Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?
Over the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution.
But today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet.
The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.
Now information technology is poised to transform college degrees. When that happens, the economic foundations beneath the academy will truly begin to tremble.
Traditional college degrees represent several different kinds of information. Elite universities run admissions tournaments as a way of identifying the best and the brightest. That, in itself, is valuable data. It’s why “Harvard dropout” and “Harvard graduate” tell the job market almost exactly the same thing: “This person was good enough to get into Harvard.”
Degrees give meaning and structure to collections of college courses. A bachelor’s degree signifies more than just 120 college credits. To graduate, students need a certain number of upper- and lower-division credits, a major and perhaps a sprinkling of courses in the sciences and humanities.
College degrees are also required to get graduate degrees. It didn’t used to be that way. Back in the 19th century, people interested in practicing law could enroll directly in law school. When Charles Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869, he set to work making bachelor’s degrees a prerequisite for admission to Harvard’s graduate and professional schools. Other colleges followed suit, and by the turn of the century a large and captive market for their educational services had been created.
Most important, traditional college degrees are deeply embedded in government regulation and standard human resources practice. It doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are — if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, it’s illegal for a public school to hire you. Private-sector employers often use college degrees as a cheap and easy way to select for certain basic attributes, mostly the discipline and wherewithal necessary to earn 120 college credits.
Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs. Now technological innovators are working on that, too.
The Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser, has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges project. Badges are electronic credentials that any organization, collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why, exactly, the badge was earned.
Traditional institutions, including Michigan State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are experimenting with issuing badges. But so are organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 4-H, the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York.
The most important thing about badges is that they aren’t limited to what people learn in college. Nor are they controlled by colleges exclusively. People learn throughout their lives, at work, at home, in church, among their communities. The fact that colleges currently have a near-monopoly on degrees that lead to jobs goes a long way toward explaining how they can continue raising prices every year.
The MOOC providers themselves are also moving in this direction. They’ve always offered credentials. In 2013, I completed a semester-long M.I.T. course in genetics through a nonprofit organization run by Harvard and M.I.T., called edX. You can see the proof of my credentials here and here.
Coursera, a for-profit MOOC platform, offers sequences of courses akin to college majors, followed by a so-called capstone project in which students demonstrate their skills and receive a verified certificate, for a fee of $470. The Coursera Data Science sequence is taught by Johns Hopkins University and includes nine four-week courses like exploratory data analysis, regression models and machine learning. The capstone project requires students to build a data model and create visualizations to communicate their analysis. The certificate is officially endorsed by both Coursera and Johns Hopkins. EdX has similar programs.
Inevitably, there will be a lag between the creation of such new credentials and their widespread acceptance by employers and government regulators. H.R. departments know what a bachelor’s degree is. “Verified certificates” are something new. But employers have a powerful incentive to move in this direction: Traditional college degrees are deeply inadequate tools for communicating information.
The standard diploma has roughly the same amount of information that prisoners of war are required to divulge under the Geneva Conventions. College transcripts are a nightmare of departmental abbreviations, course numbers of indeterminate meaning, and grades whose value has been steadily eroded by their inflation.
This has the effect of reinforcing class biases that are already built into college admissions. A large and relatively open-access traditional public university might graduate the same overall number of great job candidates as a small, exclusive, private university — say, 200 each. But the public 200 may graduate alongside 3,000 other students, while the private 200 may have only 300 peers. Because diplomas and transcripts provide few means of reliably distinguishing the great from the rest, employers give a leg up to private college graduates who probably had some legs up to begin with.
The new digital credentials can solve this problem by providing exponentially more information. Think about all the work you did in college. Unless you’re a recent college graduate, how much of it was saved and archived in a way that you can access now? What about the skills you acquired in various jobs? Digital learning environments can save and organize almost everything. Here, in the “unlabeled” folder, are all of my notes, tests, homework, syllabus and grades from the edX genetics course. My “real” college courses, by contrast, are lost to history, with only an inscrutable abbreviation on a paper transcript suggesting that they ever happened at all.
Open credentialing systems allow people to control information about themselves — what they learned in college, and what they learned everywhere else — and present that data directly to employers. In a world where people increasingly interact over distances, electronically, the ability to control your online educational identity is crucial.
This does present a new challenge for employers, who will have to sift through all this additional information. College degrees, for all of their faults, are quick and easy to digest. Of course, processing large amounts of information is exactly what computers are good for. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are designing open badges that are “machine discoverable,” meaning that they are designed to be found by employers using search algorithms to locate people with specific skills.
Protecting private, personal information is a big part of navigating the digital era. But people want certain kinds of information to be as public as possible — for example, that they are very good at specific jobs and would like to find an employer looking for such people. Companies such as LinkedIn are steadily building new tools for people to describe their employable selves. College degrees, by contrast, say little and never change.
In the long run, MOOCs will most likely be seen as a crucial step forward in the reformation of higher education. But their true impact won’t be felt until students and learners of all kinds have access to digital credentials that are also built for the modern world. Then they’ll be able to acquire skills and get jobs for a fraction of what colleges cost today.
Online Lessons
In the corner of the school library, Stephanie Brochet sits alone facing a computer and starts talking.
A voice from the screen answers back. In the top left-hand corner she can see the bearded face of her teacher, John Willoughby, as he talks her through her sixth-form psychology course.
This is a remote lesson. Too few students in her school chose psychology to make it viable for a conventional class, so Stephanie, 17, studies online instead. While many people learn online for fun, this is a high-stakes course that counts for her university entry.
On the remainder of her screen is a section of her course about designing a research study. Her teacher tests how much she can remember: what are independent and dependent variables? What is a confounding variable?
Mr Willoughby, who is conducting the lesson from his office at home 4,700 miles away in Washington state, where it is 2.30am, is a stand-in teacher — usually a woman in Ecuador directs her studies.
One other student at Southbank International School in London, is taking the same course, otherwise her classmates are scattered around America, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and India.
They share ideas and comment on each other’s work on a blog, although Stephanie says that it is usually the same handful who are active, and have an online tutorial every month or two. Her tutor holds a weekly “drop-in” session via email, Skype or pager.
Reading and assignments are posted every Wednesday, which Stephanie says normally require four to six hours’ work, which she divides between home and school.
She is studying the International Baccalaureate diploma (IB) and eventually wants to study medicine and become a doctor. The IB has six subjects: biology, chemistry and English literature at higher level and French, maths and psychology at standard level.
Justine Oliver, principal of Southbank International, said there was no reason why an A-level course could not be taught the same way. Offering an online course means that, for a small school with 126 IB students, she can provide a greater breadth of subjects. “I am very interested in the opportunity it gives to enable students to do a wider range of subjects, which is very important,” she said. “Wewant students to take a subject that really enthuses them.”
It took Stephanie some weeks to adjust to the independent learning, and she was glad to have another student at the school following the same course, but she has enjoyed it. “It is like a global classroom,” she said. “It is very interesting because you get to see different points of view.”
There are 150 British sixth formers studying one of their IB subjects online using teaching programmes and tutors arranged by a specialist company, Pamoja Education, under licence from the IB awarding organisation.
Rachael Finch, 18, has just finished an online course in philosophy. She was the only sixth former at St Benedict’s Catholic High School in Alcester, Warwickshire, who took the course, although others studied Mandarin and psychology online.
“It was hard not having somebody physically there to discuss it with . . . but it was very interesting as you get to see views from different people around the world that can be very different to what we believe,” she said. For example, an online class discussion on determinism and free will included a student from India, who believed in reincarnation, and an atheist from America.
“For some students, learning online will not suit them,” said Simon Smallman, the head of sixth form. “But they do develop a high level of independence. Their organisation skills have to be well developed and they manage their time really well.”
MOOCs In India
How does a talented Indian teenager like Gaurav Goyal make his mark on the world? Ordinarily, his destiny would have been set on the morning in 2008 when he took his country’s toughest college placement exam: the IIT Joint Entrance Exam. More than 300,000 students attempted the test that year; only 8,652 qualified for a spot at one of the ultra-elite Indian Institutes of Technology.
Goyal mustered a score in the top 1 percent, winning entry to IIT Delhi. But he fell just short of the cutoff for the school’s most competitive degree program, the one he most wanted to pursue: computer science. Instead, Goyal was told to major in civil engineering. Other students could learn about databases. For him, hydrology awaited.
Determined to change his fate, Goyal, an extrovert with a keen interest in business, found a way to outwit the system. As he recently explained over a dinner of curried cottage-cheese skewers at a fancy lakeside restaurant in Delhi’s Hauz Khas district, he wiggled his way into a variety of management courses at IIT Delhi and lined up his first job after graduation at Wipro, one of India’s leading information-technology offshoring companies.
Then Goyal set out to sharpen his résumé. In early 2014, he enrolled in three online data-science classes via Coursera, all taught by Johns Hopkins professors. By earning certificates from the courses, demonstrating expertise in areas such as the programming tool R, Goyal impressed Dunnhumby, one of Britain’s largest customer-analytics companies. He now works there as a Delhi-based senior analyst, using data to figure out what British shoppers want next.
Throughout India, online education is gaining favor as a career accelerator, particularly in technical fields. Indian enrollments account for about 8 percent of worldwide activity in Coursera and 12 percent in edX, the two leading providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Only the United States’ share is clearly higher; China’s is roughly comparable. India’s own top-tier technical universities have created free videotaped lectures of more than 700 courses, with the goal of putting students at regional colleges in digital contact with the country’s most renowned professors.
In the United States and Europe, MOOCs have proved less revolutionary than their champions predicted when they launched on a wide scale in 2012. Rather than displacing traditional undergraduate programs, MOOCs in developed economies seem to find their biggest audience among those eager to learn more about history, psychology, or some other side interest. Those enrollees try lots of classes but often drop out after a few sessions.
It’s a different story in India. There, online courses from the U.S. or Europe are finding a big following among college students and recent graduates, says Rick Levin, CEO of Coursera, which is based in Mountain View, California. They are a more serious bunch, hoping that the right technical courses can help them win better jobs. In a boon to Coursera’s bottom line, emerging-market learners are also frequently willing to pay $29 to $250 for a certificate that attests to their successful performance on a final exam.
“I believe that India ultimately will be a much bigger market for MOOCs than the U.S.,” says edX chief executive Anant Agarwal, who also is an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Indian students crave advanced knowledge that can open doors to a more prosperous life, Agarwal says: “If you’ve been trampled all your life, now you find you can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best.”
Sheer demographics bolster his case: India’s population of more than 1.2 billion is nearly four times the U.S. total. India’s brightest students enjoy the IIT campuses’ cachet as the training ground of tech-sector leaders. A handful of other state-sponsored or private universities achieve top-tier status, too. By and large, though, a degree from most of India’s 35,000 colleges simply doesn’t register with international employers.
For aspiring Indian engineers and scientists, online credentials offer a way to stand out from the crowd. Coursera’s most popular offering in India is an intensely practical University of Maryland course on how to build mobile applications for Android devices. After that come two Python programming classes from the University of Michigan and Rice University. Next is a Stanford class on machine learning. All told, eight of Coursera’s top 10 courses in India are highly technical. (Even the two nontechnical classes on Coursera’s leaderboard are designed for strivers: Learning How to Learn and Introduction to Public Speaking.)
Coursera executive Kabir Chadha is trying to persuade leading Indian tech employers to embrace his company’s completion certificates as an important part of their job-candidate screening. Already, companies including Google, Wipro, Infosys, Infineon, and Microsoft have hired Indian engineers with online-education credentials, though such achievements don’t yet factor into recruiting standards in a consistent way, if at all. Thousands of Indian engineers now list schools such as Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon as part of their educational background on LinkedIn, based solely on completion of online courses offered by professors at those U.S. universities.
“The first MOOCs were replicas of the traditional, full-semester experience. Now … people are experimenting with a lot of formats that break with tradition.”
Few people have wrestled more extensively with the challenge of teaching electrical engineering to undergraduates than Anant Agarwal. A product of IIT Madras and Stanford, he has been teaching at MIT since 1988, perfecting an upbeat, high-energy classroom style that has earned him two teaching awards. With his booming voice, untucked flannel shirts, and sweeping hand gestures, Agarwal projects a geeky charisma. One of his 2007 lectures has attracted some 550,000 page views on YouTube.
Given the opportunity four years ago to a create a globally appealing online course on circuits, Agarwal could have kept the star role for himself. Instead, he reworked camera angles so that he became an unseen background voice—while circuit diagrams and problems enjoyed full prominence. Online students needed to put each lecture’s concepts to work, right away, by designing their own circuits and analyzing the ways that amplifiers, inductors, and other devices would operate. Built-in software allowed students’ work on a digital sketch pad to be automatically graded within seconds.
It was a most un-Indian approach, sidestepping the long lectures, rote learning, and heavy emphasis on foundational principles that typify many Indian college courses. Indian campuses and tech companies began buzzing about this rare chance to experience hands-on teaching. Circuits 6.002x, as his MOOC was called, attracted 155,000 people worldwide in its 2012 debut—nearly 50,000 from India.
“I got super-excited at the prospect of being a virtual MIT student,” Shreyas Jayaprakash recently recalled. He was finishing up his undergraduate studies at a regional college in Bengaluru at the time, worried that he couldn’t compete successfully against other 6.002x students from around the world. But Jayaprakash raced to complete the course quizzes within hours after they were posted. He ended up with a 99 percent score on the final exam. Today he is a design engineer for the Bengaluru office of Avago Technologies, where he inspects chips that ultimately become part of Dell, Cisco, or Facebook servers.
Taking 6.002x “improved my problem solving,” says Ashwith Rego, who is pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay. One quiz gave Rego a better understanding of oscilloscopes. Another had him analyze car suspension systems. On the hardest problems, he tapped into online discussion forums, populated by students from as far away as Argentina and Ukraine.
What Agarwal started, dozens of other U.S. professors have now exported to India, too. Jim Fowler, an assistant professor of mathematics at Ohio State, teaches Coursera’s most popular online calculus class. Instead of lecturing nonstop at a whiteboard, he pauses periodically to blow up a balloon or cast shadows with a stick-figure puppet—helping learners visualize the integrals and derivatives they are being asked to calculate.
Such showmanship delighted Surya Prakash in 2013, when the West Bengal student took Fowler’s calculus MOOC. Prakash had finished high school and was trying to score well enough on the Joint Entrance Exam to win admission to an elite engineering college. Earlier attempts to master calculus had gone badly, but Prakash seized on Fowler’s examples and drew on them to achieve a strong test score—and a ticket to a first-tier college in Jaipur.
Mixing facts and fun in a MOOC “helps you remember things better when it comes time to take the exam,” says Mahesh Kumar Hiremath, a computer science major in his senior year at BMS College of Engineering in Bengaluru, who has taken at least eight MOOCs, often to get a second perspective on his actual courses in topics such as algorithms or Java. The extra effort has paid off; Hiremath has earned As in most of his classes and is joining SAP after graduation.
BMS’s snug urban campus is a sanctuary from the noisy motorbike traffic of modern-day Bengaluru, and a contrast to the opulent 16th-century temple to the Hindi demigod Nanda that sits just across the main access road. The school attracts people with a single-minded focus on academics, many the children of middle-class accountants, engineers, and biologists.
“There are a lot of computer science engineers in my family,” Chaitra Chandrasekhar, who’s majoring in medical electronics and biomedical engineering at BMS, wryly observed, during a roundtable chat over tea and biscuits at the school. Like many of her peers, she has used online classes as a safe, easy way of expanding her horizons, even if some explorations (such as a short-lived attempt to learn German) went nowhere. Medha S. Bharadwaj, a medical electronics major, took a Python programming class to help her on the job market and a Western music class for fun.
Indian technical colleges seldom offer the wide-ranging electives that can be found on U.S. campuses. So BMS students such as Sharath Chandra tend to chuckle when they admit to signing up for online oddities such as a sports management MOOC taught by the University of Pennsylvania. It’s irrelevant to his computer science studies, Chandra conceded. Even so, he added, “it was fascinating to find out how Real Madrid can sign a player for $80 million, and make back $40 million of that with extra T-shirt sales.”
India’s vast size and rapid development mean there is always a shortage of professors. With a record 3.2 million students currently enrolled in university-level engineering programs, there aren’t enough experts to teach everyone in person. Essential courses can’t be offered at all in some rural colleges; elsewhere, people with just a bachelor’s degree are pressed into duty as instructors for first-year courses. The best hope of fixing this predicament, says pioneering Indian computer science professor Deepak Phatak, is a much bolder role for online education.
Phatak is India’s most persistent champion of tech-based ways to stretch the classroom. In 2002, he and a colleague arranged for his IIT Bombay class in information science to be live-streamed, via video, to other Indian colleges. He is an active supporter of a national program that has made stored videos of elite institutions’ course lectures available free of charge to anyone who wants to watch. Recently, Phatak and three other IIT Bombay instructors teamed up with edX to offer their own online introductory course on computer programming.
Making the technology hum is the easy part, Phatak says. It’s harder to rearrange university priorities so that India’s best instructors can be granted enough discretionary time to build first-rate MOOCs from scratch. Another barrier, Phatak says, is schools’ reluctance to provide academic credit for online learning. He has been working with the All India Council for Technical Education to establish new guidelines that would allow students to earn 15 percent of their credits online. One proposal would let outlying colleges use a blended model, in which online instruction supplements class lectures and discussions. That approach will be put into action in the 2015–16 academic years, with about 50 of India’s autonomous institutes working with IIT Bombay to offer blended MOOCs in three subjects.