Tag Archives: online education

Illustration credit: Wall Street Journal

by James A. Bacon

Progressive icon Bernie Sanders famously called for “free” higher education. Not free for taxpayers, of course, but free for students. Daniel Pianko, co-founder of the University Ventures fund, thinks that nearly free tuition may be coming — thanks to market-driven innovation.

COVID-19 is accelerating trends that were underway before the epidemic saddled traditional higher-ed institutions with the task of reopening campuses and keeping students, faculty and staff safe. Many classes are being taught online, and many colleges and universities are offering a 10% tuition discount as compensation.

“Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing,” writes Pianko in the Wall Street Journal.

Pianko expects that one day online educational institutions will be able to provide college degrees almost for free. Continue reading →

Online learning at Old Dominion University, a key participant in the Virginia Online Network.

Several years ago when Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, was still teaching high school government classes in Chesterfield County and serving as majority leader in the House of Delegates, he had to take a continuing-education course to get his teaching re-certification.

“I went, wow, my schedule was crazy. There was no way I could get to a class,” he recalls. “I was swamped teaching and doing the majority leader thing.”

Cox’s salvation was online learning. Finding time to study at night, he managed to complete his re-certification requirements. Likewise, his wife Julie earned a Master’s degree in crisis counseling through an online course delivered by Liberty University. Having seen the advantages of online learning close-up, he has become a big believer. He sees the online learning as a big part of the higher-ed future, and he wants Virginia’s public institutions to get more involved.

Kirk Cox. (Photo credit: Roanoke Times.)

Cox took the legislative lead in 2015 to create the Online Virginia Network (OVN), a portal delivering online courses from Old Dominion University, George Mason University, and other public Virginia institutions that develop online capabilities. The portal, which targets 1.1 million Virginians who have taken some college courses but not completed their degree, has its debut this fall semester. Last time he checked, says Cox, OVN was on track to meet its target enrollment of 225 students.

“My immediate target with the OVN is adult learners with some college credit,” says Cox. “Military guys. Working moms. A four-year degree would be extremely beneficial for them.”

As he knows from personal experience, it’s not easy for working people to return to school. The dominant educational model offers classes at set times during the day, typically on a Tuesday-Thursday or a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. “If you’re working, that’s tough,” says Cox. “We want to make it easier for these folks to come back and help them get a higher-paying job.”

Private schools — including Liberty University, which Cox says, has “eaten our lunch in the online space” — offer online courses as well. But tuition at Virginia institutions, subsidized by the state, is more affordable. Previously, students could enroll in either ODU or GMU’s online programs, but they were restricted to the course offerings of each individual institution. With OVN, they will be able to mix and match courses from both institutions, as well as from colleges and community colleges that join the consortium in the future.

“The portal brings all the online programs together in one place,” says Tony Maggio, a fiscal analyst for the House Appropriations Committee. “The programs themselves will reside in the host institutions. A degree program could come from multiple providers. The experience will be seamless from the student’s perspective.”

OVN funding will provide counselors to help students navigate the system as well as a net cost calculator to help evaluate the most efficient path forward.

The program works nicely for ODU and GMU as well.

“It’s a natural connection,” says Dr. Ellen J. Neufeldt, vice president of student engagement and enrollment services at ODU, which operates the largest online program of any public university in Virginia. About 20% of ODU’s students, many of them in the military, are already online.

“The Online Virginia Network initiative aligns with our mission of affordability and access and has influenced the way Mason serves undergraduate students online,” says Robin Rose Parker, a director for strategic engagement & communications AT GMU. “This complements our online efforts at the graduate level and helps us leverage the online model to reach many more potential students. In fact, OVN has provided Mason with the opportunity to further target a key segment in Virginia — the adult learner — an increasingly significant part of the community we serve.”

The present incarnation of OVN is just the beginning. Building the network is Cox’s number one higher-ed priority in the 2018 session, which, given the fact that he is the newly elected Speaker of the House, means it will be a top priority of the House of Delegates.

Cox says he hopes to find ways to wring out costs of online attendance. Why, he asks, should online students be charged student activity and athletic fees? Is there a way for online students to share instructional materials rather than pay thousands of dollars for textbooks? Can classes be structured so that super-popular instructors can reach more students?

He also will work to coax other Virginia higher-ed institutions into participating in the network. In his view, there’s more at stake than helping students earn college degrees, as important as that is. The educational industry is changing, and Virginia’s public universities need to get a foothold online to adapt.

With their big endowments and deep alumni bases, the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech may not have to change their residential-college model, Cox says. But he’s convinced that the high-cost, high-tuition model at most institutions is unsustainable.

“If you’re not innovative — if you’re not holding costs down — you’re going to be in trouble,” Cox says. “For the viability of our public institutions, they’ve got to be in that space.”

Well, you don’t get the ENTIRE Georgia Tech experience with an online degree. For an extra $31,000, the bricks-and-mortar experience has got to buy you something.

by James A. Bacon Jr.

The revolution in online education continues. It’s just taking longer than it should.

Two years ago, the Georgia Institute of Technology partnered with Udacity, a company that runs massively open online courses (MOOCs) and ATT to launch an online masters degree in computer science charging a fraction the cost per credit hour. Georgia Tech was staking its academic reputation on its ability to deliver a quality education online. (Here was my spin on the story at that time.)

So, how is the program working two and a half years later? According to a Wall Street Journal update, the online program has evolved but looks like it has staying power. The program is “relatively massive” with 2,789 students enrolled this semester compared with 312 in the campus-based program. And it’s on track to turn a profit by May.

If there are any drawbacks, it’s that students are moving through the program at a slower pace than the school predicted. “It’s not like they’re not making progress,” said Charles Isbell Mr., senior associate dean at the College of Computing. “They’re making progress at a more leisurely pace than we expected.”

But that should come as no surprise given that many students are juggling their online courses with full-time jobs. Sandip Agrawal, didn’t want to leave San Francisco or his job as a Google software engineer so he enrolled in the Georgia Tech program to build his technical skills and professional credentials, said the WSJ. The alternative to the Georgia Tech degree would have been stringing together a few massive, open online courses and forgoing an accredited degree. That George Tech degree, by the way, will cost $7,000 compared to $38,000 for the bricks-and-mortar version, and Agrawal continues pulling in a salary.

Little wonder that Georgia Tech’s Isbell says it wouldn’t surprise him if in three years from now the program will be enrolling 10,000 students. Says he: “This is sustainable and this is scalable.”

Bacon’s bottom line: Here in Virginia, tuition and fees are still rising faster than inflation and incomes. A generation of students is agreeing to a life of indentured servitude in order to obtain a college degree (all too often, never even completing the degree requirements). There will always be a market for the four-year “residential” experience with football games, face-to-face interaction with professors, tossing frisbees on the quad, drunken frat parties and kvetching about racism and the rape epidemic on campus. But the residential experience, which seems so distressing to so many, is increasingly becoming a luxury product for the affluent classes. It is not a viable alternative for hundreds of thousands of Virginians. Something has got to change — and it will.

Gardner Campbell (left) and Christina Engelbart.

Is there such thing as an OOC? We’ve all heard of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). But what do you call it when the enrollment in an online course that’s open to the public but only 100 students sign up? An Open Online Course?

Whatever you call it, Virginia Commonwealth University taught such a course over the summer entitled, “Living the Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds.” The Richmond Times-Dispatch profiled the course today.

VCU officials refer to the course, properly speaking, as a “connectivist” MOOC. “It’s not about content delivery. It’s about being able to act as individual learners in a shared conceptual space,” explained course designer Gardner Campbell, vice provost for learning innovation and student success. The idea, as the T-D paraphrases him, was to teach students how to use digital media to to think more deeply about problems and share solutions on a global scale.

A second course this fall connects VCU students with local non-profit organizations to develop social media strategies for The World Pediatric Project and the Preemptive Love Coalition, both of which provide medical services to children overseas. What makes the courses different — and potentially valuable — is that they are open to non-students, including professionals working for the non-profits.

“Technology was just a steppingstone for the real vision, which was to help the world become a better place by figuring out better ways that we can all come together, work together, think together to solve big problems,” said Christina Engelbart, daughter of the man who invested the computer mouse and graphical user interface among other things, who provided $10,000 in scholarships to support the VCU program.

I’ll admit, that sounds a little too idealistic and kumbaya for my taste. But that’s OK. It doesn’t matter what I think. What’s important is that VCU is joining other universities in experimenting with what online courses can accomplish. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of linking students with non-profits to accomplish real-world goals. My hunch is that MOOCs (or OOCs) will morph into hundreds of different forms, customized for the specific task at hand. For mastering some bodies of knowledge, OOCs and MOOCs will never replace traditional classroom learning. But for others, they will. Education will be richer as a result.

Now, if we can just find a way for OOCs to make education less expensive.

— JAB

MOOC pioneer Sebastian Thrun. I’d feel a lot better about MOOCs if he took off those uber-geeky Apple computer-glasses.

Not unexpectedly, after two years experience, the purveyors of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are re-evaluating their model for delivering educational services, according to the New York Times. It turns out that the jaw-breaking numbers of students enrolled in some MOOC courses — 160,000 in the case of on Stanford University professor’s course on artificial intelligence — really are too good to be true. A recent study of MOOCs indicates that only half of enrollees actually viewed a lecture, and only 4% completed a course. In a highly touted program at San Jose State, evidence suggests that students taking classes online performed worse than their peers in traditional classrooms.

Some critics of online learning no doubt will seize on these findings to crow about the superiority of the status quo. But they would do well to heed this line in the article: “Even the loudest critics of MOOCs do not expect them to fade away. More likely, they will morph into many different shapes.”

“It’s like, ‘The MOOC is dead, long live the MOOC,’ ” said Jonathan Rees, a Colorado State University-Pueblo professor who has expressed fears that the online courses would displace professors and be an excuse for cuts in funding. “At the beginning everybody talked about MOOCs being entirely online, but now we’re seeing lots of things that fall in the middle, and even I see the appeal of that.”

It’s been clear for some time, actually, that so-called “hybrid” learning, combining elements of online and face-to-face learning, may be the way forward. The experimentation and tinkering continues. “We’re moving from the hype to the implementation,” said MOOC pioneer George Siemens, who convened a meeting last week to discuss results. “It’s exciting to see universities saying, ‘Fine, you woke us up,’ and beginning to grapple with how the Internet can change the university.'”

The VCU value proposition: a Top 25 basketball team

by James A. Bacon

I often wonder if higher-education board members can see the forest for the trees. In my mind’s eye, I see university administrations sharing huge volumes of reports and data in thick notebooks — no one can accuse them of a lack of full disclosure. And I imagine most board members (with a handful of notable exceptions) taking the information exactly as given, focusing on the nits and lice, never quite grasping the big picture.

For example, do you think the Virginia Commonwealth University administration would ever present the following data to its Board of Visitors — or anyone on the board would ask for it to be presented this way?

Consumer Price Index (2008-2012): up 6.6%
Virginia median household income (2008-2012): down 5.5%
VCU in-state tuition and fees (2008-1202): up 32%
Average VCU student debt upon graduation: $28,889*

Here’s where the money is coming from:

Source: State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. Note: E&G stands for “Education and General”

Here’s where the money is going:

Source: Knight Foundation on Intercollegiate Athletics

The solid line shows average spending per full-time-equivalent student. Hmmm. It trended slightly down. The dotted line shows average spending per athlete. Hmmm. It trended dramatically higher. Let’s summarize:

• Virginians’ median household incomes down by about 5.5%
• VCU tuition and fees up 32%
• Academic spending per full-time student down 9.2%
• Athletic spending per athlete up $40,000 up 86%

What are VCU students getting for their massive increases for tuition and fees? The privilege of rooting for a Top 25 basketball team. Anything else? Better academic quality? More prestigious, better paid professors? (Hah!) Better career prospects?

Looks to me like VCU is a prime candidate for being dismembered by Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or other variants of online- and technology-based education. At the end of the day VCU has a solid medical school and a few pockets of excellence like the advertising Brand Center and a top-tier art school.  How long will students for other programs be willing to pay VCU tuition and fees for the value they’re getting in return?

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* Average debt for the 63% of graduates who carried debt. Does not include the debt incurred by those who did not graduate.

Teresa Sullivan. Photo credit: Virginia Business.

In an interview for its June issue, Virginia Business interviewed University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). University professors are teaching six MOOCs this year. On the positive side, Sullivan said, the experience is changing how the professors are teaching their classes on the Grounds and promoting the UVa brand around the world.

But there’s one knotty issue the university hasn’t worked out yet:

We have a special issue with the MOOCs, and that’s the honor system.  It is known that, in the online environment, cheating is rampant.  It’s been difficult to develop ways that you actually know who’s taking an exam.

That’s a legitimate quandary. As far as I’m concerned, the honor code is sacred. Inviolable. It’s a bastion against moral decay and it cannot be compromised. The University of Virginia has systems in place on the Grounds to indoctrinate students and enforce the code. That system cannot possibly be replicated for 20,000 people taking a course around the world.

UVa may have to settle for two standards — one for students physically enrolled at the university and one for everyone else. Unfortunately, if the university cannot vouch for the integrity of online students, it will be understandably reluctant to grant them degrees, as Georgia Tech plans to do in a program I posted about recently. It’s a big issue to work out.

— JAB