Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 12

Internet Learning
cation pedagogy, and from that perspective,
thinks it is clear that MOOCs are not the
panacea for 21st Century higher education
that their proponents claimed they would
be. “MOOCs have turned out to be only a
minor achievement in pedagogy, “ he noted,
“and an expensive one at that.” In Guthrie’s
view, MOOCs were largely online lecture
halls, yet “nobody in the business of instructional
design feels that lecture halls, whether
on campus or online are a good way to teach
students.”
Not all the news is critical. As Tamar
Lewin of The New York Times wrote, since
the first free artificial intelligence course
from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students two
years ago, MOOCs have drawn millions of
people to sample learning from the world’s
top universities. There have been heartwarming
results, such as the perfect scores of
Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a
rigorous electronics course offered by MIT.
Nonetheless, as Lewin goes on to
note, while there is justifiable excitement
around the reach of these courses, MOOCs
have not delivered on the expectation of
profound change, in his view because they
offer no credit and do not lead to a degree.
Levin feels that the decision of Georgia Tech
to offer a MOOC-based online master’s degree
in computer science for $6,600 could
be a game-changer. The dean of the Georgia
Tech’s College of Computing, Zvi Galil,
expects that the program could attract up
to 10,000 students. Noteably, the program
may be a response to declining international
enrollments as well. “Online, there’s no visa
problem,” he said in Lewin’s The New York
Times article.
The prospect of a low-cost degree
from a world-class institution has generated
tremendous interest. Some, Lewin writes,
think the leap from individual non-credit
courses to full degree programs could signal
the next phase in the evolution of MOOCs
and bring real change to higher education.
While some believe in potential of MOOCs
and others see the movement as all hype,
there is a middle ground; the fact that the
topic is being discussed so intensely means
that it has the opened doors to new ideas.
MOOC have catalyzed countless conversations
about how to improve online learning—
what is working and what is not.
“Perhaps Zvi Galil and Sebastian
Thrun will prove to be the Wright brothers
of MOOCs,” said S. James Gates Jr., a University
of Maryland physicist who serves on
President Obama’s Council of Advisors on
Science and Technology. “This is the first deliberate
and thoughtful attempt to apply education
technology to bringing instruction
to scale. It could be epoch-making. If it really
works, it could begin the process of lowering
the cost of education, and lowering barriers
for millions of Americans.”
Even for those who recognize vast
potential in MOOCs, it is still challenging
to discern what will happen next and which
efforts will be successful. Georgia Tech’s Dr.
Galil is primarily concerned with breaking
new ground.
“This is all uncharted territory, so
no one really knows if it will go to scale,” Dr.
Galil said. “We just want to prove that it can
be done, to make a high-quality degree program
available for a low cost.” In response,
Lewin asked, “Would such a program cannibalize
campus enrollment?”
“Frankly, nobody knows,” answered
Galil, and it is still far from certain if the
degree program will be sustainable. While
a single pilot effort may be successful, expanding
to include more for-credit MOOCs
across institutional offerings poses its own
set of problems, requiring a larger financial
investment for more instructional design,
scaffolding, and staff. Some are skeptical that
tuition for fee-based MOOCs can remain as
low as they are in the Georgia Tech model.
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