While massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are still in their early
days, the race has begun to integrate them into traditional colleges —
by making them eligible for transfer credits, and by putting them to use
in introductory and remedial courses
On Tuesday, the American Council on Education, the leading umbrella group for higher education, and Coursera,
a Silicon Valley MOOC provider, announced a pilot project to determine
whether some free online courses are similar enough to traditional
college courses that they should be eligible for credit.
The council’s credit evaluation process will begin early next year,
using faculty teams to begin to assess how much students who
successfully complete Coursera MOOCs have learned. Students who want to
take the free classes for credit would have to pay a fee to take an
identity-verified, proctored exam. If the faculty team deems the course
worthy of academic credit, students who do well could pay for a
transcript to submit to the college of their choice. Colleges are not
required to accept those credits, but similar transcripts are already
accepted by 2,000 United States colleges and universities for training
courses offered by the military or by employers.
Coursera, founded last year by two Stanford computer professors, Daphne
Koller and Andrew Ng, has 33 university partners and nearly two million
students, who currently can earn certificates of completion, but not
academic credit, for their work.
“I feel strongly that degrees are really valuable to people, and having
MOOCs allow for credit down the line will increase the number of
students with the confidence and wherewithal to complete degrees,”
Professor Koller said. “If you’re a random student from another country,
what are your chances of being admitted to a university here? But if
you can show you’re a motivated student who’s completing five courses
and done well on the proctored exam, I think a university would pay
attention.”
The project is being watched closely by higher-education experts who
expect MOOCs to broaden access to higher education and bring down the
costs.
“With the additional benefits of ACE credit recommendation for Coursera
courses, students will have an unprecedented opportunity to obtain
recognized credentials for their work,” said William G. Bowen, the
former president of Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation, and
senior adviser to Ithaka, a nonprofit group devoted to digital
technologies in higher education.
Also on Tuesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced 13
grants, totaling more than $3 million, for MOOC research. The grants are
intended to encourage the development of MOOCs in introductory courses,
like developmental math and writing, to see how they might be
integrated into community colleges to bolster completion, and to develop
a pathway for MOOC transfer credit.
While there is some overlap between the Coursera project and the Gates
grants, only four of the nine schools that received grants are putting
their MOOCs on Coursera, while the others use different platforms.
The largest grants go to three groups — the American council, Ithaka and
the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities — that will
explore the credit issue, consider a possible consortium for
collaborating on digital courseware, and research the University of
Maryland’s experience with MOOCs.
“It certainly appears that there is potential here, and we ought to kick
all the tires and see what we can learn,” said Molly Corbett Broad, the
president of the American council
Source : nytimes.com