While MOOCs may make access ...]]> Massive Open Online Courses (“MOOCs”) are free online courses offered by institutions of higher education to individuals across the world, without any admissions criteria. Through web-based courses hosted by MOOC platforms such as Coursera or edX, student-participants learn by accessing media, including documents, pictures and uploaded lectures on the course website.

While MOOCs may make access to education easier for individuals with certain disabilities, their format may render the courses inaccessible to individuals who have vision or hearing impairment. Many individuals with vision impairment use “assistive technology” such as screen readers and voice recognition software to use computers and access the Internet. Individuals with hearing impairment, meanwhile, often rely upon captioning when watching videos. Therefore, MOOCs may be inaccessible for individuals with vision or hearing impairment if the websites are not designed to work with assistive technology or if the lectures are not captioned or transcribed. If the MOOC courses are inaccessible to students with certain disabilities, the institutions and/or the platform providers may be found to have violated the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990.

Title II of the ADA provides that qualified individuals with disabilities may not be excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of the services, programs or activities of, nor subjected to discrimination by, public universities and colleges. Meanwhile, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits disabled individuals from being excluded from the participation in, denied the benefits of or subjected to discrimination under any operation of a college, university or other postsecondary institution receiving federal financial assistance.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for enforcing Section 504 and Title II. Since the early days of the Internet, OCR has emphasized that an institution’s communications with persons with disabilities must be as effective as the institution’s communications with others. OCR has repeatedly held that the “communications” includes the verbal presentation of a lecturer, printed material and the resources of the Internet. To determine whether a communication with disabled students is “as effective as” communications with nondisabled students, OCR analyzes three factors: 1) timeliness of delivery; 2) accuracy of the translation; and 3) provision in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and the abilities of the individual with the disability.

Unfortunately, the three-factor test promulgated by the OCR has not been meaningfully expanded upon by the OCR in a way that would provide institutions with a useful roadmap to ensure which features websites must have to ensure compliance with Section 504 and Title II.

However, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division’s publication entitled Accessibility of State and Local Government Websites to People with Disabilities provides helpful guidance for website compliance under the ADA and Section 504. Specifically, the division suggests that web developers refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. ­The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide many recommendations for making web content more accessible for individuals with disabilities, such as the recommendation that all prerecorded audio be captioned. The division also outlines a “Voluntary Action Plan for Accessible Websites,” which suggests that website hosts:

1. Establish a policy that their website will be accessible;

2. Ensure that all new and modified web pages and content, including tags, captions, photos, graphics and scanned images, are accessible;

3. Develop a plan for making the existing content more accessible and describe the plan on an accessible web page;

4. Ensure that in-house staff and contractors responsible for web page and content development are properly trained;

5. Provide a way for visitors to the website to request accessible information or services and establishing a procedure for quick responses to users with disabilities; and

6. Periodically enlist disability groups to test web pages for ease of use.

The Department of Justice recently announced that, in light of the fact that the “Internet as it is known today did not exist when Congress enacted the ADA” and that “[m]any colleges and universities offer degree programs online; [and that] some universities exist exclusively on the Internet,” it intends to propose amendments to the ADA’s regulations to “make clear to entities covered by the ADA their obligations to make their website accessible.” Unfortunately for institutions currently offering MOOCs, the process for drafting and finalizing such regulations may take years. In the meantime, OCR emphasizes that institutions have “an affirmative duty to establish a comprehensive policy in compliance with Title II in advance of any request” for an accommodation by a student with a disability.

Given OCR’s emphasis on the importance of effective communications and in light of the current lack of direct guidance from the departments of Education or Justice, it is important for institutions offering MOOCs to proactively ensure that the MOOCs will be fully accessible to students with visual and hearing impairments, and it would be wise for institutions to adhere, as closely as possible, to the division’s Voluntary Action Plan. Toward that goal, institutions should insist that contracts with MOOC platforms address each party’s responsibility in providing accessible content and addressing the other requirements outlined in the Voluntary Action Plan. While not exhaustive, the agreements generally should address the compatibility of all of the course materials with software used by individuals with vision impairments, the captioning and/or transcripts of lectures and the policies and procedures for handling mid-course requests for accommodation by a student with a disability.

Nicholas Anastasopoulos is a member of the Labor, Employment and Employee Benefits Group and Higher Education Group at the Massachusetts-based law firm of Mirick O'Connell. Amanda Marie Baer is an associate in the firm's Litigation Group and a member of its Higher Education Group. 

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]> In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

The context

The nation’s most visible and influential association representing the presidents of U.S. accredited, degree-granting private and public universities, the ACE remains consistently at the center of federal policy debates in areas critical to higher education.

With a focus on improving access and preparing every student to succeed, ACE convenes representatives from all sectors to collectively tackle the toughest higher education challenges and to address and resolve those issues that most affect access and student success. Among those issues are disparities in access, college completion, student preparation, financial aid, student debt loads, and higher education costs, as well as persistent gaps in access to and completion of higher education by minority groups.

Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible and attainable. Providing useful insights on the transformational potential MOOCs hold for higher education and how higher education will evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years, Broad points to the efforts that ACE is making in developing the next generation of higher education leadership. 

The interview

DiSalvio: Although significant progress has been made over the past decade to put higher education within reach of all students, gaps remain in access to and graduation from college. President Obama has made college completion a cornerstone of both his higher education and economic platforms, with the goal of graduating the highest proportion of college students in the world by 2020. What role is ACE playing in responding to these gaps?

Broad: ACE has taken a leading role in advocating for and developing a variety of initiatives aimed at boosting college access and completion, including the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, which issued its report in January. Raising the nation’s education attainment rate is deeply embedded in the DNA of ACE. It has played a central role in the mission of ACE from our very founding. We were created by the nation’s leaders in 1918 as soldiers were returning from World War I to a jobless economy. We were then called the Emergency Council on Education because raising the education attainment of those veterans was an economic imperative. Again in 1942, ACE was called upon to create the alternative high school credential, the GED, to raise education attainment opportunities for those returning soldiers from World War II who had dropped out of high school to join the armed services. So by passing the GED, those veterans became eligible for the GI Bill and they went on to college and became what we refer to as the “Greatest Generation.” Since 1945, ACE has evaluated military training and experiences to determine their eligibility for credit recommendations. Later, ACE’s credit recommendation programs were extended to the workplace and to major departments of government. So it seemed quite logical for us to help create the attainment commission following President Obama’s call to restore the nation’s higher education preeminence. We’re already helping 34 states to participate in the American College Application Campaign and have created a Center for Education Attainment and Innovation within ACE. One of the greatest strengths of American higher education is the rich diversity of institutional size and mission. Consequently, our community is taking many diverse approaches to raising education attainment and to boosting the number of Americans able to gain a college degree.

DiSalvio: ACE was among a group of higher education associations that convened a national Commission on Higher Education Attainment. In its Open Letter to College and University Leaders, a blueprint was developed for a campus-level college completion campaign that is designed to prevent students from falling by the wayside as they pursue a college degree. What areas of reform and possible strategies to advance the goal of increased attainment are addressed in this document?

Broad: The attainment commission’s open letter is intended as a call to the academy from the academy, to make retention and completion a critical campus priority and to stem the unacceptable loss of human potential represented by the numbers of students who never make it to graduation. The commission raised the issue of new reforms and those already underway and urged campus leaders to consider three main areas for reform: 1) changing the campus culture to focus more on retention; 2) improving cost effectiveness and quality; and 3) making better use of data.

There is a plethora of ways institutions can go about meeting attainment goals. The open letter outlined strategies that are simply examples to guide the attainment conversation on individual campuses. It begins with assigning ownership. Presidents and chancellors must clearly assign responsibility for enhancing student retention and graduation. We urge our colleagues to give retention and completion the same level of priority that campuses afford to the recruitment and selection process in admissions. We further urge our colleagues to create a student-centered culture to improve the academic experiences and ensure faculty see student completion as a central part of their responsibility. In this way, students who need help could get ready access to appropriate campus resources, including support services for the growing numbers of nontraditional students. We also encourage institutional leaders to give credits for prior learning.

DiSalvio: Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. ACE maintains that removing barriers to college education requires elevating student preparation, continued investment in financial aid, and greater flexibility in course delivery. In what ways is ACE committed to removing these barriers in advancing the pursuit of equal access?

Broad: Let me start with student preparation. ACE convened faculty groups from the learned societies to make recommendations on the various drafts of the Common Core standards, which will ensure high school graduates are college-ready. This, I believe, is truly an important effort and college teacher-preparation programs are now hard at work to incorporate these standards. We are seeing temptation to back away from the standards, but I believe that would be a great mistake. There is no better single strategy to improve college retention and completion than to have entering students who are well prepared to do college-level work. That is one place where ACE has invested a tremendous amount of time and effort.

I mentioned earlier that ACE was also the creator of the GED and it has been a part of our organization since 1942. In 2011, ACE and test developer Pearson VUE created a joint venture that will drive the future direction, design and delivery of the GED testing program. Beginning in January 2014, the GED test will be aligned with Common Core standards for high school graduation and offer additional learning resources and preparation materials in order to increase the number of adults who pass the GED test and go on to postsecondary education.

Another area where we are working on student preparation is our ACE College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT) and military and veterans programs that assist adult learners and student veterans in speeding their path to a degree.

ACE also plays a central role in advocating for a strong system of federal financial aid that helps extend access to higher education to all students. Our institutions, despite significant financial pressures, are working hard to hold down college costs and to provide generous financial aid to those in need. In partnership with a number of higher education associations, ACE works with the tax-writing committees of Congress in support of higher education tax provisions, including tax credits that support tuition, as well as several kinds of education saving programs and the tax deduction for charitable giving.

I also want to mention our work on the Fisher case heard recently by the Supreme Court. ACE filed an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas at Austin. ACE has long advocated for the ability of our institutions to consider race and ethnicity as one factor when constructing a diverse student body, one where individual talents and personal interests, background, academic skills, and geographic origin all can play a role.

DiSalvio: In what could be a major step toward bridging the gap between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the college credit system, the ACE has reviewed and made credit recommendations for five Coursera MOOCs. If some colleges decide to grant credit for those courses, the council's recommendations could go a long way toward helping students who complete MOOCs gain valuable college credits. How could this raise education attainment in the U.S. and around the world?

Broad: I believe MOOCs hold the promise of extending to students, including minority students and adult students around the world, greater access to high-quality education on their own timetable. We are seeing a growing number of post-traditional students enrolled in American higher education who are not full-time, first-time students coming to college right after high school.

The Coursera and Udacity MOOCs that we have recommended for credit are part of ACE’s overall MOOC evaluation and research initiative. This is a small but important part of ACE’s broader push to expand prior learning assessment. Of course, the decision to utilize MOOCs or accept those credits in transfer is one made by each institution on a case-by-case basis.

We have created a Presidential Innovation Lab that will offer opportunities for leaders in higher education, both those who are producers of MOOCs and those who are skeptics, to engage in some proactive thinking about this new learning space. We believe this effort will help us guide a national dialog about potential new models that can help close persistent attainment gaps not only among the young, but also among older students and low-income students. The outcome of the Presidential Innovation Lab will be shared widely with the ACE membership, the press and policymakers.

I also believe prior learning assessment is an area where we are seeing new ideas for raising education attainment. Many of our member institutions are asking questions about courses outside traditional degree programs—whether they can help raise completion, whether they can meet the college curricula and whether they can increase learning productivity. ACE is well positioned to help uncover those answers.

DiSalvio: The higher education landscape is transforming at a rapid pace. How will higher education evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years? How will it affect higher education leadership and what can higher education leaders do to prepare for future challenges and opportunities?

Broad: Higher education has been an industry that for decades hasn’t seen much change in its delivery and its teaching methods. However, in recent years we have seen significant innovations. I believe there will continue to be more emphasis on the role of information technology and the cognitive sciences, as well as online learning.

Another trend in higher education is the graying of the presidency. Fifty-eight percent of college and university presidents in 2011 were 61 years of age or older. Over the coming years, we are going to see a significant turnover of college and university presidents. ACE is committed to developing the next generation of leaders who will take on those presidential positions and help sustain the preeminence of American higher education. Among the programs we offer are those for new presidents and new chief academic officers, the ACE Fellows Program, and an array of other leadership development activities.

We also should anticipate that higher education institutions will develop more flexible options for students looking to ease their path to degree completion and to gain credentials they can show employers. At the same time, new types of credentials appear to be emerging. Some call these "stackable credentials." Digital badges for the completion of certain learning activities, credits for prior learning outside the classroom and portfolio reviews are good examples. Some of this involves helping students earn degrees and some may be helping students gain other kinds of new credentials beyond degrees that will help them in both employment and their career. These are just some of the pressures for change that we will see in the years ahead.

It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.

I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and ...]]> NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever

It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.

I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and “value proposition” of higher education. From Thomas Friedman’s exuberant op-eds to President Obama’s suggestion in his State of the Union address to rethink accreditation from the ground up, the question of the future of the university is upon us.

These are not idle speculations of the twittering class. A bill currently in front of the California Legislature proposes that the 50 most oversubscribed lower-division courses across the state’s entire higher education system be made available online through MOOCs for college credit. Similarly, the State University of New York Board of Trustees has just endorsed “Open SUNY,” a major initiative to expand enrollment by up to one 100,000 students through a combination of online learning opportunities and prior-learning assessments. The disruption of higher education is here and our traditional models of teaching and learning have forevermore been shattered.

It makes this disruptive moment that much more unexpected. For even as I embrace certain aspects of this technological transformation, I would argue that it is a perfect time (or maybe just a last-ditch opportunity?) to make the case for place-based community-engaged learning. The global reach of MOOCs, I want to suggest, may actually help us reconnect with our local communities.

Let me explain.

I have long argued that we have reached an “engagement ceiling” in higher education. For all the community service hours, glossy pictures of neighborhood revitalization and anecdotal success stories, college and university engagement with their communities is too often shallow and ephemeral. There is little that is sustained or meaningful to our students, faculty or community partners. There is, put simply, a vast gap between the rhetoric of what we say and the reality of what we do regarding community engagement.

This is a shame. Community engagement—which I take as an umbrella term for the multiplicity of practices and philosophies such as service-learning, participatory action research, civic learning, democratic engagement, and community-based teaching and learning—can be an incredibly powerful mode of linking theory to practice and campuses with their local communities.

It is one of the few “high-impact” practices that the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has shown to substantially affect student learning and retention. Indeed, research has found service-learning to have statistically significant positive impacts across multiple social, cognitive, and cultural domains. Moreover, national data on faculty attitudes coming out of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute show that close to 90% of all faculty believe that “colleges and universities have a responsibility to work with their surrounding communities to address local issues.”

David Scobey, executive dean of the New School for Public Engagement, has suggested we are at a “Copernican Moment” in the civic engagement field, and nowhere is this more eloquently articulated than in the Crucible Moment, a report put out last year by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education, which argues that higher education must “embrace civic learning and democratic engagement as an undisputed priority … where education for democracy and civic responsibility is pervasive, not partial; central, not peripheral.”

The problem, though, is that we have heard this rhetoric for too long. We can look to Ernest Boyer’s clarion call a generation ago for a “scholarship of engagement,” or further back to the turn of the 20th century to the University of Wisconsin’s articulation of the “Wisconsin idea” that the “boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state,” or even further back to the Morrill Act of 1862, which formed land-grant universities.

But what we see is that lasting and meaningful successes have been few and far between. Twenty years ago, an AASC&U report put it bluntly: “While the idea of public engagement is frequently embraced by college and university presidents, there is considerable evidence that deep engagement is rare—there is more smoke than fire, more rhetoric than reality.” Just a few years ago, a white paper sponsored by the Kettering Foundation reported a very similar phenomenon:  that there was a “sense of drift and stalled momentum” in the civic engagement movement because of “imprecise and even conflicting language,” a “highly fragmented and compartmentalized” set of networks, and a “remarkably apolitical” civic agenda.

The data, unfortunately, confirm this state of affairs. I have begun calling this the “ten percent engagement ceiling,” as only about 10% or so of faculty appear to use any type of experiential field-based learning and less than 10% of students report taking a service-learning course. As researchers at Siena College’s Siena Research Institute starkly put it regarding data from their National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement (NASCE) surveys, “NASCE shows that in many areas, little service is done and few students are deeply engaged.”

So what we have is a deeply embedded and seemingly dysfunctional pattern: We demand transformation in how we bridge town-gown divisions, foster community revitalization, and emphasize civic and democratic engagement; and then we go back to business as usual until the next rhetorical cycle.

Until now.

For all of a sudden, there is no more business as usual. Online education in California and New York, and everywhere else for that matter, is quickly becoming the norm for an increasingly substantial number of postsecondary students. There is no longer any surety, no guarantee, that there will be a place for place-based learning.

So where does that leave us? Does online learning undermine the raison d’être of community-based models of teaching, learning and research? Can face-to-face engagement with local communities survive, much less have resonance, in an automated, machine-driven, web-based pedagogical environment? Does the civic have a place in a placeless world?

Perhaps.

Perhaps, because suddenly, we have to figure out what community voice looks like in a networked and too-often anonymous learning environment. Perhaps, because we now have to rethink what community impact means and looks like when the “community” may be global and distributed. Perhaps, because we now have to recalibrate and rearticulate what social justice means. Perhaps, because notions of respect, relevance and reciprocity—foundational to the community engagement field—have become unmoored from the locations we thought them to inhabit.

Put otherwise, this disruptive MOOC-driven moment is forcing us—and helping us—to disrupt our own deeply engrained patterns of how we view and enact community engagement.

This is exciting stuff. The community engagement field has been in a slow spiral of diminishing returns in exhorting the next generation of students, faculty and higher education leaders to embrace civic learning and practices. Service-learning had begun to feel like one of those “been there, done that” experiences for students and faculty committed to a better world.

But now, faster than you can register for “Democratic Development” on Coursera’s platform, the world has changed. For the world can now register for that course. And according to the course description, the instructor hopes that “students in developing or prospective democracies will use the theories, ideas and lessons in the class to help build or improve democracy in their own countries.”

Wow. Imagine 10,000, 100,000, a million, students taking such a course. And then changing their local and global communities.

Or perhaps not. For as we have begun to discover, the vast majority of such MOOC registrants never make it past the first week and only about 10% end up finishing the course. What is thus truly unknown, and what we must figure out, is how we come to think about and enact community engagement both within and against the coming online transformation.

This is the state of community engagement in the disrupted university. It is a precipitous moment where traditional models and norms no longer apply so easily or thoroughly. In some cases, there are immense opportunities to be gained as faculty discover how to make their work public and bring the public into their work. In other cases, there are immense opportunities to be lost as marginalized populations and communities become ever more disenfranchised from the institutions just blocks away, yet gigabytes apart.

This moment is an opportunity that could lead us to new and better means and modes of engaging and improving our communities. Or it is a moment just before the civic engagement bubble bursts. Or maybe even both.

In the end, MOOCs may save us. Or not. But at least they have given us the opportunity to figure it out.

Dan W. Butin is an associate professor and founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College and executive director of the Center for Engaged Democracy.

The series called “New Directions for Higher Education” will feature interviews with key visionaries by Philip DiSalvio, dean ...]]> The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) invites you to be part of a new series examining emerging issues, trends, innovations and ideas that will make a profound impact on higher education in New England and globally.

The series called “New Directions for Higher Education” will feature interviews with key visionaries by Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing and Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts.

We are seeking experts in their respective fields who would be interested in being interviewed by Dean DiSalvio for this new series of articles.

If you would like to participate, please send your contact information, a brief bio and topics on which you’re willing to speak, to me at jharney@nebhe.org.

Recently, NEJHE has featured the following about the transforming nature of higher education ...

University Unbound! Higher Education in the Age of "Free"

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.

"University Unbound" Rebounds: Can MOOCs Educate as well as Train?

George McCully, founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy, praises NEBHE's University Unbound conference, even wonders if it should become an annual event. But he worries that the massive open online courses (MOOCs) at the center of the discussion are better suited to training than to development "of personal values, life-experience, qualities of feeling (empathy, sympathy) sensitivity and insight, inspiration and aspiration, interest and concern."

No Stinkin' Badges? Mozilla's Erin Knight on "Open Badges" (Video)

Mozilla's Erin Knight speaks about her "Open Badges" work—an alternative credentialing system allowing learners to control their credentials and move away from seat time.

I Am Not a Machine

If all we have experienced in college classrooms is being lectured at, then Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and MOOCs should replace us, concedes Dan W. Butin, associate professor and founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College, But Butin says he hopes "MOOCs will prompt us to refashion what we do in the college classroom and how we do it. For we all yearn for that 'dynamic, charismatic' teacher who can rock our world. We want our education to matter." Butin concludes, "MOOCs may indeed transform higher education, but they cannot transform my students."

Coming to Terms with MOOCs: A Community College Angle

Bunker Hill Community College President Mary L. Fifield explains how MOOCs and community colleges share common values. 

And Dean DiSalvio’s NEJHE articles on:

Pardon the Disruption ... Innovation Changes How We Think About Higher Education

Ventures such as edX, Coursera and Udacity may be catalysts that displace established ways of thinking about higher education institutions. How these innovations could move higher ed from an "instruction paradigm" to a "learning paradigm."

Shifting Landscapes, Changing Assumptions Reshape Higher Ed 

MIT and Harvard's collaboration to offer online courses free of charge points to something much deeper within the higher education fabric. A convergence of forces driving change in higher education is forcing us to ponder such fundamental questions as what a university is, what a course is, what a student is and what is the meaning of a college credential.

Degrees of Durability and the New World of Credentialing

Is the "college degree" an artifact ... an outdated higher education credential?

Bubble Wrap: Higher Ed and the Value Gap

There are many roads to an educated life, and higher education institutions may be the perfect incubators for non-degree credentialing and expanded learning options.

Will MITx Change How We Think About Higher Education? 

MITx is lowering the existing barriers between residential campuses and the millions of learners around the world by making MIT educational content accessible and providing those learners with an opportunity to earn an MIT-related credential.  

I am not a machine.

This makes my college students happy. Though, to be honest, they assume as much since I walk into the classroom, make some small talk and launch into my lecture. After a few minutes, I may stop, ask for questions, prompt some discussion and perhaps tell ...]]> An education dean reflects on MOOCs …

I am not a machine.

This makes my college students happy. Though, to be honest, they assume as much since I walk into the classroom, make some small talk and launch into my lecture. After a few minutes, I may stop, ask for questions, prompt some discussion and perhaps tell a few bad jokes. Which should prove once and for all that I am human and fallible.

My students seem to gain from these lectures, the formal discussions and the informal banter. Most of them write coherent essays on the assigned topics, pass the midterm quizzes and submit fairly decent final projects. Some students are superb; others, well, they just barely make it through. Each year is like that, and each year I work on getting better. Semester by semester, year by year, I improve my teaching, provide new experiential activities and community-based projects, switch around my readings, and watch yet another set of students gain from my classes. I am proud of what I do and take seriously my job of preparing the next generation of future teachers.

But sometimes, late at night when I cannot sleep, I wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Maybe, just maybe, if I were a machine, the class would be better.

Let me explain.

According to the recent New York Times Education Life section, this was the “Year of the MOOC.” That’s “massive open online courses.” It’s what Times columnist David Brooks called a “campus tsunami” and Thomas Friedman declared as the “college education revolution.” That’s because anyone, anywhere can now take a course from some of the best instructors and institutions in the world just by logging on. Students watch short clips of the professors’ lectures, submit their quizzes to be graded by computer-automated systems and, for those who finish with a respectable score, get a certificate of completion.

In less than a year, close to 2 million students have enrolled in such courses and hundreds of thousands have finished. More students, for example, have registered for Coursera’s Modern Poetry course this semester (30,000+) than go to the University of Pennsylvania. Which is where, by the way, the instructor of that course teaches. So in one semester, the entire student population of the University of Pennsylvania could take his course. For free. In their pajamas. From home. Did I mention that some universities have begun to provide transfer credit for completion of such courses? And that one blogger couldn’t stop gushing about this “delightful course” and the “dynamic, charismatic teacher we all wish we could have had in school.”

So let me be blunt: higher education is about to be fundamentally disrupted for a vast number of students. For the tens of thousands in California who could not get into a community college course because of state budget cuts; for the hundreds of thousands who drop out of postsecondary education every year due to expenses or boredom or life taking an unexpected turn; for the millions in developing countries who have minimal access to a quality education.

All of them and many others will be able to take these online courses and be treated to an educational experience that very few have ever had: They will be able to listen to a world-class professor, access a trove of curated resources to deepen and expand on such lectures at their fingertips, get instantaneous feedback on their assignments through built-in automated tutorial systems that adapt to their level of learning, and have access to a worldwide community of peers commiserating and discussing and debating the topics in the course.

And just think of what can be done, a la iTunes or Netflix: add closed captions in whatever language is best for you; speed up or slow down or skip around the lectures; click on similar subjects to get a deeper understanding of the issue or follow a thematic riff to see where it leads; have the system, based on your previous clicks, provide suggestions for further readings or ask you to repeat the assignment to make sure you have mastered it.

This is crazy stuff. All I offer is a twice-a-week class for 75 minutes at a time and once-a-week office hours. Sometimes my lectures are great; other times I am happy to just make it through. Sometimes, truth be told, the discussions drag. I do my best to keep students’ attention, but I have no surefire way to know if they really “got” my main points. I love what I teach, but, honestly, it’s a lot of work to lecture about the same things year after year. I am, after all, only human. I am not a machine.

Which raises the question: What do I offer that cannot be done by a MOOC? Why should students roll out of bed, get dressed, drive 10 miles through rush-hour traffic, desperately try to find a parking spot on campus and get stressed that they might walk in 10 minutes late for my 9 a.m. class?

It is certainly not for the content knowledge. Somebody out there surely knows a heck of a lot more about John Dewey or Paulo Freire than I do. And it is not for that all-too-fuzzy “human connection” of getting to know your son or daughter. Many faculty have 30 or more students in each course of the three or four or five courses they teach each semester. There is no way I’m going to truly get to know your child no matter how hard I try. And I’m not even talking about the 300- student lecture hall.

Rather, what the college classroom truly offers is an apprenticeship into thinking. I can provide my students with a conceptual map of how to think about teaching and begin to plot out where different ideas and strategies fit on that map. I can take their insights or misunderstandings and play out their limits and possibilities. I can take a current issue and begin to peel away layers to reveal particular assumptions and implications. And I can begin to teach them how to do the same thing themselves.

This is what it means to move students from novice to expert thinkers, able to apply specific knowledge, skills and protocols within a particular situation and with authentic outcomes. A MOOC can’t do that. Computer systems are still too linear and too literal, too dependent on problems having solutions and thus unable to deal with true ambiguity or nuance. A MOOC can’t go “meta” and step outside itself to reflect upon and change its own assumptions and patterns. That is ultimately why students should come to my class: to stretch their understanding of the possible, to test their assumptions and make sense of the complexity of world.

I should note that we in higher education are actually pretty bad at offering this kind of teaching. Most of what we do is based on a transmission model of education, and most of what we transmit is low-level content knowledge to help students just get the basics. This is why MOOCs have become such a sensation. If all we have experienced is being lectured at, then, sure, Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and MOOCs should replace us.

I hope, instead, that MOOCs will prompt us to refashion what we do in the college classroom and how we do it. For we all yearn for that “dynamic, charismatic” teacher who can rock our world. We want our education to matter. In the end, MOOCs may indeed transform higher education, but they cannot transform my students.

Dan W. Butin is an associate professor and founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College and executive director of the Center for Engaged Democracy.

NEBHE has begun focusing the attention of New England institutions on the MOOC movement, which will affect them ...]]> In the days since NEBHE convened hundreds of educators and opinion leaders in Boston for the University Unbound conference, we've received a surge of reactions including this one from George McCully, founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy.

NEBHE has begun focusing the attention of New England institutions on the MOOC movement, which will affect them all. Already, within months of their public debut, MOOCs and related "disruptive" models are widely considered to be global game-changers in higher education. The urgency signaled by the NEBHE conference title, “The University Unbound: Can Higher Education Compete and Survive the Age of Free and Open Learning?” is fully merited. Some have seen this revolutionary transformation as comparable to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th-17th centuries, or the introduction of printing in the 15th-16th centuries, producing what may be the most rapid, powerful and profound paradigm-shift in the history of Western thought, especially as it relates to the rest of the world.

The key to this striking vision is that MOOCs (massive open online courses) promote modern STEM culture electronically and instantaneously, free of charge, in English, to every corner of the globe, to everyone on Earth with access to the Internet and the desire, will and capacity to utilize it. Nothing like this has ever happened before in cultural history, and its effects—in empowering hundreds of millions of people with useful knowledge and skills to become more fully productive—are incalculable but certainly world-changing. Everyone in, or interested in, higher education, would do well to give that at least a moment’s thought.

As for the NEBHE conference itself, one take-away for me was how it demonstrated our need to articulate more precisely what is happening, so that we might more effectively understand, strategize and evaluate this transformation and its parts as they proceed.

What MOOCs demonstrably do best is knowledge-development and skills-development—that is, technical training, certification and accreditation. No other system has shown greater power and promise in these areas than MOOCs.

But that is not the same as self-development, which is to say, education. To be sure, self-development necessarily includes knowledge- and skills-development, but beyond those it focuses on character-development—of personal values, life-experience, qualities of feeling (empathy, sympathy) sensitivity and insight, inspiration and aspiration, interest and concern, love and commitment, inter alia.

We do not yet know how, or how much, MOOCs will accomplish these. EdX is committed to researching the limits and competencies of MOOCs in “education,” but I did not hear at this conference a clear articulation of precisely what that means, and in particular whether the traditional distinction between training (at which MOOCs are unquestionably superior) and education (at which MOOC competency is unknown) is informing that inquiry.

One handle on this challenge is that whereas knowledge- and skills-development (training) can be (with modern IT) a mechanical process, self-development (education) must be a substantially social and intensely personal process. Centuries of residential “higher education” have taught us that the myriad personal and social experiences to which college and university communities are conspicuously conducive, are essential in education. Does this mean that MOOCs cannot educate? Not at all—where computers and the Internet may be engaged in education is in their capacities for communication, and especially interpersonal communication between students, and between students and faculty (as distinct from publishing or broadcasting).

If so, where MOOC research might initially focus is on the kinds and intensities of personal communication that are and can be achieved in these courses and their various modalities (chat rooms, etc.). MOOC courses might be considered “educational” insofar as they promote interpersonal experiences in their requisite knowledge- and skills-development.

What about specifically liberal education? While MOOC experiences in STEM disciplines may certainly be self-developing as well as knowledge- and skill-developing, liberal education must include more than token exposure to, and training in, the humanities—already identified as a field of special interest for MOOC pedagogical research. In Professor Anant Agarwal’s course, intercontinental chatrooms spontaneously arose as students volunteered to answer one anothers’ questions; the distance between these and seminars seems easily traversable, especially with audio-visual teleconferencing. Evaluating students’ written work will be challenging, but only temporarily.

There are many unanswered questions about MOOCs, but none so far that seem unanswerable. Since any institution, not just colleges and universities, might offer MOOCs, and job-qualifying accreditation might occur through course-completion certifications, is the dominance of college and university degrees in accreditation about to be diluted, or to evaporate entirely? What will this “unbinding” of universities mean for the departmental system, as well as for the future of academic disciplines?

Paradigm-shifts are serious processes. The stakes are huge, and they have winners and losers. NEBHE, whose constituents are all stakeholders in the MOOC movement, has with this conference demonstrated its excellent suitability as a leading forum—perhaps annually—for monitoring and measuring MOOC progress.