upceaonline

Editor's Notes

• #4: There are two very powerful trends in higher education that are converging—the commercialization of OpenCourseWare (OCW) and the strong national and international interest in lowering the cost of degree attainment. This presentation will trace the history and then detail the current events leading up to the converging of these two trends as symbolized by several recent announcements about the granting of credit for learning achieved primarily through OCW.
• #5: This presentation will also consider some emerging trends that will continue with increased vigor—the proliferation of high-quality open materials, the incorporation of open material in traditional degree offerings,including the "flipped classroom” concept, and the creation of sustained online learning communities.
• #6: UNESCO calculatesthat by 2015 just about 1 billion people who could benefit from higher education will not be able to get it. Serving these people is impossible with traditional campus-based higher education. The answer to this crisis is in online education as is indicated by a list of the universities (all using online education extensively) enrolling over 100,000.
• #7: Yet there is absolutely no way that the demand for education, to sustain social and economic growth and to address our many problems, can be satisfied by traditional higher education.
• #8: The demands for workforce education cannot be met by traditional degree programs. Degree education is not affordable by world economies and is often not the appropriate format for many learning objectives.
• #9: The purpose of this presentation is to make and document the point that this is no longer a vision, but now a prediction. This prediction presents serious threats to traditional higher education, and, in fact, gives us a window into what has been called “post-traditional” higher education. Institutions now have a responsibility to help our institutions recognize the opportunities and threats that this “imperative” holds for their futures.
• #10: First, two critical aspects of education, content and communication have become free or very low cost. Commoditization is a more recent concept, created by Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., and who coined “Web 2.0” to distinguish what he saw as the use of the Web as a communication and social networking vehicle as contrasted with its initial use as a content and information delivery vehicle. Observing the growth and dynamics behind the development and progress of open source software (free, developed through voluntary communities), O’Reilly applied the “law of conservation of attractive profits” to the phenomenon of open products. When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.
• #11: Commoditization pushes the traditional “value proposition” of an industry to the periphery of the good or service. The consequences of the commodification of education are more clearly seen if we observe what happened in the content and communication industries. Providers of content (publishers, encyclopedias) gave way to organizations which provided free content but charged or benefitted from peripheral services (Wikipedia, Google, iTunes and YouTube). Commodification of communications spawned the social network industry and web-based communication (Skype, Facebook, and Twitter). In education we’re seeing the creation of organizations and businesses designed to deliver free services associated with learning pathways (repositories of learning objects and supplemental instruction). Again, the OER/OCW movements are the result of and benefit from the long-term shift in education toward commodification.
• #13: The development of the OCW and Open Educational Resources (OER) movements both started in the form of open, easily accessible repositories of "learning objects,” discrete files containing material that were intended for use in the teaching/learningprocess.
• #15: Begun in 1997 at the California State University System, MERLOT has grown into a multi-campus and multi-state consortium serving over 108,000 members, with a collection of over 38,000 online learning resources. The MERLOT collection, which has been designed to help people find learning materials quickly and easily, is a continually growing catalog of teaching tools and support resources supported by an active community of people interested in enriching educational experiences using technology.MERLOT’s collection is an open access, user-centered, searchable repository of peer-reviewed and selected resources, catalogued by its members, and curated by editorial boards organized around academic disciplines. The collection also features annotations from MERLOT members—user comments, assignments, and personal collections. While primarily oriented towards higher education, MERLOT’s communities and collections of Open Educational Resources (OER) are used by others in secondary education, K-12 initiatives, workforce development, and continuing education.
• #17: Founded in October 1999, Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology.
• #19: Here is a list of a few open repositories that were created to serve the needs of certain populations but which were also open to everyone.
• #22: Perhaps the most significant event in the creation of the OCW movement was the decision by MIT's faculty in 2001 to place all of MIT's courses online in an open format. By 2007, MIT had placed 1800 courses on its OCW site.
• #25: The MIT OCW site remains one of the most heavily used of all such open sites. The site currently experiences over 1 million visits per month.
• #27: MIT, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, started the OCWC which grew quickly in its international institutional membership and most impressively with its production of open courses which today numbers well over 25,000 courses.
• #29: UCI’s open education project has grown significantly in just six years to include contributions from 80 UCI faculty members, 90 complete courses, 300 video lectures and over 1,500 learning assets. The Web site has achieved global appeal, receiving over 1 million cumulative visits, not including traffic to our YouTube and iTunes sites. Over 38% of visitors are from countries outside of the U.S. The site is consistently ranked alongside the top ten OCW projects in the U.S., among MIT, Tufts, Notre Dame, and Johns Hopkins University. UCI’s faculty members have experienced and understand the significance of OCW, for themselves, their colleagues, and their students. UCI is a sustaining member of the OCWC. Unlike many other institutional OCW projects that offer only degree courses as OCW, UCI has paid special attention to the targeting of specific, deserving audiences who seek to continue their education. These audiences are served with stand alone or self- paced courses designed specifically for their needs.
• #31: The development of the OCW and Open Educational Resources (OER) movements both started in the form of open, easily accessible repositories of "learning objects,” discrete files containing material that was intended for use in the teaching/learningprocess.
• #32: In a pathway parallel to the organized and separately developed model for OCW, YouTube attracted several universities, including most prominently UC Berkeley, with its capacity of accepting lecture-length videos of classroom lectures. This opened a huge channel for OCW, one in which any university willing to simply video capture a lecture and post it for the world to see could do so easily and cheaply. YouTube currently hosts over 700,000 video lectures, allowing users to browse for courses within three categories: primary/secondary, higher education, and lifelong learning.
• #35: iTunes created an section called iTunesU to provide a channel for open education. While it offered a broader format, not restricted to video formats in the YouTube manner, iTunesU was initially restricted in its scope. But with its recent announcement regarding the lifting of restrictions, the volume of OCW materials in their repository will rise significantly. The site features more than 500,000 lectures, videos, books, and other resources on thousands of subjects from Algebra to Zoology from education and cultural institutions in 26 countries--including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, UC Berkeley, MoMA, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress.
• #37: Again, in a separate and parallel fashion, fueled by the rapidly rising cost of textbooks, the Open Text Book movement formed and today is making sharp inroads on the textbook publishing industry. In fact, a number of publishers are exploring very low cost or free access to their textbooks seeking income from the services that surround textbooks such as tutoring and digital learning supplements. Many textbooks today resemble courses in their digital expression. 
• #41: The first MOOC was created in August 2011 by two Stanford professors, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. It's unlikely subject for such a popular course was artificial intelligence. It rapidly enrolled 58,000students who learned about it through a network of people interested in the subject, but as word spread enrollments jumped to over 160,000. The huge publicity gained by this effort and the very large numbers of enrollments quickly caught the attention of seed and venture investors and MOOCs were the newest big thing in higher education. 
• #42: The response to Stanford's success in two courses was immediate. A number of start-up companies or organizations were formed to take advantage of what looked like a version of another Facebook. The variety of the responses and the ways that investors believe that they can gain a return on their investments is interesting. 
• #43: Coursera a higher-ed startup focused on bringing Ivy League caliber courses to the masses, for free. Coursera has the ability to reach a vastly engaged audience from their partnerships with universities like Stanford, Princeton, and UPenn.
• #44: Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Coursera envisions a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Its technology enables professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
• #47: Coursera doesn’t know exactly how it will profit from the free courses it is offering with major universities. The contract proposes 8 potential ways to generate income, which the universities agreed to in spirit. But few if any of these ideas are currently happening and seem to be ideas for the future.
• #51: Udacity believes that university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth. Udacity was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for very low cost. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The class was twice profiled by the New York Times and also by other news media.
• #53: Udemy claims to recruit the world's top experts, including New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, celebrities, and Ivy League professors. These expert instructors have taught over 200,000 students on Udemy, helping them learn everything from programming to yoga to design to salsa and more. Udemy's platform makes it easy for experts to build an online course. Instructors can use video, PowerPoint, PDFs, audio, zip files and live classes to quickly build a course and share their expertise with anyone in the world with an internet connection.The million-dollar milestone and the redesign of its teacher-facing UI come on the heels of strong growth for the startup over the last year. Over the last nine months, the co-founder said, the company has been seeing steady 20 percent month-over-month growth. To date, instructors have published 5,000 courses on Udemy in subjects ranging from self-help and design to photography and programming, with 1,500 of those being paid courses — a number that has increased 7-fold since last year.
• #55: EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions, the founders are creating a new online-learning experience with online courses that reflect their disciplinary breadth. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning–both on-campus and worldwide. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. EdX's goals combine the desire to reach out to students of all ages, means, and nations, and to deliver these teachings from a faculty who reflect the diversity of its audience. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard.
• #60: U.S. students today graduate with an average student debt of about $26,000, but this average masks the scope of the problem for individuals. Debt for a bachelor’s degree can range has high as $50,000 +. For graduates starting out in a tough job market with an obligation to make monthly payments is discouraging to say the least and weighs on the public psychology. This burden is virtually inescapable—such debts, which are usually guaranteed by the federal government cannot be relieved by bankruptcy proceedings and are subject to the same collection methods as those who owe delinquent taxes.  Total student debt in the U.S. now topped $1 trillion in 2012. When compared to the total consumer debt in the U.S. of $11 trillion, which has been falling in recent years, student debt threatens the very economic health of the nation just as mortgage debt did a few years ago.
• #62: Unlike almost every other country in the world, the U.S. has a tradition of education as a primary means of upward social mobility and the treatment of the cost of education as an investment in the future of its children, investment in the very literal sense of saving and then spending money on a college education. This investment mentality has underlined the market aspects of education in the U.S. and, of course, the cost of education is a significant market element. The cost of education was also extremely important during the time when the U.S. was moving from elite to mass higher education. For instance, the GI bill immediately after WWII dramatically reduced the personal cost of higher education for millions of Americans, driving an otherwise unemployed workforce into colleges to gain the skills needed for the growth of our economy in the 1950s and 1960s. Both to provide additional infrastructure for mass higher education, and to improve access, both financial and geographical, and particularly to provide a nation-wide "second chance" pathway, the U.S. system of community colleges became one of the first efforts to reduce the cost of higher education and remains so today. In addition, the U.S. system for "banking" academic credits created a large number of students with some college education (including education from the inexpensive community colleges) but not enough for a four year degree. Targeting this population has been important in our history and has recently attracted much attention as unemployment and the shortage of skilled workers in the U.S. has converged in a highly politicized climate. The forces we see at play now, rising personal costs of higher education, increasing student debt, unemployment, unmet workforce needs, and the political climate which encourages wide spread criticism of public institutions has paved the way for new providers in the low cost degree and degree completion field. Finally, the role of OCW as revealed by the publicity surrounding MOOCs has begun to be a major factor in lowering the cost of degree education in the U.S.
• #63: The 1970s saw a surge of interest in helping people complete their degrees, some of whom had their education interrupted by war or financial difficulties. Several states started institutions with an emphasis on giving 4-year degree credit for courses taken at other institutions or who could "test out" of courses, obtain credit for experience or non-accredited learning, and take additional courses to complete their degrees.
• #64: The current climate has created an imperative for public universities to provide a low cost, part-time, non-residential, online, option for a low cost degree.
• #65: Just now becoming evident is the use of OCW by major institutions and organizations in the offering of low cost degrees. These three examples provide different models for the future of higher education in the U.S. (first) and the world.
• #68: Coursera and Antioch College have entered “into a contract to license several of the courses Courserahas built. Antioch University, would offer versions of the MOOCs for credit as part of a bachelor’s degree program. ”The deal represents one of the first instances of a third-party institution buying permission to incorporate a MOOC into its curriculum…..in an effort to lower the full cost of a degree for students.” Kolowich, Steve. “MOOCs for Credit,” Inside Higher Ed, October 29, 2012.