Stanford's Exploration of the MOOCs. (September 21, 2012)

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has burst onto the academic scene with a vengeance and just this past Wednesday The University of Melbourne announced it has joined Coursera* with its  32 other universities which include Stanford, Princeton, Duke, école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Rice, UCSF and the universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington, Toronto and Edinburgh.

Stanford University Professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller announced this past April that they had secured $16 million in venture capital to launch a web portal based on their own interactive online education platform. Their Mountain View California-based company, Coursera.

The September/October issue of the Stanford Magazine features an extensive write-up by Theresa Johnston in which she sets out an array of the views expressed by various faculty members regarding the initiative and what it is seen to mean for Stanford and its student body.

Ms Johnson poses the questions: Should Stanford encourage more of its faculty to produce these so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs? Should anyone profit from their distribution? And if the University does invest more heavily in online education, how might that affect students—and professors—on the home campus?

Some of the university's faculty see the fostering of MOOCs so long as they are "high-quality online courses" as enhancing the University's prestige and identifying and attracting  brilliant students from around the world to Stanford. In addition they see it as a way of eliminating the large lecture courses and allowing for significantly more time for tutorial face-to-face interaction.

In contrast other professors of the Stanford faculty told Ms Johnson they "loathe the idea of lecturing to a camera, or of trying to assess thousands of students online. They fear that time spent developing online courses might distract from their on-campus responsibilities. And they worry about the fallout. Will less well-known colleges and universities find that people won't pay to enroll there when they can get a more prestigious "brand" online for free?"

Stanford's president, John Hennessy, says: First and foremost, I hope Stanford will broadly deploy online technology to improve the education we deliver for our existing students. Beyond the campus bounds, we already provide some forms of online education, primarily at the graduate level. Expanding such opportunities, while maintaining a high quality experience where students can learn and demonstrate mastery of topics, is in keeping with the University's mission, and something we can aspire to in the next few years. How things will evolve ten years out is hard to say; education changes slowly in our society while technology changes quickly. Nonetheless, change is coming. And for some parts of higher education, I expect it to be profound.

It was just in the past three years that the university's latest foray into online education began: "initially for on-campus consumption when Stanford computer scientists started toying with the idea of 'flipping' their classes—that is, putting their lectures and course materials online in order to free up class time for more engaging activities, such as optional group problem-solving exercises and guest lectures by Silicon Valley luminaries."

Professor Koller's approach was to set out to reinvent her winter 2010 course on probabilistic graphical modelling, breaking down her standard 75-minute lectures into  recorded segments of 10 to 15 minutes each. An approach similar to that of the Khan Academy website for K-12 learners. In addition it also sports a forum where students can help each other with questions and approaches.

The movement from servicing the Stanford campus to inviting the world occurred last year when Sebastian Thrun, a part-time faculty member and director of Google's X research lab, together with Peter Norvig offered their 10-week AI course together with the online courses by Professor Ng and department chair Jennifer Widom not only to Stanford students, but also, for free, to the world.

In only a matter of days the three free courses attracted 350,000 registrants from 190 countries—mostly computer and software industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills. Those off campus non-fee-paying students on satisfying their instructors that they had completed the online course were issued a statement of accomplishment bearing the instructor's name but not Stanford University's.

Professor Ng told Ms Johnson: "We recommend that the teaching staff monitor the [online] course at least in the first offering, to find and fix any major bugs. After the content has stabilized, we find that because students answer each other's questions, it's OK for the professor to step back, and the course can more or less run itself."

Professor John Mitchell, President Hennessy's newly appointed special assistant for educational technology, makes the point that Stanford has no financial agreements with Coursera. The University still owns the content of all its courses and is open to trying other platforms. "We may find that the particular model we have now is really effective, or we might find different things [but] turning into a McDonald's is not going to be our strategy."

Stanford's Provost John Etchemendy was also emphatic: "Our experiments are aimed primarily at understanding what the technology can be used for and what its limitations are. Our first and foremost goal in exploring the potential of these technologies is to improve the education we offer to our own students. We are being careful that it does not negatively impact on-campus students in the same way we try to ensure that a faculty member's research activities have a positive rather than negative effect on his or her teaching. In addition, our faculty know that an important factor in promotions and salary setting is their students' evaluation of their teaching—and that's evaluation by Stanford students, not students signed up for a MOOC!"

By no means is every Stanford member of the faculty enamoured with online teaching let alone MOOCs:

Elizabeth Bernhardt-Kamil, professor of German studies and director of the Stanford University Language Center says: "When the Language Center was established, the philosophy that I brought is that we would never try to replace teaching with technology. The classroom is where you can get immediate feedback. It's where you can get to know a representative of the culture. It's where the language comes alive."

Electrical engineering professor Andrea Goldsmith worries about faculty peer pressure: "to set up a whole infrastructure to change the way we teach without necessarily knowing that it's better. Generally for me, when I teach, I need the visual feedback. I like to ask questions and give answers to questions. I learn through these interactions, and that enriches my teaching."

And computer science professor Eric Roberts told Ms Johnson: "It's hard to hear President Hennessy argue that the lecture is dead when in our own department we have extraordinarily successful lecture classes that students want to be in. I'm not at all averse to Stanford being in this business and finding good ways to maintain the quality that Stanford has; I think we are in a privileged position to do it. But one of the things that concerns me is the notion that moving to online content would necessarily improve the on-campus experience."

And then there is the question of where in lies the pecuniary profit. Provost John Etchemendy says: "We have not settled on what the appropriate percentages should be [for profit sharing] but if there is additional revenue from online offerings, we will make sure that the faculty member is compensated for the extra effort."

Finally Theresa Johnson notes: "Despite the many uncertainties surrounding online education, one sure thing is that other universities will be watching closely to see how these experiments pan out. They wonder: Could MOOCs from big hitters like Stanford, Harvard and MIT doom smaller brick-and-mortar institutions? Or could they perhaps help the higher education ecosystem by decreasing costs?"

*Berklee College of Music Brown University California Institute of Technology Columbia University Duke University École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Emory University Georgia Institute of Technology Hebrew University of Jerusalem Johns Hopkins University Mount Sinai School of Medicine Ohio State University Princeton University Rice University Stanford University The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The University of British Columbia University of California, Irvine University of California, San Francisco University of Edinburgh University of Florida University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of London International Programmes University of Maryland, College Park University of Melbourne University of Michigan University of Pennsylvania University of Pittsburgh University of Toronto University of Virginia University of Washington Vanderbilt University Wesleyan University