Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden

Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction provider in Mountain View, Calif.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.

This is the third article in a series that examines free online college-level classes and how they are transforming higher education.

Previous Articles in the Series:

Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, is Udacity’s chief executive officer.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.

Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings.

While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates.

Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.

“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”

In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses.

The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.'s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

“We’re engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is similar, we will not have the traditional version next year,” said Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. “It would be educational malpractice.”

It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures.

Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the institution from which Rachel Meltzer, an online mentor, graduated. It was Washington University in St. Louis, not Stanford (where Ms. Meltzer worked a clinical research manager). And an earlier version of this correction misidentified her employer. It is Udacity, not Coursera.

Colleges Assess Cost of Free Online-Only Courses

The offer inspired Todd Watson, an I.B.M. executive in Austin, Tex., to update his knowledge of corporate finance. But who needs tuition? Instead, he signed up for a free finance class created by the prestigious University of Michigan and offered by a start-up called Coursera. The company promotes massive online open courses — known as MOOCs.

“Voilà, problem solved,” wrote Mr. Watson on his blog. He could now rekindle his finance “love” and study “at no cost to myself or to I.B.M.”

Mr. Watson solved his problem, but he represents a larger one for many colleges and universities: MOOCs threaten to poach paying students. But at the same time, emerging competition in higher and continuing education will most likely lower costs for students.

Often likened to a tsunami or an avalanche, the free online learning juggernaut gained momentum in the past year. Coursera, which counts Columbia and Princeton among its elite affiliates, has two main competitors.

A nonprofit venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edX features 26 classes, including “Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation.“

Another competitor, Udacity, backed by venture capitalists, was begun by Sebastian Thrun, an acclaimed computer science professor, after more than 160,000 students took his online artificial-intelligence course at Stanford University. He thinks Udacity will ultimately increase enrollment at brick-and-mortar institutions by preparing more underserved high school students for college.

“There’s a distinction that people often don’t make,” said Professor Thrun, “which is whether these classes reach existing students and take away business, or whether they reach new students and add to the business?”

While that question is being answered, MOOC-phobia continues to spread. Last year, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association entitled its annual conference “Resilience.” This year’s event is called “Disruption 2.0.”

“Everybody should be afraid of MOOCs,” said Gary W. Matkin, dean of continuing education, distance learning and summer session at the University of California, Irvine, “although there are some that should be more afraid than others.”

He scoffs at the notion that MOOCs threaten top-tier residential universities, like his own. In fact, he headed his university’s alliance with Coursera.

For the universities that create free online courses, mainly major colleges with A-plus brands, relationships with Coursera, Udacity and edX could pay dividends. Mega classes, which can draw hundreds of thousands of students, may aid faculty retention, providing a perk for star professors. And all MOOC marketers promise to share revenues with partner universities, although the path to profitability is murky.

Professor Thrun, Udacity’s chief executive, concedes this. “The truth is for all these massive online courses that are being offered for free, there’s clearly a question of what our business model is, and I don’t think there is a good answer quite yet,” he said.

Still, Mr. Matkin forecasts tough times ahead for what he calls the “mediocre middle” — institutions that have not been invited into what amounts to a higher-education V.I.P. room.

The future is brighter for students, whether in continuing education or not. Mr. Matkin says he believes that as colleges start to give credits to students who complete MOOCs, market forces will pressure many other institutions to liberalize their credit-transfer policies, bringing educational costs down.

Last month, the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service, which many institutions rely on to assess whether workplace and military training courses merit credit, included free online courses for the first time. Five Coursera courses passed the test, and four Udacity classes have a received a “preliminary thumbs up,” said Professor Thrun.

“If people are coming at you and they’ve got learning that they can demonstrate from other institutions, are you going to turn them away?” asked Mr. Matkin. “Or are you going to make them take that class over again? I don’t think so.”

Consortium of Colleges Takes Online Education to New Level

Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland.

And some of them will offer credit.

“This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”

Because of technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.

To date, most MOOCs have covered computer science, math and engineering, but Coursera is expanding into areas like medicine, poetry and history. MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.

“The fact that so many people are so curious about these courses shows the yearning for education,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. “There are going to be lots of bumps in the road, but this is a very important experiment at a very substantial scale.”

So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade. But the University of Washington said it planned to offer credit for its Coursera offerings this fall, and other online ventures are also moving in that direction. David P. Szatmary, the university’s vice provost, said that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments and work with an instructor.

Experts say it is too soon to predict how MOOCs will play out, or which venture will emerge as the leader. Coursera, with about $22 million in financing, including $3.7 million in equity investment from Caltech and Penn, may currently have the edge. But no one is counting out edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Udacity, the company founded by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford, who taught the artificial intelligence course last year.

Each company offers online materials broken into manageable chunks, with short video segments, interactive quizzes and other activities — as well as online forums where students answer one another’s questions.

But even Mr. Thrun, a master of MOOCs, cautioned that for all their promise, the courses are still experimental. “I think we are rushing this a little bit,” he said. “I haven’t seen a single study showing that online learning is as good as other learning.”

Worldwide access is Coursera’s goal. “EPF Lausanne, which offers courses in French, opens up access for students in half of Africa,” Ms. Koller said. Each university designs and produces its own courses and decides whether to offer credit.

Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.