STATE AFFAIRS: Want free college-level education?

You and your college-age youngster now can take courses online ? for free ?from professors at the best universities in the world and, soon I predict, earn college credit for your work.

For-profit universities and private colleges without strong brand names have to be deep-down worried about their futures.

Massive open on-line courses (MOOCs) now are being offered free by consortia of schools such as Stanford, Princeton, Illinois and the Ivy League in a phenomenon that has expanded exponentially in just the past year. The world of higher education won't ever be the same.

What does higher education do? It adds value through education and learning, and provides credentials for that learning through college-based credit hours and degrees, which travel with the holder for his or her lifetime.

The costs of earning those credentials have soared in recent years, and parents now look at outlays of $20,000 to $50,000 a year to send their youngsters away to college.

More parents and high school graduates are now opting for local community college education topped off with online four-year college degrees.

For example, the University of Illinois now offers 100 different online degrees. University of Illinois at Springfield has been a leader in the game. Today, about one-third of its majors are online students and 38 percent of all credits at the campus were generated from online courses.

These online courses are offered to classes of no more than 25 students each. They are the same courses as offered on campus. Tuition is about the same as for on-campus instruction at the public institution, which can be close to $10,000 a year.

Massive open online courses are different. They are free and anyone can sign up, which means scores of thousands have done so, from around the world, for a single course offering.

Ray Schroeder is a professor of communications at U of I-Springfield and a nationally recognized expert on the topic of MOOCs. Indeed, he offered a MOOC recently on "online learning today and tomorrow." More than 2,700 students from 70 countries signed up.

Every Thursday for four weeks he held audio panel discussions with leaders in the field. Students posed questions via Twitter. Discussion groups sometimes formed, as with students of the course in Christchurch, New Zealand, who gathered weekly at a local McDonald's (which has Wi-Fi).

If you want to try a U. of I. MOOC, you can go to uis.coursesites.com and sign up free for a course on the Emancipation Proclamation that begins January 28.

The big names in MOOCs are Coursera, edX, and Udacity, all started in just the past year or so by professors at gilt-edged universities. They may be superseded by Google and Apple, which are moving rapidly into education.

"If they can see a profit in it," observes Schroeder, "you may well see Google U. and Apple U. in the future. Many existing universities would have trouble competing with that."

There are, of course, bugs to be worked out. How will cheating be avoided and course credit authorized, for example?

Proctored examinations at testing sites around the world (every community college has a testing site) are now used for "traditional" online courses and could be utilized by MOOCs. And if a student scored high on a final exam, why not award him or her college credit?

At present, some course providers offer electronic "badges" that represent successful completion of a course. These badges become part of a student's record, and may someday replace the old college transcript.

I imagine that "free" will become "low cost" at MOOCs in the future, as there are certainly costs involved in providing courses. Google could, of course, sell advertising to offset costs and make a profit.

A MOOC education certainly would be less personal than a traditional college experience, although I recall introductory psychology and economics courses being taught to 1,000 or so students at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which wasn't very personal.

But attendance at a bricks and mortar college provides experience at living somewhat on one's own, development of social skills, creation of life-long mentoring relationships with professors, and a setting that imposes some discipline upon learning.

• JIM NOWLAN,a former Illinois legislator, agency director and aide to three governors, is a member of the state Executive Ethics Commission. He also was lead author of "Illinois Politics: A Citizen's Guide" (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Nowlan can be reached atjnowlan3@gmail.com.

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Source: http://www.mywebtimes.com/archives/ottawa/display.php?id=468859

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