Crumbling ivory towers

GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND

E-learning is coming to higher education, and at least three consortiums are racing to develop a platform for online university courses:

https://www.coursera.org
https://www.edx.org
http://www.udacity.com

At edX, you can sign up for a free course from MIT, Harvard, or Berkeley, and get a certificate of completion.  150,000 students from around the world enrolled in MIT's brutal 'Circuits and Electronics' course when  it was first offered.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/education/edlife/anant-agarwal-discusses-free-online-courses-offered-by-a-harvard-mit-partnership.html

U of T is one of 12 members of Coursera, a group of universities that includes Stanford, CalTech and Princeton.   1.6 million students have enrolled in their free courses so far this year.

These are just fireflies before the coming storm, it won't be long before private degree-granting institutions emerge.  When courses from top universities are widely available, then there is a straightforward business in providing tutors, marking, libraries, labs, study carrels, examination services, and certification that the student has passed the course.  Perhaps a future transcript will state that the student got such a mark on this course from Princeton and on that course from Harvard; the only limit is the credibility of the business offering the certification.  Some businesses may start by offering in-house degrees for their employees and then expand: imagine an engineering degree from Toyota or Apple based on courseware from MIT and CalTech.

Taxpayers should be asking hard questions about the future of our provincial universities.  Ontario provides roughly $7.5 billion for higher education; for that we get big campuses with ranks of tenured professors and armies of administrators.  Maybe there's a smarter way to deliver more for less.

Comments