Virtual Virtue

There’s been a lot of talk about how education, particularly higher education, will fare in a world of online alternatives. Premier professors can disseminate audio-visual recordings of their most powerful lectures or series of lectures, monetizing access at differing levels. View the course for free or a modest fee. Pay more and interact with the course, in real time if the presentation is live, or be evaluated for credit as part of an overall course of study. Perhaps the degree will be granted by a single institution from which the courses emanate, or maybe, where courses from many different prestigious colleges or universities are being amalgamated, from a new institution created to regulate and confer appropriate degrees to students who have completed the requisite coursework.

Interaction among students can take place in new social networks based on these courses of study. Cheating and plagiarism can be contained with retinal or fingerprint scans and content scanning that compares the work to writings of students around the world (the latter being a process that is already in widespread use). Perhaps an examination once a year in a physical location might also work.

I don’t think the SEC or the Pac 12 will substitute fantasy sports for the real thing, however! But the fact remains that while I don’t see the death of major colleges and universities teaching on their existing campuses anytime soon, I also see a transition of acceptance of virtual online education being accepted as mainstream and quality learning… with a global reach.

There have been lots of courses and opportunities from smaller, for profit, online colleges, but the biggest and best are the institutions that will have the greatest impact. We’re seeing some pretty major universities creating some very interesting online instruction. “From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [ranked first by U.S. News & World Report among U.S. engineering universities].

“But the courses have not yet produced profound change, partly because they offer no credit and do not lead to a degree. The disruption may be approaching, though, as Georgia Tech, which has one of the country’s top computer science programs, plans to offer a MOOC-based online master’s degree in computer science for $6,600 — far less than the $45,000 on-campus price.” New York Times, August 17^th.

Stanford University is the second-ranked and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) the fifth-ranked (according to U.S. News & World Report) engineering universities in the United States. Getting degrees from universities at this level, allowing enrollment on a global level to find the “best and the brightest” without borders and vastly lower tuition barriers (and no separate charges for room and board or even travel costs), can alter the landscape of global empowerment even in nascent developing countries. The expansion of English or some other major languages as the lingua franca of education may also draw the world closer together, just as political divisions seem to be intensifying.

Economies of scale can provide enough funding to make this form of education exceptionally affordable, perhaps even subsidizing on-campus degrees where tuition costs have soared as a multiple of the cost of living. “Zvi Galil, the dean of the [Georgia Tech’s] College of Computing, expects that in the coming years, the program could attract up to 10,000 students annually, many from outside the United States and some who would not complete the full master’s degree. ‘Online, there’s no visa problem,’ he said… The program rests on an unusual partnership forged by Dr. Galil and Sebastian Thrun, a founder of Udacity, a Silicon Valley provider of the open online courses.

“‘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.’

“The plan is for Georgia Tech to provide the content and professors and to get 60 percent of the revenue, and for Udacity to offer the computer platform, provide course assistants and receive the other 40 percent. The projected budget for the test run starting in January is $3.1 million — including $2 million donated by AT&T, which will use the program to train employees and find potential hires — with $240,000 in profits. By the third year, the projection is for $14.3 million in costs and $4.7 million in profits.” NY Times.

You simply cannot overlook how learning has transitioned over time. Long gone are those informal gatherings of Greek philosophers and their adoring students that ultimately evolved into the hallowed halls of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Harvard. A seminal shift in communications technologies and related social practices almost by definition has to impact education as we know it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this is clearly just the beginning of a revolution is how we teach and how we learn.