Online Courses and the Future of Higher Education-Becker

Online courses began around 1990 with the growth of more widespread access to the Internet. They spread rapidly in the United States during the last half of the 1990’s buoyed by the dot-com boom, and fell sharply after that bubble burst. During this early period, online courses typically charged fees. Some of the courses catered to individuals who wanted to improve their job prospects, others were meant solely for intellectual enjoyment, while some could be used to obtain college degrees. For-profit schools with physical facilities, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, were often sponsors of online courses, although a few of these courses were sponsored by nonprofit universities.

What is new about the MOOCs (which stands for “massive open online courses”) is not the use of the Internet to instruct in particular subjects, but that they are free, and they often are sponsored by some of the very best universities, such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. Since they cost little if anything to take, it is much easier for the MOOCs to get massive enrollments than the fee-charging courses offered during the earlier boom in online courses. Various recent articles on MOOCs in the New York Times by Tamar Lewin show that the massiveness of the enrollments is somewhat misleading since, as one would expect with free courses, the great majority of those initially enrolled fail to finish. Still, the number of persons who do finish these courses is very large compared even to what are considered very big enrollments in on-site courses.

Aside from typically being free, the other unique aspect of MOOCs is that many of them are sponsored by known, often well-known, private and public universities. Since so far these universities get no revenue from the MOOCs they offer, the motivation is teaching to much larger audiences, favorable publicity for the universities involved, and the prospect of eventually earning revenue from these courses by charging fees or in other ways. The cost of offering these courses is typically not large since even the super star professors who sometimes lecture in online courses are quite cheap, and they may even do it without receiving any payment since they too want to spread knowledge and their influence.

Particularly given my long time interest in human capital, I have been excited by the prospects of online education since the 1990s. Indeed, I was a little involved at that time in helping to develop a for-profit company that offered fee-charging courses to men and women who wanted to improve their skills so that they could get better employment opportunities. Online courses have many advantages: they can enroll large numbers of students from many countries and of various ages, individuals can take them at their convenience from their homes and when they have free time, online students can easily communicate with each other even when they are located in different countries, and enrollees can get quick feedback from their answers to quizzes and other questions posed by instructors.

The equally obvious downside of online courses is that they do not involve direct personal contact with online instructors and classmates. No one yet really knows how important such direct contact is to the learning process. It likely varies from student to student, and depends also on the materials covered, and how the instructor conveys what he or she knows. I do not expect online course programs to compete effectively in the next decade against the education offered by top universities, although that may be because I do not appreciate fully how comfortable young people are with online communication. Still, I do expect online instruction to become very good substitutes for the thousands of courses offered by lesser schools.

Since online courses are so convenient and will remain relatively cheap, I expect them to spread rather rapidly sometimes even when they are decidedly inferior to courses that allow personal contact with instructors and fellow students. Online courses are likely to be particularly popular in developing countries because the worldwide boom in higher education during the past several decades has meant that many developing countries are trying to rapidly boost enrollments in higher education. A good example of what might happen in higher education in these countries is provided by the installation of cell phone towers in many poorer parts of the world, such as rural India and most parts of Africa. Poor families in these areas are now able to use cell phones to communicate with the outside world without their governments or private companies having to lay expensive phone cables for wired phone service.

Similarly, building physical facilities to accommodate very large numbers of new enrollees in higher education would be quite expensive for developing countries. When access to the Internet becomes widely available in developing countries-it already is in China- online courses that qualify for credits toward a college degree would be a substitute for physical facilities. These degrees typically would not be of the quality offered say by Peking University in China or the IITs in India, but a system of higher education should have a diverse mixture of schools with different approaches to teaching and offering various qualities of education.

 In summary, I expect online education to be a rapidly growing part of the higher education landscape, especially in developing countries that want to expand quickly higher education opportunities.

 

Comments

[Bo Shi]

I'll speak to MIT's OpenCourseware (OCW) as I've gone through a couple courses since graduating undergrad. I think subjectively, as far as quality of education goes, online courses are much closer to the "real deal" than even the author believes.

First, in aggregate, we probably overestimate the value-add of matriculation. By my observation, a significant percentage - perhaps majority - of students go through not fully utilizing the vast (college is wasted on the youth :P) one-on-one instructional resources available to them. I've no doubt that a motivated student would get just as much out of an OpenCourseware class as a significant number of students who go through their four years skipping a fair number of tutorials (small group lecture and Q/A).

Nearly all students collaborated with peers doing homework or project. While OCW cannot currently replace the opportunity to work with some really world class students on a problem set or group project, customers are perfectly capable of working in groups through an online course. The quality of collaboration might even be higher since the motivations of OCW students are "purer". In college, you might have collaborators who are only interested in the answers and not necessarily learning the material. I can't overstate the value of group learning; this is one area where OCW might even have an advantage. one envisions an simple match making service for each week's course materials where students can find small groups of other students working on the same material in order to collaborate.

What OCW can't provide is the external signaling and reputation boost that an institutional degree can. Luckily, most good employers know not to put too much stock in a degree.

Another consideration is that teaching a technical subject is probably more straightforward than a humanities topic. I'm not sure reading is a sufficient substitute for socratic debate for which the instructor-student ratio is much more difficult to scale.

[RossAnderson]

The traditional economic analysis of higher education recognises two components – the human-capital component and the signalling component. Degrees in subjects like veterinary medicine or computer science help you earn a living directly while classics or art history simply signal to employers that you're clever and diligent. Elite universities have a particular advantage in signalling because of their restrictive admissions.

Making a Stanford AI course available worldwide clearly adds value, in that tens of thousands of engineers acquire theoretical insights and useful skills. It may even provide some signalling benefits, in that engineers educated at unknown institutions in less developed countries have an opportunity to show that they can hack it along with engineers educated in North America and Europe.

However I'm slightly sceptical about the value added if a humanities degree is scaled up in this way, as the signal will be diluted. I'm also sceptical about the effects of scaling up degrees that prepare for professions that restrict entry, as medics and lawyers do in many countries. In Britain, a generation ago, pretty well anyone who completed a law degree could get a training place which led to professional registration. Now there are many more law graduates than training places, giving an advantage to students whose parents have connections with law firms. Thus even though the increase in university provision in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s was designed to promote social mobility, it did the opposite in case of the law.

So MOOCs are great for industries like computing where the demand for skilled labour is large and growing. For more traditional pursuits, their benefits may be more nuanced.

[Andreaswpv]

Why don't you try it yourself - I have taken two courses, and it has changed my perspective dramatically. Its free and not scheduled to certain times of the day, which allowed me to participate beside working full time and having a family.

I use these for fun, intellectual challenge and to keep my skills up to date, and for this these courses are great as well.

Having participated in one course from a very respected and one from a less well known college I have to say the marketing aspect for the well known could be quite negative. The course from the lesser known college (not in the US) was much better prepared, more interactive, much better adapted to online, had good discussion forums, help areas. After this, I'd NEVER recommend going to the top league college.

Having all the additional features plus responsive, active professors made it seem very feasible to not just participate in 'lecture' style courses, but also to Master grade level courses with few participants.

And why not? I work global every day, and results are excellent. Why should learning via phone, internet not work as well? Why do you have the image that college education needs presence more than working in large companies?

[Jdwalton]

And Dr. Becker has a series of lectures hosted by University of Chicago, free to all. (Or at least this was the case a few months ago courtesy of a youtube search.) As an alum, I am always intrigued to capture some of the stuff I missed in my youth. It's different 35+ years later, not bothered with the distractions of the draft, job search or impending marriage. A big thanks.