The American Council on Education has agreed to review a handful of free online courses offered by elite universities and may recommend that other colleges grant credit for them.
The move could lead to a world in which many students graduate from traditional colleges faster by taking self-guided courses on the side, taught free by professors from Stanford University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and other well-known colleges.
In what leaders describe as a pilot project, the group will consider five to 10 massive open online courses, or MOOC's, offered through Coursera for possible inclusion in the council's College Credit Recommendation Service. That service has been around since the 1970s and focuses on certifying training courses, offered outside of traditional colleges, for which students might want college credit ...
Last year, a provider of low-cost online courses called StraighterLine became one of the first online institutions to win inclusion in the recommendation service. ACE also announced on Tuesday that it will set up a Presidential Innovation Lab that will bring together college leaders to discuss the potential of MOOC's and new business models for higher education. The lab is supported by an $895,453 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of about $3-million in new MOOC-related grants announced Tuesday... The review process by the council will be 'similar to the way regional accreditation works,' said Molly Corbett Broad, president of ACE... To pass the council's test, Coursera will make a few changes in the courses for which it seeks certification. For instance, ACE requires an 'authentication of identity,' said Ms. Broad, meaning that Coursera must have some kind of proctored examination or other way to prove that students are who they say they are.For the courses in the pilot project, Coursera will form partnerships with online proctoring companies that use Webcams and special software to monitor tests remotely, said Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera... The remote-proctoring strategy differs from an identity-verification system used by other providers of MOOC's, including edX, a nonprofit started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Udacity, a start-up company competing with Coursera. Both of those organizations say they will use a series of testing centers run by Pearson, which will require students to travel to a test center to take final exams in person, if they want a certificate of completion... another Gates-foundation grant announced Tuesday, for $1,440,900, will support researchers from Ithaka S+R, a group that speeds development of information technologies for higher education, to study the effectiveness of MOOC's used in a 'flipped classroom' model. In that model, students at traditional campuses watch lecture videos for homework and use class time for discussion rather than lecture..."