CyberSightings

In the Spotlight

Due to the enduring global recession, access to higher education has become more stratified. This issue is particularly severe in the United States, where tuition and fees at the most expensive private colleges and universities for the 2012–13 school year averaged more than $45,000 (source: www.usnews.com/). Students who cannot afford these fees have to look into other ways to finance their education, for example by getting a loan. As announced by the the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in its latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, outstanding student loan balances increased by $10 billion during the fourth quarter of 2012 to a total of $966 billion (www.newyorkfed.org/research/national_economy/householdcredit/DistrictReport_Q42012.pdf). Student debt has now become the second largest balance after mortgage debt. But what is even worse is that many of the 37 million Americans who owe money for their education are unable to repay their loans. According to a recent report from the Center for American Progress (www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/StudentLoanRefinancing-5.pdf), more than 13% of students whose loans came due in 2009 defaulted on the debt within three years; another 26% of borrowers of five of the major loan guaranty agencies became delinquent on their loans—one stop short of default.

The rise of “MOOCs,” or massive open online courses, may offer students new opportunities to access university education without indebting themselves. For example, Coursera (www.coursera.org/) has partnered with top universities in the world—such as Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and others—to offer free courses online for anyone to take. In a recent TED Talk, Stanford University professor and co-founder Daphne Koller explained that Coursera was created after her colleague Andrew Ng offered a machine learning class online for free and had about 100,000 people enroll (www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html/). The initiative has been a huge success so far: at the time of writing this column, enrollment has exceeded two million, with more than 200 online courses offered. However, Coursera isn't the only player in the “education 2.0” arena. Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have recently announced the creation of edX (www.edx.org/), a not for profit enterprise that in addition to providing online courses on its open source platform will set up a forum in which members can share experiences around online learning. Other ventures are emerging as well. For example, Udacity (www.udacity.com/) is a spin-off of Stanford University that provide several MOOCs, each consisting of multiple units comprising video lectures with closed captioning, integrated quizzes, and follow-up homework. Another similar initiative is Udemy (www.udemy.com/), an online learning platform launched in 2010 that allows instructors to host courses. Internet giant Google has also shown interest in this emerging market. In summer 2012, its research department ran a large free online course, Power Searching with Google (www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html/), taught by search expert, Dan Russell. The course was aimed at showcasing online search techniques and how people can use them to solve everyday problems. The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students, and so the project team decided to make the technology used to build it available as open source so that others can experiment with online learning.

In sum, online education is a rapidly accelerating trend, which could allow students who cannot afford tuition and fees to access high quality education content. However, this strategy still has weaknesses compared with conventional, face to face courses. For example, MOOCs provide very limited engagement with qualified instructors, who, for example, cannot answer students' questions or give other forms of feedback. Another common criticism toward these services is that they often do not provide credits, which can be transferred to educational institutions. However, despite these limitations, MOOCs are undoubtedly an important phenomenon, which promise to transform radically how education is delivered and received around the world.

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