When MIT approached Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) to participate in edX, the new Harvard/MIT massive open online course (MOOC) initiative, we reacted with both interest and skepticism. What did MIT have in mind for Bunker Hill Community College? How would edX “transform the way that community college students learn” as edX President Anant Agarwal claimed, when he discussed the likely impact of MOOCs upon both Bunker Hill Community College and Massachusetts Bay Community College, the two institutions invited to participate in this experiment?

Innovative programming and instructional experimentation has characterized Bunker Hill Community College’s approach to teaching and learning since its inception. In the 1970s, BHCC pioneered its Center for Self Directed Learning, affording students opportunities to learn at their own pace and in their own style. The community college has been offering online courses since 1997 and grown this enterprise so that today, 4,000 of its more than 13,500 students take at least one online course. While most of the online offerings follow a traditional lecture format, BHCC’s online nursing degree program features a hybrid configuration. That is, students learn content online and this is supplemented by in-class instruction and the requisite clinical experiences in a healthcare setting.

Today at BHCC, the establishment of “Learning Communities” transforms traditional classrooms into peer-focused collaborative ventures based on commonly shared experiences. In five years, learning communities have become a central and unifying feature of teaching and learning at BHCC, currently involving more than one third of the student body. The goal is to make every class a learning community in the next five years and to strengthen the complementary relationship between hybrid online offerings and learning community courses.

Building further upon learning community successes, BHCC’s newest initiative, “Life Map” seeks nothing less than to empower students to chart their own futures with individualized pathways. Both virtual and physical spaces are used. A new portal enables students to do everything from sharing learning experiences and creating e-portfolios to whatever advances the probability of their success and degree completion. The Life Map Center brings services such as face-to-face advising to students to complement the portal.

It is against this dynamic backdrop of multiple and intersecting, virtual and real-time learning experiments that BHCC considered MIT’s offer. With critical support from the Gates Foundation, Bunker Hill and Mass Bay community colleges will offer a MOOC adaptation of MIT’s popular Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course at each of their campuses. Selected faculty members at the two community colleges will undergo professional development opportunities to strengthen their ability to teach a massive open online course successfully for community college students. An integral feature of the collaboration will be the design and pilot testing of assessment tools to determine both benefits and challenges associated with employing MOOCs at the community colleges. Supplementing the MIT online instruction and course materials, students will meet collectively twice weekly with community college faculty. These classroom meetings will focus on communal course problem-solving and help students to complete assignments, which would ordinarily be considered homework in a typical classroom environment. This strategy has been used elsewhere and is commonly referred to as a “flipped class,” because the online lectures replace traditional homework, while the flipped course’s homework is done during the time students spend in class.

Other major differences between MIT’s MOOC offerings and that of the two participating community colleges are of a more logistical nature. For instance, MOOCs are available to anyone and they are free. Students do not receive credit for completing a MOOC, although MIT does give a certificate. With the community college edX experiment, students will register and pay for the courses. In return, they will earn college credit.

The sheer number of individuals worldwide who are able to participate in a MOOC promises an accessibility to education for almost everyone everywhere—a mindboggling phenomenon. One can imagine educational opportunities and benefits with neither fiscal constraints nor physical boundaries. This vision of fully accessible democratized learning is one logical extension of a core value of community colleges. However, as Utopian as its originators would have us believe it to be, MOOCs purported reinvention of higher education must and will go through a myriad of difficult, soul-searching and, yes, profit-driven considerations and questions if this model for large-scale online instruction is to reach the full potential to which its creators and advocates aspire.

For community colleges, it is difficult to imagine that MOOCs can make a significant contribution to the college mission without being successfully adapted to incorporate the human interaction, assistance and sense of communal learning that says, “We are all in this together.” These hallmarks of Bunker Hill’s learning community courses have already demonstrated a 32% increase in student persistence rates. In contrast, traditional MOOCs’ persistence rates often are in single digits.

Another issue involves the academic preparation of students to do college-level work. Universities frequently bemoan the inadequate mathematics and English writing skills of entering students. At community colleges, even more students arrive needing developmental coursework. Some institutions are designing MOOCs precisely to bridge these skill gaps. Yet, the persistence of developmental students will likely remain a problem even with extensive support by faculty and interaction with fellow students. The lack of a classroom environment may make MOOCs less effective with this student population.

The non-credit, grade-free nature of traditional MOOCs begs the question of how student performance will be assessed. This issue is of particular significance to community colleges when assisting students to transfer both into and out of other colleges and universities, as well as when needing to demonstrate student skills to prospective employers.

Community colleges comprise a unique sector of higher education focused on the teaching and learning process. They have their own history, mission and diverse student populations, each member of which has distinct needs and aspirations. Further, community colleges have developed a considerable body of empirical knowledge and hands-on experience in providing effective pedagogical experiences. In communities across America, these institutions provide centers for lifelong learning, both by degrees and community education courses. Considering this context, MOOCs are unlikely to completely reinvent community college education or, for that matter, any other sector of higher education, as their most ardent proponents have argued. On the other hand, they have in their early use, demonstrated enough potential in expanding access and learning options to be considered more than a fad as critics of MOOCs have warned.

Before MOOCs can completely fulfill their potential, they need to be seen less as new “technological marvels” or lucrative opportunities for entrepreneurs. Perhaps they are better viewed by community colleges as new potentially valuable teaching models to be integrated with other complementary strategies of already proven worth. As such, they need to be rigorously evaluated and modified as warranted to improve educational outcomes. Only then will MOOCs find their proper niche in facilitating the critical mission of America’s community colleges.

Mary L. Fifield has been president of Bunker Hill Community College since 1997. She announced in September that she will retire as president on June 30, 2013.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are using technologies to make freely available the things for which universities charge significant money. MOOCs ... free online courses ... lecture podcasts ... low-cost off-the-shelf general education courses ... online tutorials ... digital collections of open learning resources ... open badges ... all are disrupting higher education's hold on knowledge, instruction and credentialing.

NEBHE convened more than 400 New England educators and opinion leaders in Boston in mid-October to discuss these new opportunities for students and challenges for traditional higher education institutions.

The speakers included EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger (below) who cited among signs of the newly connected world of open learning: digitized learning, student empowerment, peer-to-peer learning and an acknowledgment of student swirl, including “reverse transfer” from four-year colleges to community colleges and other kinds of institutions.

Oblinger noted that anyone can participate in the new open learning. Reminiscent in some ways of Wikipedia and fueled by in social innovations such as “crowdsourcing” and “do-it-yourself” instruction, the new models are rife with many of the edu-terms you’ve (over-)heard for years, but they are suddenly more cohesive and seem to have more momentum.

Models include Khan Academy and MOOCs (massive open online courses). They are fascinating modes of delivery with sophisticated analytics systems for learning assessment. (Still, for as along as the question of what students should learn goes unanswered, such issues about delivery should be noted with an asterisk.)

Oblinger also explained how groups such as Persistence Plus give at-risk students “nudges” via mobile devices to remind them to study for their exams, for example. She spoke about using technology for learning tools of the teaching trade through simSchool for pre- and in-service teachers, instructors and administrators to improve their knowledge and confidence.

Shocked at MIT

MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science Anant Agarwal is the president of the nonprofit edX created by Harvard and MIT. Agarwal mocked how little has changed in higher ed over the past century. He showed slides of a recent MIT class, contrasted with one from a half-century earlier. “What do you notice? Whoop-de-do, we have colored seats … and one of the most spectacular inventions of all time in education has been sliding backboards,” he said. He then showed an edx class being offered to high school students in ... as the audience was surprised to learn ... Mongolia.

Agarwal contended that courses offered via edX are as rigorous as those offered on-campus. With no marketing, nearly 155,000 students from more than 160 countries registered for the inaugural Circuits and Electronics course; just over 7,000 wound up certified. The students were split evenly between traditional college-age (and a few high-school age) on one hand, and adult learners on the other.

Teaching 150,000-plus students required the same staff resources as teaching a 150-person class. Because of effective peer interaction, Agarwal predicted, fewer staff will be needed next time around. Students watch videos of about five to 10 minutes, not unlike those made famous by Agarwal's student Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. The videos are interwoven with short interactive exercises and online laboratories.

Agarwal noted that skeptics wondered why MIT and Harvard would give away the platform. The answer, he said, is that with open-source, you get "the whole community working together and improving the platform ... think of it as peer-to-peer software development."

When kids hit age 13, Agarwal added, they go digital and speak teenglish composed of grunts and silence. They don’t even answer the phone, he said, so “text them!” The students love instant feedback, said Agarwal, like the green check mark that is superimposed when they get something right.

An audience member asked about courses in areas such as the humanities that don’t lend themselves to the big green check mark. Agarwal noted that edX is exploring various assessments to grade open-form content and peer learning, but there’s a long way to go.

Another asked the difference between the 155,000 who started the program and the 7,000 or so who made it through. Agarwal said analytics show many of the students who started were not prepared, and the successful students simply spent more time doing the exercises.

Up from subprime

John Katzman said technology has been held out as a solution to higher education’s competitive challenges, but online learning began as the province of what some people would call “subprime educators"  ... and he showed logo of University of Phoenix.

The founder of Princeton Review, 2Tor and most recently, Noodle, Katzman noted that while the Internet began on college campuses, most tech-ed programs such as Blackboard flanked traditional campuses, rather than replacing them.

Noting that technology’s cost structure is higher at a small scale and lower at a large scale, Katzman extolled the collaboration long absent from the siloed and jealous higher education sector. He showed a slide with boxes labeling colleges as elite, middle, entry, two-year, four-year, MBA ... PhD., and suggested there'll be consolidation of institutions rewarding scale within each of those boxes, but not across them. If a college is a regional brand, rather than a global one, collaboration is especially crucial to get the benefits of scale.

Katzman contended that instructors say students are learning better and a larger percentage of online students walk for graduation than on-campus students. Colleges are also tracking how many students donate each year, reflecting a feeling of team, he said.

Another trend, he pointed out, is “edutourism.” Students from around the world, especially Asia, want to go to the U.S. for its reputation for academic freedom.

Reaching more students

Stanford University computer science professor Andrew Ng explained that the group he co-founded called Coursera uses technology to offer courses from top schools. He said his normal class reaches 400 students at Stanford; last year, when he put the course online, he reached 100,000 students.

Ng noted that the online learning is more interactive than the bricks-and-mortar classroom in terms of students answering questions. "When I ask a question in my classroom, usually half the class is still madly scribbling the last thing I said. About 10% are on zoned out on Facebook and there's one smartypants in the first row who blurts out the answer, and I feel really good that one student knew the answer and the class moves on with only one student having gotten in to attempt an answer. On the website, the video stops, and every student gets to attempt an answer."

He said a U.S. Department of Education study showed that online instruction and classroom instruction have comparable high quality, and a blend of the two is even better.

But if anyone can take a Princeton course online, he asked, why would they go to the campus. Ng conceded that the answer is the real value is not just the content, but rather the interaction with the professors and other equally bright students.

“Asking the students to watch the content at home allows them to come into the classroom and have more interactive discussions,” said Ng. “By marrying the idea of MOOCs and flipped classrooms, we’ve flipped many classrooms at many of our 33 partner campuses.”

At Coursera, Ng said, we think high-quality education is not a privilege for the elite, but a fundamental human right. Ng noted further that for many people, higher education is not a choice between Princeton online and the Princeton campus, but rather between online and nothing.

Branding and monetizing

Chris Vogel, who wrote a story on edX for Boston Magazine, asked if the new models cheapen a school’s brand? Katzman noted that colleges can dilute their brand by admitting students online whom they wouldn’t normally take or by giving students a bad experience, but, he said, scale actually correlates positively to reputation. Ng noted that Stanford’s brand has not been hurt, and Stanford faculty like the idea of reaching so many more students.

Vogel then asked a $64,000 question: how do you make money off the model? Ng said he often is asked: Why don’t you charge $5 for a course? “The most needy people in society not only don’t have $5 ... probably don’t have a credit card, he said. "But teaching online courses is an expensive enterprise; we need to bring revenue back to share with our university partners to cover our costs,” said Ng, adding: “Many of our partners have expressed interest in charging for a university-branded certificate with the course content being free.”

Coursera is also working on monetizing job placement. “If you do well in a Princeton class or a Stanford or Cal Tech class, that’s a strong sign that you’re a talented individual and companies would love to talk to you,” said Ng. “Being mindful of privacy, we’re piloting introduction between our top students and employers and charging employers for this.”

But, Vogel pressed, will employers appreciate certificates as much as degrees? Ng said yes. “There are many areas where having just one additional course that teaches you some latest technology can significantly boost someone’s income. Employers also take seriously the fact that these are Princeton, Cal Tech and Stanford classes, and it’s not easy to do well in them. Our demographic is people who are self-motivated and decided, for whatever reason, to spend their free time taking one of these ridiculously hard courses.”

I want Ghandi

Saul Kaplan, founder and “Chief Catalyst” at the Business Innovation Factory, facilitated a session called “Gandhian Innovation and Creating the $10,000 Degree.”

The first panelist was the first university president to earn approval from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), the regional accrediting agency, for a competency-based program, based not on credit hours but on competencies. Southern New Hampshire University's program will next be considered by the U.S. Department of Education.

“If the guys at Coursera and 2tor are working with USC or MIT on circuitry," said SNHU President Paul LeBlanc, "we’re talking about the 37 to 40 million Americans who have some credits but no degree and the 30 million who have no college credits at all."

LeBlanc said he is skeptical of the ability of established players being able to do disruptive game-changing innovation, except when programs with very high brands, built on exclusivity, release their brands. "If Podunk University does that same course with that delivery method, they’re not going to have 100 students showing up. If Stanford does it, who doesn’t want to have a Stanford course on their credentials?”

In an economically booming area of Texas that is home to 155,000 oil wells, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin has created a $10,000 college degree, even as other UT campuses raise tuition. President W. David Watts explained that the UTPB “Texas Science Scholars” offer the deal in the lowest-producing majors, such as chemistry.

Ed Klonoski, president, Charter Oak State College, compared the 40-year-old Charter Oak to a fish that had lungs—it proved  an advantage when the oceans dried up. We accepted credits from any regionally accredited institution and for portfolios and prior learning assessment. Now the idea is ripe. He told of a family that will earn seven degrees from Charter Oak for a total of $60,000. Klonoski called for a national common definition of competency-based learning, noting that he and his New England colleagues will be swamped by Coursera, 2tor and other national powerhouses.

Assessing assessment

Rosemarie Nassif, special advisor to the assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education quipped: “I’m from the federal government and I’m hear to help you.” Joking aside, her department, an occasional whipping boy for tech reformers, is indeed obsessed with meeting President Obama's goal to make the U.S. the world leader in college degrees by 2020. Meeting that goal could hinge on two major themes at the NEBHE conference: the role of IT and competency-based assessment.

Nassif noted that education can be assessed in new ways regardless of where the learning came from, including work and life experience. Such alternative assessment reveals more than transcripts can. It is time-independent allowing students to progress at their given pace, it increases affordability and allows for flexibility. Nassif called for forging widely accepted learning outcomes. She suggested higher ed could learn from the Common Core State Standards process being used in K-12 and involving industry and states.

Sally M. Johnstone, vice president for academic advancement at the Western Governors University (WGU), spoke of the online institution headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. When WGU was formed in 1996, the requirements were: serve workforce development, use technology to its fullest, and make it competency-based. WGU currently enrolls 36,000 students. The cost to student is $6,000 a year, “How long the students stay with the university is up to the student … we don’t count how long it takes a student, what we count is how well a student can demonstrate the skills and knowledge that have been defined for a bachelor’s or master’s degree,” said Johnstone. Today, WGU has about 600 full-time faculty, external councils comprising industry and academic representatives work on competencies in four schools: business, IT, health profession and teacher education … and committees create the courses to match the competencies.

Stinkin Badges?

Erin Knight, who leads the learning work at Mozilla, known for its mission to protect the open web and its open-source Firefox web browser, spoke of her "Open Badges" work supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The alternative credentialing system aims to allow the learner to control the credentials, moving away from seat time.

“The only things in the game right now are grades, transcripts and degrees, and there are only certain ways you can get those … there’s a bunch of learning that’s getting missed. The idea with badges is to have an alternative system that allows us to supplement the degree,” said Knight.

“Instead of having just a grade at the end of a course or a degree, we can recognize various competencies along the way,” said Knight. She said many of her peers in her master’s degree group were different kinds of learners who took different pathways, but the degree just presents them as all the same. Badges can capture a more comprehensive way to talk about their learning than just one-line naming degree.

Badges are not just images or digital stickers. Baked in is who issued the badge and when, a link to what they require, endorsements and links to urls of artifacts.

We want all the badges to work together, Knight said. Mozilla has built the plumbing on what should be in the badges—essentially digital resumes, which are evidence-based. “The learner is managing the collections and building identity and entrepreneurial side of things, and on the display side, there’s consumption for jobs and real results.”  Knight thinks employers will look at both badges and degrees, because the degrees don’t offer enough granular information. The narrative works particularly well in informal learning, out of school and on-the-job learning experiences, but colleges like Purdue and UC Davis are among those introducing badge systems for courses.

“A badge is just recognition of the learning experience," explained Knight. "Is there a way we can add more information to that badge that starts to get to the same results we lean on accrediting bodies to do now without requiring just a few top-down bodies to say, ‘Yes, this is OK, '” said Knight.

One session focused on“Flipped Instruction: The Interactive Classroom.” Julie Schell, senior educational research associate of the Mazur Group at Harvard University, told of the past and present of the flipped classroom idea. Schell quoted Bergmann and Sams: “Flipping the classroom is ... [a] mindset redirecting attention away from the teacher and putting attention on the learner and the learning.” One result is students spend class time on what we used to think of as “homework” and home-time viewing “lectures.” Schell explained the methods that inspired her blog Turn to Your Neighbor.

Click here for more on the conference ... And please watch here for additional videos ...

MIT will screen “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System” on Thursday, May 5, at the Ray and Maria Stata Center, beginning with a 6 p.m. reception and followed by an 8 p.m. panel discussion with: Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Cambria Managing Director Ellen Kumata, Harvard Graduate School of Education Academic Dean Robert B. Schwartz, and Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.

In the latest survey from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading.

Visit here to view a trailer.

Following last week's 8.9 magnitude earthquake off Northeastern Japan, continuing aftershocks and a massive tsunami, colleges and universities are keeping a close eye on that part of the world. Below are some updates from New England institutions.

• Boston University's Daily Free Press reports BU students in Tokyo O.K.
• 19 Yale Students Safe in Tokyo, reports The New Haven Register
• WTNH says two Conn. College students in Japan O.K.
• 31 UNH Students Safe in Japan, reports UnionLeader.com
• The Morning Sentinel of Maine reports 1 U. of Maine Farmington student O.K., 3 Colby students "unreachable"
• Boston Globe reports MIT grad. student studying disaster planning returns home from Japan safe but shocked
• Darmouth College reports 60 students and staff are safe in Japan

About 18,000 New England residents, including 10,000 from Greater Boston, live in Japan, according to the Boston Globe. Last week, local Japanese student associations gathered at MIT to discuss the situation. Among other relief efforts, a group of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital arranged travel plans to Sendai.

MIT’s Learning International Network Consortium (LINC) will hold three days of panel discussions and workshops from Sunday, May 23 to Wednesday, May 26 at MIT on “University Leadership: Bringing Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages.” National Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest will give a keynote address. Plenary speakers will include rectors of virtual universities in Mexico, Pakistan and Africa. For more, click here.