MediaShift . Why Online Education Has Gained Revolutionary Momentum | PBS

“The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years...  Internet connections, computers and cellphones have become faster and cheaper, providing easier access to online material and creating the potential to speak with, work with, and learn from nearly anyone in the world... Free tools like Moodle, Jing, YouTube, and Twitter have provided new means of information sharing and collaboration. Smartphones and the iPad have provided portable means of accessing and creating information, making learning more portable than ever.  In their book ‘Liberating Learning,’ Terry Moe and John Chubb say that this technological transformation is ‘reshaping the fundamentals of how human beings from every corner of the globe communicate, interact, conduct their business, and simply live their lives from day to day...’  The expense of higher education has risen more than 550 percent since 1985, pricing many students out of the market even as a college degree becomes more important than ever for reaching the middle class. At the same time, the cost of technology has dropped, allowing more people easier access to the Internet and to resources for learning.  Colleges and universities have come under increased scrutiny because of rising costs, mediocre rates of degree completion, and lack of willingness to change from a centuries-old model of education.  In the education magazine Change, John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic have criticized what they call higher education's ‘iron triangle’: ‘the assumption that quality, exclusivity, and expense necessarily go together...’  Online and hybrid education offers students freedom to work through course material when and where they want, and at their own pace, repeating material if needed, and reducing the amount of time they sit passively in large lectures.  In a survey last year by the Educause Center for Applied Research, nearly 60 percent of undergraduates said they learned more in classes that had online components, and 9 percent said they learned best when classes were totally online.  Online and hybrid education offers new means of engaging students through interactive lessons, videos, animations, games, discussion boards and chats. These are all familiar and comfortable technologies for a generation of students that has grown up with ubiquitous technology.  In the book ‘Understanding the Digital Generation,’ Ian Jukes, Ted McCain, and Lee Crockett argue that members of this digital generation ‘think and communicate in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation,’ even though most adults still view the world and the classroom through a 20th-century lens. Technology-aided learning helps break through these barriers and meets students on familiar ground...  New organizations such as Coursera and edX have made headlines by attracting large numbers of students, large investments of capital, and commitments from big-name universities...  The success of large online courses, or MOOCs (for massive open online courses), at attracting students and capital, and the success of for-profit colleges have sent many colleges and universities scrambling to avoid the perception that they lack vision or the ability to change in an era of digital learning...”