U.S. Plans Global Network of Free Online Courses

The learning hubs represent a new stage in the evolution of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and address two issues: the lack of reliable Internet access in some countries, and the growing conviction that students do better if they can discuss course materials, and meet at least occasionally with a teacher or facilitator.

“Our mission is education for everyone, and we’ve seen that when we can bring a community of learners together with a facilitator or teacher who can engage the students, it enhances the learning experience and increases the completion rate,” said Lila Ibrahim, the president of Coursera. “It will vary with the location and the organization we’re working with, but we want to bring in some teacher or facilitator who can be the glue for the class.”

Early this year, using courses from Coursera and other online providers, the State Department ran a pilot program, asking embassies and consulates and others in places funded by the United States to open space where people could take free online courses in priority fields, including science and technology subjects, Americana and entrepreneurship.

“Some of them took it above and beyond, and decided to host facilitated discussions with the courses,” said Meghann Curtis, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for academic programs. “Over the summer, when we looked at the success stories, we identified facilitated discussions as something that seemed to work.”

Coursera is joining forces with the State Department’s MOOC Camp Initiative, now operating in 40 countries — about half using Coursera courses, and the other half courses from such providers as edX and Open Yale, whose courses are also available free on the Internet. But beyond having its courses used, Coursera is taking an active role in the project.

“We have a list of MOOCs from different providers that we suggest, but Coursera has had a unique interest in working with us to collect the data to understand the learning outcomes from facilitated discussions, and has given us additional materials to give out to the facilitators,” Ms. Curtis said.

The classes are small, some with only 15 students and none with the hundreds or thousands of students who enroll online.

In a pilot program in Bolivia, Korea and Indonesia, Ms. Ibrahim said, the completion rate for those in classes that met for discussion once a week — and provided access to career services, another part of the pilot — was 40 percent, compared with only 10 percent of those who worked online only.

For the State Department, Ms. Curtis said, the appeal of the MOOCs is that they can be used to reach students anywhere, exposing them to American universities and college-level discussion, and perhaps spurring a desire to study in the United States.

Instruction in the classes is in English, she said, and neither the facilitators nor the MOOC providers are getting paid. Many facilitators are foreign service officers, retired teachers, or those who had a Fulbright or other travel grant.

Both Coursera, the largest MOOC provider, and edX, the nonprofit Harvard-MIT venture that is the second largest, began two years ago by offering wholly online courses, but are now working with universities to offer blended, or hybrid, courses. Both are also working with a growing number of overseas partners. including universities in Australia, Switzerland, China and elsewhere, sometimes with courses offered in languages other than English.

In October edX announced that it would be working with the French higher education minister to offer online courses in France, and that its platform had also been chosen to power China’s new online learning portal, Xuetangx. EdX is also working with the International Monetary Fund to offer training.

Coursera, which now has 100 university partners, has developed a network of translators who are making the materials in some courses available in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Increasingly, though, American MOOC providers are facing competition from a growing crop of foreign MOOC providers, such as Germany’s Iversity and Brazil’s Veduca.

Along with the State Department, Coursera’s partners for the learning hubs include the University of Trinidad and Tobago, Overcoming Faith Academy Kenya, Digital October, Bluebells School International and Lady Sriram College, Learning Links Foundation and Tapthetech.org.

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.

Universities Offer Courses in a Hot New Field: Data Science

The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.

In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.

In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions teaching data science include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.

Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”

Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.

Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.

“This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”

Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.

North Carolina State University introduced a master’s in analytics in 2007. All 84 of last year’s graduates in the field had job offers, according to Michael Rappa, who conceived and directs the university’s Institute for Advanced Analytics. The average salary was $89,100, and more than $100,000 for those with prior work experience.

“This has become relevant to every company,” said Michael Chui, a principal at McKinsey who has studied the field. “There’s a war for this type of talent.”

Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.

Claire Cain Miller is a technology reporter for The Times.

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.”

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.