Arizona State University and edX open a new frontier- maybe

Arizona State University (ASU) and edX recently announced a joint project to offer an online freshman year with full official credit from ASU - The Global Freshman Academy:

“We’re going to have 12 new courses, of which students will take eight,” Mr. Crow (President of ASU) said. “They have to be constructed at a fantastic level of digital immersion, not just talking heads. This is a general education freshman year, not a series of disconnected courses, so they have to be thought through together.”

All courses will be designed and taught by leading faculty at ASU. Whether the Department of Education bugaboo of competency based testing will be used is not clear from information I have seen. 

This is truly an "open admissions" program, with no entrance requirements. Students pay nothing to take the courses, only paying after successful course completion if they desire to get ASU credit. Projected cost for the credit will be no more than $200 per credit hour. The combination of relatively low cost, online accessibility and convenience, and college credit from a major institution certainly make this a great experiment, and may well make this a very successful program. 

ASU has a strong existing online program with focused and strong student support that has led to an astounding 89% retention rate. Should similar rates be obtained in the Global Freshman Academy, it would be a first for MOOC-like courses. 

A few years ago, I thought a new age was dawning with the establishment of Semester Online - a consortium of almost a dozen highly ranked institutions that would be offering a number of credit bearing courses online.This, I thought, could be the beginning of an experiment to allow students to customize their own educations. Unfortunately, that consortium was rather short lived, in large part because of objections from faculty at the member institutions, and the experiment died. ASU and edX have restarted that experiment by offering students an alternative way to pick up the often-generic first year of college.

Another radical thing is happening in this program, if Crow's statement above is correct. The general education program is being thought of as a whole, rather than as a set of barely connected courses - an approach greatly encouraged by extensive educational research, but hardly ever seen in the actual world of higher education where "academic freedom" ensures that faculty teach what they will. This general education program could become a model of how general education should be done!.

Comments

[Muvaffak Gozaydin]

ASU has been providing on line courses and degrees for 13,000 students out of 50,000 already .
( It is expensive tough, $ 1,500 per course )

Now ASU is cooperating with EDX . WHY ??

ASU still will develop online courses.
EDX will provide its platform and share the income .
But fee is $ 600 per 3 credit courses . Wooovvvv.
How come ? Was ASU platform too expensive . ?

ASU has already platform . Why do they need EDX ?

Lloyd comments: good questions, and I don't know the answers. Perhaps their present platform is not really set up for MOOC like volume that they hope to get. They may also have wanted the edX visibility, and the ability to join a really big-data operation that can help drive modifications to improve learning. All guesses, however.

[Burck Smith]

Hey Lloyd -- I think the real value is a big brand college stating publicly that MOOCs will count for credit and that the biggest pricing attraction is the low cost of failure (start for $49 per course). The actual program details make me wonder whether this particular program will get students. Without financial aid, the program is competing with all the other ways to get college credit. CLEP is roughly $85 per exam. CC credits are $85 per credit in AZ. Of course, StraighterLine's freshman year offering is 1/5th this price. Without financial aid, students will be price shopping and $600 per course is pretty expensive. What it does signal is the collapse of tiered pricing for online courses within colleges and between colleges and non-colleges.

Lloyd comments: Hi Burck - thanks for your great points. First, this is a surprisingly expensive option, but one can hope that ASU decides to lower the price as they get closer to roll-out. However, as you point out, this is the first big brand place to give regular academic credits for a MOOC-like course, and there is value associated with that. Another benefit (if it actually happens) is that these courses will provide a coherent, coordinated GE program, which the research suggests should provide an enormous educational benefit. I view this as another experiment that will give us more useful data on where markets really lie.