edX: a step forward- or backward?

edX, the new distance learning collaboration recently announced by MIT and Harvard, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so:

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced edX, a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

Coming on the heals of the appearance of Coursera, Udacity, and the edX precursor, MITx, this has led numerous commentators to suggest that we have entered a veritable age of aquarius for massively open online courses (MOOCs). All of these efforts involve, to one degree or another, universities of the very top rank and each will offer online versions of university level courses using the most advanced technologies. Further, all will be open to anyone who wants to sign up, and the courses will either be free or involve a very nominal cost for e.g. testing. Importantly, however, none of these efforts will lead to course credit, degree or certificate from the universities involved. Instead, successful students can hope for a signed letter of completion from their well-known instructor or a certificate from the organization

Preliminary results are very exciting, indeed. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, did an online course at Stanford that drew over 160,000 student, and Udacity has over 200,000 students signed up for its first six courses. MITx's first course enrolled about 120,000 students.

I view all of these efforts as really positive developments in a number of dimensions. First, the major universities are recognizing that online learning is part of the future of education. Harvard and MIT emphasize that through edX (and MITx), they will be testing new approaches to education that will end up enriching their traditional on-campus experience while offering high level online education to learners around the world.  What a great win-win! There is also an enormous amount of really high-power technical expertise that is being focused on building new and better platforms for online education.  While the MOOC grading technologies developed thus far are best suited to technical courses (e.g engineering), all of the efforts eventually will be experimenting with approaches to grading MOOC humanities courses. This is pushing into really interesting approaches to evaluation! It is also very positive that these courses from major institutions will be made available to learners worldwide at essentially no cost to the learner.

One concern I have is that all of the descriptions of the platforms emphasize the technology that has gone into them.  Ultimately, however, it is not the best technology, but the best technology designed to support the best pedagogy that will will be most effective in producing the best learning. Is the technology being developed to support the best pedagogy, or is the usable pedagogy being defined by the characteristics of the technology?  I would bet that the ultimate winners will do the former - which means bringing in people who are experts at learning at the very beginning of the technology design. It also means providing pedagogy support to the faculty who are creating the courses, since pedagogy is not the specialty of most faculty.

************

Several articles on this explosion of online ventures have referred to a similar explosion at the end of 1990's - an explosion that ended in a bust.  Will this lead to a similar bust? I would venture a firm "yes and no."

The lesson I learned from the bust of the early 2000's was that although everyone was in favor of getting more education, they were only really interested in doing the hard work involved if they got a credential of value out of it at the end. Thus, we saw essentially no market at all for "recreational" education if the level and difficulty of the courses was high. Is that still true?  Only time will tell, but it is suggestive that the attrition in the MOOCs has been very high so far. Strun's 160,000 enrollees dropped to about 20,000 by course end, and MITx's 120,000 enrollees have dropped to 10,000 by midterm. These are obviously courses that require a great investment of time and energy, and what one gains in the end is "simply" knowledge, but no useful credential. Of course, one can argue that 20,000 is several times the number of traditional students at Stanford, and so the number of students completing is still mind-boggling. True, but one has to question whether we are seeing inflated numbers of enrollees because of the novelty of the approach - is this reproducible over time?

My guess is that these numbers will not be reproducible over time, and that the number of recreational users of these courses will decrease as the newness wears off. This part of the market will be a "bust."   However, I think there potentially is a huge market for these high quality products "repackaged" by others to provide credentialing. I can imagine lower ranked higher education institutions all over the world deciding that they cannot produce courses of the quality that can be obtained for free from these ventures and others that will surely spring up. These institutions are likely to see how they can incorporate these courses into their own programs, thus simultaneously increasing quality and decreasing instructional costs. These institutions then will provide the degrees and other credentials that will make the student's hard work worthwhile. This part of the market will be a "boom", and will meet the stated goals of most of these ventures to make high quality education available to students worldwide.

**********

So why do I question in the title of this post whether edX is a step backward? I actually thought that MITx was a brilliant idea that solved one outstanding problem of great significance- at least to me.  MITx will give a certificate to students that successfully complete a course. One could imagine that a few years from now, MITx would have the equivalent of entire degree programs on line. Students successfully completing the demanding sequence would not, of course, get an MIT degree, but rather a MITx "super-certificate" certifying their success in the entire degree program.  They would not be equivalent to MIT grads, but because of the rigor of MITx courses, they would likely be better prepared than the grads of a large fraction of accredited schools. I believe that the MIT reputation is such that employers would see this MITx super-certificate as providing a meaningful description of the skill set of the recipient.  In other words, the super-certificate would become a desired credential of value for students.

What problem does this solve? In higher education, brand is related to scarcity. Every highly ranked educational institution limits the number of students it has, and sets very high requirements for entry. This limits the potential for the highly ranked universities to educate large numbers of students or to educate students who are from a significantly different educational demographic. So at the end of the 1990's, a big question was, "how do we create a second brand that is less expensive and allows us to educate some population different from our normal customers?" There were no obvious models for creating a second brand. However, MITx looked to me like the desired second brand- infinitely expandable, appealing from the outset to a large new demographic, providing brand value without damaging the brand of the original - in fact, potentially increasing the brand of the original.

I don't believe that edX has this same potential. Multiple masters diffuse responsibility for course quality, and that diffusion will become even more obvious as other partners come on line.  This diffusion would make an edX super-credential of considerably less value to employers, and thus of less value to students. Of course, it may well be that neither MITx nor edX ever plans offer the equivalent of a degree program, so all of these thoughts may be totally useless. But MITx could do something really revolutionary.

Comments

[walden student 1]

Hi,

This article was very interesting becuase I want to work with online education when I complete my doctoral degree and I am completing a thesis on online education so I like to stay current with the trends. I could not agree more that people will take a course that is free just to learn a new skill on their own time but this is a trend that will not last a long time becuase of the demandes of life. People need and make time for what is most important such as taking a course that gives credit to help someone stay certified or keep a job.

[Kelly K.]

What an interesting concept. While I agree with and appreciate all comments to date, I am also thinking of this technology and concept in a different way.

I see potential here for prepatory classes, or as I like to call them "bridge" courses. Those needing to improve upon math, science, reading, or english skills would be able to do so at little to no cost. The certificate of completion could be shown, at which time a person would be eligible for enrollment.

This could also be a format for repeating a failed course. Although cost is a motivation for non-failure, we have all experienced or heard from others about "that one tough course." This may negate the desire to abandon a discipline because of one course, and negate the need to extend years in school or financial aid because of repeating a course. Of course, there would be lots to think about with this concept, such parameters of student enrollment, academic probation, GPA and credit, etc.

[Christian College]

Opportunity is available to people via online education. Education can reach any part of the world . Edx is a step forward !

[Mick Raike]

Thank you for a very interesting article. I too believe that the field of higher education will see more "high-ended" universities offer on-line classes. However, I remember the days of the diploma mills where for a small amount of money one could become certified in just about anything. My question, therefore: Will schools like Harvard and MIT be willing to "cheapen" their brand name so that a po' boy like me can claim that he took a class at Harvard? Or, will they return to their elitist status and shrug off the online experience as just a novelty of the times?

Lloyd comments: good question indeed. That is exactly the reason many have talked about creating a "second brand" - less expensive, fewer bells and whistles, but still having a value proposition. Not easy to do, however.

[Tom Mason]

Another possible unintended consequence of this effort may be to dissuade some students from attempting higher education at all.
Low-SES students from poor preparatory backgrounds might click into a calculus course only to see symbols and formulas they could not imagine are within their ken. While a few might feel challenged to conquer this bit of knowledge, those who have experienced social disorganization and the Pygmalion effect of naysayers, are much more likely (in my view) to rationalize a reason not to attempt higher learning.

P.S. Sharon must be an English professor. Sharon, this is not a dissertation -- it's a blog...

[Sharon Stevenson]

Dr. Armstrong, with all due respect to your accomplishments, I urge you to be a bit more careful in your posts. I suggest you simply reread them outloud to catch errors which for your standing are really unacceptable and a bad example for those of your students who read them. That said...

"…this has lead [LED] numerous commentators to…"

…a very nominal cost for e.g. testing" - which as is, reads, "for for example". "e.g." does mean "for example." so you don't need an extra "for." Also normally, e.g. is set off with commas before and after.

…from the organization - No period?

(e.g engineering) - now you do not put in a second dot, i.e., period. Huh?

I'm sure this is simple carelessness, which can be easily rectified. The article itself, was thought-provoking. The great challenge is to seek to make more knowledge "stick" for the learner's profitable present use and for providing a future underpinning for more advanced learning, no?

[Erin Keefe]

Lloyd,
I have enjoyed reading your blog. I recall several years ago when MIT began offering their free online classes. To hear they are still providing this opportunity with a high level of completion speaks to the draw of "recreational education". Do you truly foresee institutions accepting certificates of completion from these courses for credit towards degree completion in the future?

Lloyd responds: thanks for your comments and question. The earlier MIT offerings were not courses per se, but rather notes, readings, etc. that could be used as the user wanted. MITx will be packaging everything as a course, with graded homework, exams, etc.that must be successfully completed in order to get an MITx certificate. "Recreational" then takes on a different meaning with respect to this generation of offerings from MIT. I don't expect that other colleges will accept these certificates for transfer credit at this time - however, when it becomes more common to award credit for knowledge obtained elsewhere (e.g. the practices of WGU), such a certificate could possibly demonstrate desired learning. I think it much more likely that employers will begin to weigh MITx certificates favorably when compared to transcripts describing courses from significantly lower ranked programs. As I said in this post, I don't think the same will happen for edX certificates.

[Keith Hampson]

Lloyd – Thanks for this. Very interesting.

I’d like to touch on one aspect of this topic.

As you know, embedded in the responses to the announcements from Harvard and MIT is the assumption that the digital educational materials made available through these open content initiatives and open courseware are of value because they come from highly selective institutions. Certainly, the interest of the press to these initiatives would be far more subdued had they come from Chicago State University or the University of North Dakota. Apparently, highly selective institutions EQUAL high quality digital educational materials.

I’ve not seen any research that evaluates the quality of open digital materials coming from different types of institutions. However, I think it is still fair (and hopefully useful) to question the assumption that highly selective institutions are somehow better able, or more motivated, to produce high quality open content.

First, the development of digital education materials is more closely aligned to teaching than it is research. And highly selective institutions like MIT earn their status through their focus on research. The faculty members hired by these institutions bases their value – both in terms of the labour market and personal - on their ability to attract research funds and conduct and publish research, not to teach. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of great teachers within these institutions, but in all analyses, it’s useful to “follow the money”.

Motivation is also a factor. MIT and Harvard are not enacting this initiative in order to grow their markets, expand revenue, or reduce their costs. This is not being done so that the institutions might survive, as might be the case at other, less well-funded institutions. Growth is not an issue for either institution. In fact, maintaining exclusivity is “Job Number One”.

While this initiative may generate some benefits for their own students, the motivation is social and reputational. They are “giving away” their wares because they can afford to, and because philanthropy supports the brand. It’s not insignificant that they are doing this at a time when colleges are under attack.

If our interest is in finding the business models that are most likely to support increased quality at the best price, I’m not sure that this philanthropic model, coming from institutions with little need to truly innovate, and that have a deeply vested interest in the status quo, will produce the best outcomes.

Lloyd comments: Really excellent comment, Keith. I agree with all of your points.