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.

Bits Blog: Lenovo Is Top Supplier as Global PC Sales Fall

Move over, Hewlett-Packard. You’ve just lost pride of place in an increasingly dubious tech category.

International Data Corporation and Gartner, both industry analyst firms, just released their statistics on worldwide personal computer shipments for the second quarter, and Lenovo was the top supplier, with H.P. second and Dell a somewhat distant third.

No one looked good here, though. In Gartner’s report, total PC shipments worldwide were 76 million, down 10.9 percent. I.D.C. put the number at 75.6 million, down 11.4 percent. Every one of the five major companies followed by the two research firms (Acer and Asus were the other two) had sales declines worldwide, compared with a year earlier.

Gartner analysts described the five consecutive quarters of falling shipments as the longest decline in the history of PCs.

H.P. was able to hold its own in the United States, its home market. According to I.D.C., the company shipped four million PCs in the quarter, a drop of 4.1 percent from a year earlier. Dell had a 5.8 percent sales increase, to 3.8 million units. Apple’s Mac computers were third, with 1.8 million units sold, a drop of 0.5 percent. Lenovo had a sales increase of 19.6 percent, to 1.5 million units, I.D.C. said. The Gartner numbers were roughly similar, though Gartner recorded a sharper sales drop for Apple.

Much of the problem is that the market is maturing, said Jay Chou, an analyst at I.D.C. “In America and Europe, all homes have computers, even multiple computers,” he said. “The new purchases are tablets and smartphones.” Lenovo did better over all, removing H.P. from I.D.C.’s top spot for the first time since the end of 2006, he said, “because of a shift to emerging markets. Lenovo is based in China, so they have a head start there. They also have been aggressive about building sales channels to new markets while they protect their home turf.” Gartner noted that across the Asia/Pacific region, except for India, PCs showed weakness.

Another difficulty is that the machines these companies make are now too good. “PCs last longer. They have bigger hard drives. And they have a processing capacity that most people never fully use,” Mr. Chou said. That makes it harder to sell replacement machines. “It’s a tough business for everybody. We don’t expect prices to go up soon.”

Bits Blog: Why Asian Internet Companies Struggle to Become Global

Bobby Yip/Reuters Tencent, one of China’s most valuable technology companies, owns WeChat, an online messaging service that’s growing in popularity across borders.

Asia is home to nearly half of the 2 billion Internet users in the world. It makes most of the hardware — laptops, smartphones, tablets and other gadgets — that is used to gain access to the Internet. In countries like South Korea and Japan, it has some of the fastest wired and wireless networks for carrying Internet traffic.

Yet in one aspect of the high-technology economy, Asia still struggles. It has yet to create an Internet company with the global scale of a Google, Facebook or Amazon. A report published Wednesday by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research outfit affiliated with the Economist magazine, examines some of the possible reasons for this.

In some cases, the study says, Asian Internet companies have simply been held back by a lack of international ambition. In countries like China or India, domestic markets are so big that expanding abroad has not always been seen as a necessity. Other companies are reluctant to tackle the cultural challenges of operating in the West, according to the report, whose conclusions were reached after interviews with Internet entrepreneurs and others.

But that is starting to change. A new generation of Asian Web companies is seeing rapid cross-border growth — including, in some cases, in the West. These include online messaging services like Line, from Japan, and WeChat, which is owned by a Chinese Internet business, Tencent. Social gaming companies, like GungHo of Japan, have also achieved strong international growth.

Meanwhile, Alibaba, an e-commerce giant in China, has increasingly international ambitions, and is expected to offer stock to the public soon to finance them. Another Asian e-commerce company, Rakuten of Japan, has moved to expand abroad through acquisitions of companies like PriceMinister of France, and it has adopted English as its official language.

Yet these are the exceptions. The study says Asian Internet companies have been hobbled by factors like a lack of trusted online payment systems, a reluctance among Internet users to pay for digital content and restrictions on hiring foreign workers. The report also highlights burdensome regulations, including laws in countries like India and Thailand that make Internet companies responsible for the content posted on their sites.

“In many markets around the region, change must begin with a better understanding, on the part of governments, of the specific challenges facing Internet businesses, and a more general recognition of the growth opportunity that online commerce represents,” the authors write.

Asia is not alone in struggling to export home-grown Internet services. If anything, Europe has had an even harder time — despite lesser regulatory, linguistic and cultural hurdles to international expansion.

The report was sponsored by the Asia Internet Coalition, a group that was formed by five American Internet companies — Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and Salesforce. The Economist Intelligence Unit says it was written independently. But some of the issues that are highlighted – especially the effect of regulation – do mirror the complaints from American Internet entrepreneurs and executives about operating in Asia.

In addition to the well-known restrictions that American Internet companies face in China, where services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked, Silicon Valley giants have also struggled in some other Asian markets. In South Korea, for example, the Internet search business is dominated by two local players, Naver and Daum, and not by Google.

The report makes clear recommendations for stimulating the Internet economy in Asia, urging governments there, for instance, to make regulatory changes to allow efficient online payments systems to develop.

Who would be the main beneficiaries? That is less clear.

Bits Blog: The Global Arbitrage of Online Work

If you thought it has been tough to find good work over the last couple of years, just wait.

The old problem was a bad economy, the kind of thing that ends. Trends suggest that we’re heading for a global online arbitrage of opportunity, however, with good workers in bad places able to snatch business away from better-performing environments. If that happens in large numbers, the competition will get really fierce for everyone.

Recently two of the biggest online staffing companies, oDesk and Elance, have released surveys concerning the companies that hire workers over the Internet to do things like write software, and the mindset of online workers themselves.

Between them, oDesk and Elance claim to have more than four million coders, Web designers, marketing professionals and other workers. Some even spot porn on Facebook at a rate of four for a penny. In the second quarter of 2012, oDesk says, its contractors worked over 8.5 million hours, a 70 percent increase over a year earlier. The average freelancer at Elance, meantime, expects to make 43 percent more money in 2013, as more employers come online.

Taken together, the reports indicate a lot of growth ahead in the business, and a lot of talented people looking for work wherever they can find it. oDesk, which surveyed over 2,800 companies that used its service, found that 10 percent of these buyers were college students, and 58 percent described their companies as start-ups.

Not all those young companies will survive, but the habit of hiring online seems baked in; 64 percent of respondents said at least half of their work force would be online by 2015, and 94 percent predicted that in 10 years most businesses would consist of online temps and physical full-time workers.

The range of jobs done online is increasing, too. Workers on Elance said the highest-growing job categories in 2013 would be Web programming, making mobile applications, design, marketing and content writing. oDesk respondents were heavily in those categories too, but also saw employment in customer service, secretarial work and high-level technology development.

“As we move along, we see an increase in all the categories of work,” said Gary Swart, the chief executive of oDesk. “We now have lawyers, accountants, financial executives, even managers.” The only work unlikely to go online is immediate physical work, like plumbing, he said, adding, “but even a plumber needs an accountant.”

What he doesn’t need, apparently, is an accountant anywhere nearby. Some 30 percent of the United States citizens working on oDesk are working for overseas companies, Mr. Swart said. An even greater number of overseas people are probably working for Americans, too. In interviews, both companies say the continuing economic troubles in Europe are driving more people to online employment. oDesk has seen a 78 percent growth in hours billed by companies in Britain this year, even though it has never had much of a presence there.

The online work is already changing how some governments think about labor. Last May the government of Bangladesh decided to classify online work as export-related commercial income, free of taxes, instead of as a taxed offshore remittance.

The idea, Mr. Swart said, is to foster the growth of online workers. In other words, if you’re reading this from one of the better parts of the global economy, it’s a good time to think about how to be indispensable.

Another interesting wrinkle from the oDesk survey: Education alone probably won’t help you get hired. Only 6 percent of the survey respondents rated schooling as a “very important” reason to hire someone. It was the lowest-rated reason to hire someone. Work experience was first, followed by how other people rated the contractor, pay, portfolio of work, references, and scores on skills tests that oDesk offers online.

In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.