A Bold Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but Details Are Scarce - Government - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Supporters of newly proposed legislation in California hope to reduce the number of students shut out of key courses by forging an unprecedented partnership between traditional public colleges and online-education upstarts. But on Wednesday specific details of how the deal would work were hard to pin down. Senate Bill 520, sponsored by State Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is president pro tem of the Senate, calls for establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by providers outside the state's higher-education system. If the bill is passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bringing the controversial courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted. But right now SB 520 is just a two-page 'spot bill,' a legislative placeholder to be amended with details later. And for those concerned about the consequences of a sudden embrace of a relatively new enterprise such as MOOCs, the devil may be in those details. Who will approve the courses? What role will faculty members really have? Will student financial aid apply to paid online courses? How will the revenue collected by the companies benefit the colleges? The students? At a news conference announcing the bill, Mr. Steinberg acknowledged that such a bold move could be expected to cause 'some fear, and sometimes some upset.' He took pains to emphasize that the legislation 'does not represent a shift in funding priority' for higher education in California, and is not intended to introduce 'a substitution for campus-based instruction.' 'This is about helping students,' he said. 'We would be making a big mistake if we did not take advantage of the technological advances in our state' to do so. Students may stand to gain, as does California, if Mr. Steinberg's legislation helps more college graduates join the work force. MOOCs and the companies that offer them stand to gain enormously as well. But right now, no one knows for sure what will happen.  Everyone involved in state higher education in California agrees that access to classes is a problem. Declining state support has led to cutbacks in the number of course sections offered, just as student demand has risen. For example, more than 472,000 of the 2.4 million students enrolled in the California Community Colleges last fall were put on a waiting list for a course that was already full.  The community-college system's chancellor, Brice W. Harris, was one of several state higher-education officials who lauded Mr. Steinberg's attempt to deal with the class crunch. 'Anything that increases the opportunity to access higher education in California after the last four years that we've had rationing of education is a good thing,' he said.  The language of the measure, as currently written, outlines a platform that would apply to all three state systems: the University of California, California State University, and the community colleges. A nine-member faculty council established last year to oversee open-source digital textbooks would come up with a list of the 50 lower-level courses that students most need to fulfill general-education requirements—courses that are, as Mr. Steinberg put it, 'identified as the most difficult for a student to get a seat.' The council would then review and approve which online courses would be allowed to fulfill the requirement and count for credit as conferred by state institutions ..."