Higher Education Innovation

For the last two years, MOOCs have dominated the national conversation on technology and the economics of higher education. But for all the talk of whether they’ll usher in a new age of democratized global learning or destroy higher learning as we know it (or possibly both at the same time), it’s been hard to get a handle on MOOCs are, and what they can be. A lot of MOOC journalism has been like this, wherein a general-interest magazine writer signed up for 11 courses, finished one of them (the easiest, apparently), and formed his opinions accordingly. On the theory that to understand an educational experience you should actually experience it, I’ve spent the last four months taking two MOOCs. Now I’m done, and this is what I learned.

The first was Introduction to Philosophy, from Coursera (also the one class MOOC dropout guy finished, coincidentally.) It’s a nice, friendly, seven-week overview of major philosophical concepts, with each week’s lecture led by a different professor from the University of Edinburgh’s philosophy department. It was fun, and I learned some things. It was not, however, the equivalent of a legitimate college course. And to be clear, it didn’t pretend to be. The expected to workload was listed as “1-2 hours/week” and even granting the many problems with equating time and learning, that’s a clear signal the class isn’t something people should be getting three college credits for.

And beyond the brevity, Introduction to Philosophy was missing important things. Grossly simplified, there are two main components of an educational process. One involves making choices about knowledge, ideas, and skills. What do we want students to learn? How do we present that information? There are many ways to go about this, and Introduction to Philosophy chose two time-honored methods: lectures, presented on video, and supplemental reading. But the course was mostly missing the second component: creating a process and environment in which students make meaning out of the information you’ve presented, integrating it into prior knowledge and larger concepts in a way that allows for applications to problem-solving and transfer to other domains. There are plenty of well-known ways to do this, too, and they took a stab at one of them, assigning an optional peer-graded essay at the end of the class. But for the most part, the education was passive.

My second MOOC experience was very different. Having sampled Coursera (and a Udacity statistics class last year), I wanted to try something from the third major MOOC player, edX. I asked edX president Anant Agarwal to recommend one, and he suggested MIT 7.00x, an introductory biology course that was starting in a few weeks. It would show the cool things the edX learning platform can do, he said, plus the professor is great. So I logged on and in roughly two minutes I was enrolled.

With the economy stuck in neutral, tuition prices and student loan debt skyrocketing, and parents and students increasingly questioning the value of a college degree, our public institutions urgently need a different approach to the challenge or educating an increasingly diverse mix of students at a reasonable cost. Today, New America's Education Policy Program released The Next Generation University, a policy report about the future of public higher education. The report comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation's higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.

As the nation struggles to find new ways to increase college access and completion rates while lowering costs, a handful of "Next Generation Universities" are embracing key strategies that make them models for national reform.

According to State U Online, a new report from the New America Foundation and Education Sector, although 32 percent of all postsecondary students in the U.S. took at least one online course in 2010, public institutions of higher education have been slow to embrace the potential of online learning. The report suggests ways state systems of higher education can build and sustain an online public university and profiles several states that are addressing common challenges such as faculty buy-in, quality control, and financing.

Among the report’s findings:

• States that have had the most success building a “state u online” have:
  • made it easy for students to access available online learning opportunities through such means as a centralized clearinghouse of courses and degrees offered;
  • provided student services support such as e-tutoring and advising;
  • spread costs among institutions through shared contracts for resources such as learning management systems;
  • collaborated within and between states to streamline a student’s path towards completion by making sure credits transfer between institutions and even across state lines.
• Some examples of states that have made steps towards comprehensive online programs include:
  • The University of Wisconsin’s eCampus which provides a catalogue of all online courses available in the system, connected by a single brand.
  • Minnesota State Colleges and Universities which are able to share resources and costs of online learning by way of an inter-institutional online university.
  • The Florida Virtual Campus which provides access to tutoring, advising, and library support services in one place for students in the Florida College System and the State University System of Florida.
  • The University System of Georgia which has created an online core curriculum, subject to approval by each institution that offers general education courses fulfilling requirements at institutions within the system.
  • The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) which has developed a consortium of 20 regional public distance-education programs in states with a common interest in providing education to rural professionals in fields such as  human services and agriculture.
• The report concluded that for a “state u online” to be successful, systems should consider the following:
  • Sharing costs between institutions, enabling institutions to identify the needs of their own campus, and utilizing existing online education resources (like MOOCs) on a system level.
  • Offering faculty a stipend to teach online courses, giving weight to online instruction in tenure decisions, and providing professional development for course design.
  • Providing a clearinghouse of online courses, so students can learn about various online opportunities in one place.
  • Creating agreements among institutions to allow credits to follow students.
  • Providing detailed information on the policies, procedures, and benefits of online learning to all students before they begin an online program.
  • Designating administrators to follow up with students who did not show signs of activity online.
  • Embracing prior learning assessments and competency- based education to accelerate time to degree for students.

New America higher education experts Amy Laitinen and Rachel Fishman discuss policy reforms that could alter the higher education system for the better. Laitinen explains how to move past the credit hour and measure learning, not just seat time, and Fishman explores how public universities are collaborating on that and other issues to develop online courses. Fuzz Hogan hosts.

Guest post by Danielle Kehl and Benjamin Lennett from New America's Open Technology Institute.

For a kid growing up in rural northern Wisconsin, attending the state university offers a key avenue to broaden career opportunities or gain skills to better run the family farm. In recent years, as public institutions like the University of Wisconsin (UW) have increasingly embraced online courses and flexible degree options, the university’s resources may seem more accessible than ever—but only if you live in a part of the state that has adequate and affordable broadband.

UW has long been devoted to serving the public interest, cultivating one of the biggest and most ambitious extension programs in the country over the last century. “The Wisconsin Idea,” first articulated by Governer Robert LaFollette and University President Charles Van Hise, was a vision for the university in which its academic activities were connected to every local community. Van Hise declared in 1904: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.” It suggests that “the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state.”

This post originally appeared in New America's blog In the Tank

When I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took approximately 8-10 large lecture classes. I remember walking into my first lecture as a freshman—Introduction to International Relations—and choosing between a seat on the first floor or in the balcony. I chose the first floor, somewhere in the middle. The “classroom” that day was brimming with more than 500 students. As the professor went over the syllabus, it became evident that attendance at lecture was “strongly encouraged” as there would be no way to quickly take attendance. By the second lecture, there were many empty seats.

Many freshmen and sophomores who attend public universities find themselves stuck in these large, introductory courses. With no one to check up on them or give them personal attention, many fall through the cracks—they may stop attending class and then do poorly on exams, or they may fall behind and withdraw from the course.

With this in mind, when I began to research online courses and credentials at public universities for a policy report, I assumed I would find the same problems endemic to large lectures—high attrition and low success rates.  Instead, I found something that surprised me:  While some online courses may suffer the same problems as lectures, several universities have discovered simple ways to keep students engaged once they start exhibiting drop-out warning signs, like neglecting assignments or lectures. In many instances, the data collected about online students by some institutions create a safety net to prevent drop outs where none exists in a face-to-face lecture-hall setting.

Guest post by Mandy Zatynski

Officials at eCore, the University System of Georgia’s online curriculum, collect heaps of student data every year: individual course completion rates, withdrawal rates, and even the number of those identified as at-risk each semester.

Every day, Melanie Clay, dean of eCore, says she looks at the dropout rate and compares it to the rate at the same time last year. “If it’s not going in the direction we want it to be going in, then we … try to analyze why until we figure out why,” she told me when I visited her office at the University of West Georgia last fall. It could be the online platform (Is it user friendly?), the instructor (Is s/he responsive?), or the student success adviser – the person tasked with calling (yes, on the telephone – twice, then regular contacts by email) every student identified as at-risk. The student success adviser has to be caring, but convincing. Dean Clay knows online courses are just as important as face-to-face courses, even though it’s easier to forget about them.

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

Online learning has become a permanent fixture of our system of higher education. Yet, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of college students, have been visibly slow to embrace it.  Many of these institutions were founded with a mission to serve their citizens, including those unable to attend in residence. Yet even as the technological means to achieve this goal reaches new heights, public universities too often shy away from the challenge.

Today the New America Foundation and Education Sector released State U Online, a report that examines the history of distance learning at public colleges dating back to the eighteenth century.  This paper not only reviews the online offerings at many public colleges and universities, but it also identifies consistent patterns that can help institutional and state-system leaders chart a path forward for the online future. The analysis identifies five steps that institutions and states can take to build a coherent system-wide State U Online. Each step builds on those before it, leading toward increasingly integrated systems in which students can move freely among institutions within a state and eventually beyond state lines. The steps are (access the infographic here):