MITx and other free online classrooms

The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak By kevin Carey

In this article Kevin carey looks at different ways that traditional schools are feeling pressure from outdside competition. He talks about how students from all over the world are now able to take online classes by well renouned proffesssors from schools such as Stanford, and MIT. The students take the online coarse and go to a proctored location to take the midterm and final. If they do well the teachers send the students a form indicating that they passed the coarse, with the proffesors signiture, and its all free.

" a group of adjunct professors at Stanford University who were offering their courses in Artificial Intelligence and other computer science topics to anyone in the world, online, at no charge. Tens of thousands of students had signed up. The availability of free Internet courses itself wasn’t all that innovative—MIT’s Open Courseware initiative is a decade old and elite schools like Yale and Carnegie Mellon have followed suit. The news was that the Stanford professors were letting students in their global classroom sit for the midterm, at proctored sites around the world. Those who did well on the A.I. test and a later final exam got a letter saying so, signed by the professors" (pg.1)

"MIT made a major announcement: The world-famous research university would be creating a new non-profit organization called MITx. It, too, would be offering free online courses, designed from the ground up to serve tens or even hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. And it, too, would administer exams to students who, if they passed, would receive a certificate saying so from MITx."

"What all of these new ventures have in common is that they are outside of the existing system of college credits and degrees. The traditional college degree monopoly has long been sustained by three mutually-reinforcing factors. First, colleges are highly subsidized through some combination of direct government funding, non-profit status, and student financial aid. Second, only accredited colleges can receive government subsidies and offer credits and credentials that are recognized by employers and other colleges. The accreditation system, meanwhile, is controlled by existing colleges themselves. Third, our society has made an enormous psychic investment in the idea of traditional colleges. Most people don’t know how to think about credentials any other way."

'While an online class might not be as good as sitting in a classroom being taught in person by a learned scholar, the thinking goes, online courses are cheaper and getting better all time and so will eventually disrupt the providers of live instruction"

"the economy continually reorganizes itself in a way that values the possession of deep knowledge and complex cognitive skills. They are universally recognized and never expire, golden keys to the parts of the labor market most worth entering."

This information is so interesting because it makes a student like me wonder why am I in a traditional school when I am finding out that education is becoming increasingly popular and free online. Not only that but there are many new companies coming out with different ways of administering proof that students are masters of a subject by sending them "Badges" as credentials. Eventually students will be able to go online and become an expert in the feild of their choosing. "The great unanswered question is when the abundance and quality of new credentials will reach a critical mass of acceptance among employers and society at large." If this new system gets its feet off the ground, it probably wont be long, especially since there is so much technology to help it. "The Mozilla Foundation, funded by the people who developed the Firefox web browser, are sponsoring a competition for the creation of badge systems that will help students organize the credentials they receive from different providers." Once students can organize their credentials there is probably only one thing left that is needed. Online advisors to help guide students in the right direction and tell them what classes they should be taking first and a total of what ones they need. It will probably take a while for students to figure it out on their own. It may take a while for students to create their own degree this way too. Back in the sixties and seventies it wasnt uncommon for students to stay in school for up to ten years when they were figuring out the system, whereas now students are commonly only in school for four years. If there is a good Advisor system for this program students could potentially figure out how to finish their education in a timely manner.

 "Traditional degrees have the great advantage of being simple and universally understood. The problem is that they provide little information about what students actually know and are becoming more expensive all the time." If these free online institutions are a success, it would only take a few decades before everyone will be online taking classes at a very low cost if any. This could be the end of small liberal art universities. Online coarses will prove to be too much competition, Liberal Art universities wont be able to compete with the cost  and they wont be able to keep the number of students in their institutions high enough to continue to run their schools. The only institutions that will keep their doors open will be those doing large amounts of research, because research will always be needed and it is possible that like MIT, large instituitions will be the ones handing out the degrees. If this were too happen I could be among the last generation to be compiling large amounts of debt from education, which would be better for the country as a whole economically.

If this were to be successful what would be the consequences? would this drive the classes apart even further then they already are? Yes more of the lower class would be able to be educated at a much lower cost, but once again only the rich would be able to attend actual universities such as MIT and Stanford, because they would be the only ones willing to pay for education. Would that be good or bad for society as a whole? Yes more people would be educated, but would it cause all education to be the same, would it be creating a society that thinks alike rather then individually?