Princeton, Penn and Michigan join the MOOC party | Inside Higher Ed

“Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have teamed up with a for-profit company to offer free versions of their coveted courses this year to online audiences. By doing so, they join a growing group of top-tier universities that are embracing massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as the logical extension of elite higher education in an increasingly online, global landscape. Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera’s platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take. The move is perhaps the most coordinated foray into online learning by high-profile education institutions since early last decade, when Fathom (a Columbia University-led for-profit venture into online education that also involved the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and Michigan) and AllLearn (a nonprofit collaboration between Oxford University, Yale University, Princeton and Stanford) became casualties in what was then a relatively underdeveloped online learning sector. Online education, and the technology universities are using in that medium, has matured significantly since then. And brand-name elites, this time with little or no emphasis on making profit or even breaking even, are making a new push toward finding their place in the constellation of Web-based higher education. There are ‘100 wrong ways’ to do online education, and Penn has been ‘looking for years’ for the right way, Amy Gutmann, Penn's president, said in an interview. Gutmann said she doesn’t care if Penn eventually makes money from its MOOC experiment, noting that the cost for Penn of taking its courses online with Coursera -- which is buoyed by $16 million in venture capital -- has so far amounted to ‘a rounding error in my budget.’ The Penn president also said faculty have leaped at the opportunity to teach MOOCs, even without major incentives (participating professors may get some summer release time to create courses, she said). Faculty at traditional colleges have occasionally struggled to persuade professors to cooperate with administration-led online initiatives, occasionally to the peril of those initiatives. But the prospect of teaching tens or hundreds of thousands of students at once seems to have piqued the interest of certain faculty members at Penn, which is currently scheduled to put 12 courses online through Coursera over the next year. The Coursera courses -- which total 39 across all the universities -- will be interactive, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of students completing exams and assigned work that will be graded, either by intelligent software or by their peers. The universities will own the courses. These include six courses in the humanities and social sciences, including History of the World Since 1300, Introduction to Sociology, and Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. That is uncharted territory for the new breed of MOOC -- which focuses on scale, assessment and certification -- thatemerged last fall at Stanford and has since taken hold at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So far, the high-profile MOOCs being offered through Udacity, another Stanford-born company, and at MITx, MIT’s new nonprofit subsidiary, have focused on courses where student work can be more easily quantified and scored by machines, such as engineering, math and computer science. Koller, an artificial intelligence specialist who has taught computer science at Stanford since getting her Ph.D. there at age 25, said that the challenge of assessing student work in humanities-oriented MOOCs could be addressed through a system of ‘calibrated peer review.’ Human readers, plucked from the ranks of the course registrants, could read short essays written by their peers and rate them according to a rubric developed by the professor. A critical mass of deputized students should be able to evaluate an essay ‘at least as [well] as a pretty good [teaching assistant],’ Koller said in an interview. Mitchell Duneier, a sociology professor at Princeton, said he is planning to give students in his Introduction to Sociology MOOC the opportunity to participate in small group discussions with him and his students at Princeton via Google Hangouts, a videoconferencing application... None of the universities will offer formal credit through the courses they put online through Coursera. However, several might give students the opportunity to earn certificates bearing the names of both the universities and the company. There is no formal credentialing mechanism currently in place, but some university officials indicated that tangibly recognizing the achievements of non-enrolled learners is a goal... ‘Since the venture is just starting, cost and certificates may be determined in the future, based on appropriate market analysis and metrics after the courses