At Conference, Leaders of ‘Traditional’ Online Learning Meet Upstart Free Providers - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"A longtime online-learning pioneer sounded a note of frustration at a national cyberlearning conference here this week. The complaint was over the perception that MOOC’s, or massive open online courses, run by highly selective universities are the biggest drivers of innovation in online learning. 'The hyper-prestigious universities' are not driving the change, said Jack M. Wilson, president emeritus of the University of Massachusetts, who founded UMass Online some 10 years ago, in remarks during a kickoff panel at the Sloan Consortium’s International Conference on Online Learning. He said that institutions like his and others represented at the conference, which is in its 18th year, have been slowly improving the quality, credibility, and enrollment of online courses for decades. Mr. Wilson suggested that some new providers appeared to think they’d invented something new rather than drawing on the experiences of earlier projects. And he noted that dropout rates in some MOOC’s are as high as 90 percent, with only a tiny fraction of students actually completing the material. 'If we had 10-percent completion rates at UMass Online, I’d be in the Massachusetts jail instead of the Massachusetts university,' he joked. He praised the new entrants for bringing attention to the value of online education, but said that 'is not who has led online learning, or who is going to lead online learning.' One of those MOOC pioneers, Sebastian Thrun, had a chance to give his side of the story in a keynote address on Thursday. Mr. Thrun is the Stanford University professor who landed on the front page of The New York Times when he co-taught a free course that enrolled 160,000 people, and he has since founded Udacity, a company working with professors to offer similar large-scale free courses..."