEO
Anant Agarwal said in an interview. “There are no admissions requirements -- no
SAT scores, no GPAs, no recommendation letters.”
The reaction to this
move has been swift, but not the way I would have thought. Questions about
accreditation and whether such courses should count have already been raised.
Some educators have already gone on record as calling this attempt to give
credit “retrograde”.
Paul L. Gaston, a Trustees Professor at Kent
State University and author of Higher
Education Accreditation: How It’s Changing and Why It Must, nevertheless
called the Global Freshman Academy a “retrograde action” for an institution he
praised for its innovation.
“It’s a kind of compromise with the values
that they have demonstrated in terms of clear learning outcomes and creating
exciting environments for learning,” Gaston said. “I do think it represents a
shift in the character of the kind of commitment that ASU has been known for.”
The move by ASU and
the reaction represents the conflicts that will be fought in the near and long
term. Should MOOCs be incorporated as part of earning credit for degrees not
just at ASU, but at many other schools, then things will change in at least
some of the ways Carey predicts. If the education establishment prevails and
ASU fails to prove these courses prepare students for success, then MOOCs will
still exist as a part of graduate programs and as a way of students and others
from around the world of learning skills like coding and learning about an huge
range of topics and subjects. They will not, however, become a threat for most
of the colleges and universities who see the current model of brick and mortar
education not as an outdated paradigm, but as what has made the US system of
education the best in the world for the generations.
Carey’s book does repeat itself in its unswerving allegiance
to the transformative power of MOOCs. By the last chapter the tone deserves the
phrase "religious fervor". He himself wants MOOCs to become a sort of religious
cathedral that will draw acolytes from all over the world. (The religious trope
is his, not mine.) They will learn from the scripture of the sciences and reason
and a new dawn of humankind will begin. Ok, I am exaggerating a bit here, but
not by that much. He does invoke religion and belief and that seems a bit over
the top.
But if the histories of religious differences throughout
history are any guide, the war, at least of words, credit and cost will not be
settled without causalities. If I had to guess the changes at the margins that
are happening now would have to be embraced by the public at large perhaps
based on the inability of most in the middle class and below to afford
traditional education on campuses without incurring significant debt. Whether
the casualties that may result are the colleges themselves or the MOOCs, is,
for me at least, too hard to predict.
*******************************************************************************
In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I have taken a MOOC and learned a great deal from it. I have also had some debates with educators who think MOOCs are not useful in comparison to teaching students in a classroom. I mention this as I do not wish to pretend that I can approach this topic with anything approaching pure objectivity. All of us have cognitive biases.
REM: the end of the world as we know it
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