MOOCs—Implications for Higher Education—Posner

“MOOCs,” an acronym for “massive open online courses,” denotes an important, possibly a revolutionary, development ineducation. These courses are online, free of charge, open to anyone in the world who has a laptop and an Internet connection, and offered by entities with strange names such as coursera, codeacademy, edX, khanacademy, and udacity. The offerors are mainly university consortia or university-affiliated. Moreover, and critically, the universities are elite universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia.

Not that online education is new; there are adult-education online courses such as are sold by The Teaching Company; there are even online college degree programs, offered mainly by for-profit colleges. What is new is the scale and potential of free online education offered by, or in conjunction with, the nation’s leading universities.

The courses, like conventional college courses, are sequenced by difficulty, enabling the student to progress from beginner to advanced. The courses cover not only a very broad range of technical subjects such as math, statistics, computer science, the natural sciences, and engineering, but, increasingly, also courses in the social sciences and the humanities. MOOCs ae not offered for credit; they do not count toward an undergraduate or graduate degree; they are (at present) for people who want to obtain not a credential but skills or knowledge, whether for enjoyment or to put to some practical use. Anyone anywhere in the world can enroll; individual MOOC courses are attracting tens of thousands of students. There are frequent quizzes embedded in each online courses, and sometimes there are mid-course or end-of-course exams as well. These exams are graded by peer groups (other students enrolled in the course—in one program a student’s exam is graded by five other students and the grade on the exam is the average of the grades given by the five graders). Some students form online study groups, or in-person groups with students who live nearby.

The format seems superior to the conventional lecture. The average quality of the lecturers is much higher, because there is no limit on the number of students “attending” the lectures and so no reason why any student should be stuck with a mediocre lecturer. The online format has other advantages. The student can scroll back, or fast forward—in short can go at his own speed, which he could not do in a live lecture. A first-rate lecturer can communicate more effectively than a textbook (and of course the student can supplement the lecture with a textbook), and, of great importance, one doesn’t have to travel anywhere to attend an online lecture. One can obtain in effect a first-class American college education wherever one lives and however little money one has. All you need is a laptop computer and an Internet connection. There is a problem of asking questions of the lecturer in a class of ten thousand students, but some MOOCs solve it by allowing students to post questions that the student body votes on, and only the most popular questions are put to the lecturer.

MOOCs are a very recent development; most of them are fewer than two years old. Only in the last month have they been receiving significant media coverage (there was, for example, an excellent article on them by Tamar Lewin in the November 20 New York Times). Maybe they will flame out. But I don’t think so; as I said, they have revolutionary potential.

It may help to see this by thinking of MOOCs in demand and supply terms. There are three types of demanders for such a product. One consists of retirees and others seeking mental stimulation. Another and larger type (in part because it is more international) consists of persons, mainly young but also some middle aged, seeking to acquire skills that will contribute to their careers. And the third, which at the moment is potential rather than actual, is degree seekers. It is merely potential because the MOOCs don’t offer college, graduate, or professional degrees. They can’t, without a more rigorous method of evaluating performance. Apart from the limitations of student grading, there is the problem of plagiarism in the Age of Google when an exam is taken at home. (There is no problem of plagiarism when an online course is not offered for credit.) Even if these problems could be overcome, there would be the problem of basing evaluation of a student’s performance entirely on lecture courses—no small courses, no personal interaction with faculty, no seminar papers or senior theses.
There would also be a problem arising from the heterogeneity of an international student body admitted to the online college without selectivity and therefore with great variance in levels of preparation. The mediocre performance of a student from a backward country might signal far more intellectual promise than the superior performance of an upper middle class student from an advanced country.

On the supply side of the MOOC market, there is the problem of developing a viable business model. As long as the market for MOOCs is limited to the first two groups of demanders—persons seeking intellectual enrichment and persons seeking marketable skills—the costs of providing the product are very low. They primarily consist of modest bonuses for the lecturers—modest because most lecturers would consider a huge expansion in their audience to be a substantial bonus in itself, as well as auguring a likely very large market for their textbooks, though the overall market for textbooks will decrease as MOOCs catch on. On the benefits side, even without sale of advertising space or the charging of an enrollment fee, MOOCs provide cheap advertising for the colleges and universities that provide the lecturers.

The question of supply and hence of the optimal business model becomes acute only if providers of MOOCs decide to award degrees and thus tap into the vast market for college, graduate, and professional education. Now enrollment would have to be limited (it would be limited automatically once an admission fee to the program was charged) and now higher costs would be incurred: admissions personnel would have to be hired to decide who would be admitted, financial personnel would have to be hired to collect fees and administer student loans and scholarships, graders would have to hired and online exams monitored, provision for seminars and thesis supervision would have to be arranged—in short many of the expenses of a conventional college or university would have to be incurred. But the expenses would be much lower per student because there would be so many more students, and so fee revenues could be huge even if the fee for enrolling were very modest. For example, costs of room and board would be very low because students would live and work at home.

Harvard has about 6600 undergraduates. One can easily imagine an online Harvard enrolling 66,000 undergraduates with no diminution in the average quality of the students. Or 660,000, for that matter, because it would be drawing from the entire world. But then what happens to the physical Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its resident students? If it remains, there will be a lingering suspicion, and quite possibly the reality, that a degree from physical Harvard is a more valuable credential than a degree from online Harvard—but also there will be elite students who will decide that the cost and possibly quality advantages of online Harvard (quality advantages because only the very best Harvard teachers will be invited to lecture online) outweigh what initially at least would be the greater prestige of a degree from physical Harvard.

A movement toward online higher education could have an enormous impact on American higher education, comparable to the impact the Internet has had on bookstores and publishers. There would undoubtedly be a very rapid and considerable consolidation of colleges and universities. Would quality fall? I imagine it would increase. A harder question is whether the movement toward online higher education would be stymied by the desire of students for conventional extracurricular activities such as sports and the excitement of living away from home, with other young people. No doubt many American, though few foreign, students would feel that way (college students in most foreign countries live at home rather than on a college campus). But offsetting such a preference would be much lower tuition and living costs and access to a better college, since there would be no physical limits on the size of a college. There are many more than 6600 high school graduates who meet Harvard’s admission standards; all who do could be admitted to online Harvard at no cost to Harvard.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

For anything global the fees would have to be minimal,when monthly wages are a few hundred $ and local higher education free,it's not easy to pay even a few thousands $/year.Maybe if each graduate would have to volunteer a number of hours to work (online) for the school,the fees could be kept low but ,in the end,what is needed is to try to innovate.Must online fully mimic what is done in existing schools and what can be done better,cheaper,more efficient.How much can be done by machines instead of people- the more i think about this the more obvious it seems that Google should get into this field, they have tools for collaborative work (students already use Google Docs to work on projects without wasting time meeting),they know how to handle huge amounts of data,they work hard on AI,predictive search, all things that could be very useful here.
For the US a rapid consolidation of colleges and universities would be problematic for research and sports.

[Thomas Rekdal]

Years of theorizing about to improve education and we are right back to lectures? Just wider audiences, cheaper fees, and bigger stars doing the talking? What a disappointment.

[Terry Bennett]

I am encouraged by this development, and I think it is right on time. Higher education is generally a very good investment in terms of return, but it is a large investment and it is practically a mandatory investment. Something had to be done, and it is being done, spontaneously in response to demand.

Law students often grouse that you can't take the bar exam and get a state law license without a law degree. The reason for this is that the bar exam, all two days of it, is not comprehensive enough to screen for the minimum needed knowledge - but it could be made so. Suppose you could take a whole four-year bachelor's curriculum on-line, for free, and then optionally fly to Cambridge for a stringent, in-person exam period, maybe 10 days, consisting of a mix of on-line multiple choice and essay tests interspersed with several hours of oral examination. Even if Harvard charges $10-20k for the exam, it's still a huge savings to the student, and the profit to the school would probably be comparable given the dramatic increase in enrollment and lower cost of delivering the service. Some professors would have to find something else to do, but for most the lecturing is just something they have to do in between research projects anyway.

[Gertrud Fremling]

Note that testing as well as any granting of course credit could easily be separate from the delivery of the course itself. That would be just as with AP-tests currently given at high schools around the US, where everyone face the same national test but have taken slightly different versions of a preparatory AP-course. Various universities then choose what types of AP-courses (with what minimum score) are allowed to be counted towards a degree of theirs. The menu of AP-courses could thus simply be expanded to include more courses, e.g. intermediate microeconomics, econometrics, linear algebra. The student is free to study any MOOCs that correspond to that AP-test.

Another slightly different model to follow are professional exams. An example is the various levels of actuarial exams, which are offered at different times during the year at a fee of a few hundred dollars each at designated test centers. The existing test centers offer extremely high levels of identity check and monitoring to prevent cheating.

So, the American Economics Association (or any other entity) could design its own tests for various courses, including upper-level undergraduate and basic graduate courses. The student could choose freely whether to pick an MOOC from Harvard, MIT or Penn State as a preparation for the AEA test. A student could thus pass a number of exams that would be the equivalent of the requirements for an economics major at a normal university. Or the student could stop at a smaller set of courses for an AEA "certificate" or "minor". The total costs would just be a few thousand dollars - small change compared to current levels of tuition. A great benefit is that the universities with the best lecturers and best brand name would not necessarily need to get involved in the nitty-gritty work of evaluating the students.

[CompraChina]

Within a few years the studies were conducted electronically, and online cooperative, will be the trend in study groups and research. Now we lose too much time moving, attending meetings, etc.. That time is lost and is worth millions of dollars.

[Neilehat]

MOOC's? Business and Industry has been using these techniques for years for conferences, meetings, international and intranational engineering and technical design/construction/fabrication/etc. meetings for years. Saves a bundle on travel expenses, and time losses. As for Educational MOOC's, just one question, Accreditation? Currently it's somewaht remeniscent of the old courses offered on the back of a matchbook and functioned in the mail order realm. But what the heck! In those days, tens of thousands of people improved their education and skills set by mail order. Same could be said for the once emerging technology of Radio, Television and now the Cyber world technology...

[jim kirby]

MOOCs pose a welcome threat to the ivory-tower sinecures of our socialist professorship that depends on certification by the gummint.

A country that goes on demanding certification for everything, including haircutters, is doomed to disaster once the higher education genie is released from the bottle, because for every coddled Amerikan student there will be 10 from around the world who, having skipped the football and beer, will compete for his job.

Folks have to be reminded again and again that the movers and shakers are not the Harvard and Stanford grads. Thomas Edison's classroom was a train car, Henry Ford's a machine shop, and Gates, Dell, Zuckerberg, Jobs and Wozniak dropped out of college. There are many more like them worldwide, whose development would be hobbled by having to sit in a socialist Amerikan classroom.

Furthermore, the MOOC student's loss at not being able to converse with the prof is a canard: I had many profs, including especially the German ones at the U of Chicago, who were too aloof to approach for anything; I had many others, mostly at other universities, whom I could barely respect, much less seek advice from. I would have learned just as well studying alone with Andrew Carnegie in James Anderson's library.

Certification stands in the way of learning.

[Nathandgregory]

My awareness of this blog and the works of Gary Becker and Richard Posner are thanks to my attendance in the open course provided by Yale; "Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform" taught by Yale SOM professor Douglas W. Rae.

Mr. Posner's book, "A Failure of Capitalism," was required reading for the course and afforded me an introduction to Mr. Posner's significant contributions to economics and law.

My experience with that and other open courses has tremendously enlightened my thinking on my OWN time and without the hassle of stopping my professional life to attend traditional graduate school.

MOOC's are addictive....

[Ganasist]

In 10 years will employers be more willing to hire an A+ online Harvard "graduate" or a B+ physical Harvard graduate? I think the demand for exceptional online talent will be higher than we think today.

As for cheating in the Age of Google: the fact that people CAN and DO look up factual information routinely via Google and Wikipedia today should not be ignored or overcome within the educational system, but rather accepted and embraced. For too long exams have been based on regurgitating memorized facts, essentially ignoring the reality that anyone with an internet connection can look up anything, anytime. There is now far less need to memorize the academic minutia of years past. In this regard, all university exams should trend towards the open book format for both physical and virtual students, with the emphasis being placed on applied reasoning rather than regurgitation. This, coupled with multiple choice formats and stringent exam time limits, should allow for mass grading - which is currently the key limitation to expansion of accreditation of MOOCs. To further prevent cheating, all students would take exams at the same time regardless of their time zone, or else students in different time zones take different versions of the exam.

Whoever designs software that can accurately correct handwritten exam answers (think math, engineering, biology) will complete the MOOC revolution.

[Neilehat]

Ganasist, What's the answer? "It's in the book" or "It's in the Library" or "It's on the Internet". Sorry, wrong answer. Memorization is of vital importance to real education. What happens when you don't have the book at hand, the Library is closed, or you've lost power or the Wifi connection is dead? As a former Professor of mine put it, "I don't care if you know where to find the answer. What I want to know is what's inside your skull and I don't mean "Mush""... ;)

[Rustylongwood]

Neilehat, you're dead wrong. If you're in law, IT, math, science or engineering, when the power's gone and your wifi's dead you're going home for the day whether you know the answer or not!

I'm at a top 10 law school and everything's open book, open-note-(just no google, haha!) Just because you have all the information available to you doesn't mean you know the answer. In the real world it's not the person who can spit up the information does well, it's the one who can apply it and synthesize it appropriately. That's not to say we haven't learned anything, just that we don't waste our time trying to drill useless little details into our heads. If your job or field is really so simple that having a textbook or two open can really give you all the answers, you're in the wrong field!

[Institutepost]

Hello Mr. Becker & Mr. Posner,

I have greatly appreciated your informative and useful posts.

I really like your blog content and will be looking forward to reading future posts.