Massive online open courses are evolving thanks to extensive data collection from the early efforts to offer college-level classes to a worldwide online audience for free. According to MIT Technology Review, as the number of MOOCs offered grows, course designers are already looking at ways to make MOOCs 2.0 better.

Andrew Ng, who is the co-founder of Coursera, one of the largest MOOC providers, explains that each course offered by the company provides an opportunity for collecting information on how students learn, giving insight on an unprecedented scale. And it is all being used to tailor the courses in such a way as to help students succeed in their goal of completing their course.

How detailed is the data being collected? According to Ng, the company tracks “every mouse click,” which includes every student interaction with course materials – like knowing which part of the lecture videos get watched and which get fast-forwarded. So important has data collection become, that it is quickly emerging as the chief focus of MOOC technology efforts, taking priority over infrastructure improvements in order to accommodate an ever-greater number of students.

Some recent findings have vindicated aspects of MOOCs’  design. Princeton researchers used data from Coursera to show that the company’s system of peer grading, which calculates grades for coursework based on feedback provided by other students, is effective. Other findings have challenged assumptions about how an online course can successfully cater to hundreds of thousands of students or more.

The information being collected is already having an impact on course designs at another MOOC provider – Udacity. Since the beginning, the chief way the company’s courses put information across was short videos. But according to the data, students seem to get bored even with such bite-sized chunks of information, preferring to skip videos instead of watching them.

This means that the company’s focus has shifted. Sebastian Thrun, who left Stanford University’s robotics department to found Udacity, explains that since the discovery the courses offered on the website now rely on videos much less. Even in those classes that continue to use them, many have been re-recorded to make them more engaging to watch.

Some of the analyses taking place at MOOC companies appear to be answering more-modest questions. “A/B testing,” a methodology common at Internet companies, is being used to try out small design tweaks that might nudge students to do better. A/B testing shows different versions of a service to different segments of a site’s audience to see how they react.
Through A/B testing, says Ng, Coursera recently found that its practice of e-mailing people to remind them of upcoming course deadlines actually made students less likely to continue with the courses. But sending e-mails summarizing students’ recent activity on the site boosted engagement by “several percentage points.” One A/B test by Udacity pitted a colorized version of a lesson against a black-and-white version. “Test results were much better for the black-and-white version,” says Thrun. “That surprised me.”

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As the popularity of massive online open courses (MOOCs) grows, ten more state colleges and public universities from around the United States have affiliated with Coursera to provide a MOOC platform. However, the schools’ primary concern in creating these courses may be to supplement their on campus curriculum as opposed to broadcasting to a worldwide audience, according to Larry Gordon from the LA Times.

MOOCs supplement the “blended classrooms” that already utilize videotaped lectures from various online classes. They are being used as a virtual and visual textbook as a tool to complement traditional face to face teaching and evaluation.

Thursday’s announcement of the new partnerships means that the state schools, from New York to New Mexico, will experiment with using Coursera’s massive online open course (MOOC) video and testing platform to improve and widen online learning on their own campuses, officials said.

The institutions are the State University of New York, the University of Tennessee, the Tennessee Board of Regents (which oversees other public campuses in that state), University of Colorado system, University of Houston system, University of Kentucky, University of Nebraska, University of New Mexico, University System of Georgia and West University System.

The majority of MOOC classes have not been used to obtain academic credit — so far.

According to Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford University professors who founded the Mountain View, California-based Coursera last year, the main goal of the schools’ partnership with Coursera is for the universities to pull potential in-state students back into degree programs. It can also hasten graduation rates and allow high school students to get a jump start on a college education.

Coursera is already working with several University of California campuses to offer non-credit classes, as is its rival edX, a nonprofit MOOC platform based out of Massachusetts. There are even some MOOC that students can take for credits offered by Cal State schools through edX and another for-profit MOOC provider Udacity.

The University of New Mexico, one of ten schools to newly join with Coursera, reports that 15% of the school’s credit hours are already obtained through its own online courses. The Provost Chaouki Abdallah predicts that the partnership with Coursera could boost that another 10% in the future.

He said he did not think many of those new online courses would wholly rely on Coursera’s content from other universities but that New Mexico faculty likely will developing their own online material, blending it with lectures and presentations from other Coursera classes and maintain live classroom discussion and assignments.

“I don’t know how this is going to end up,” he said of the new online initiatives. “I am looking at it as an experiment.”

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Massive open online courses have opened up educational options for many people, but some are concerned that these MOOCs will be used to dismantle the education system, and make professors obsolete.

Steve Kolowich of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a group of philosophy professors from San Jose University wrote an open letter addressed to Michael Sandel, a government professor at Harvard, concerning his popular MOOC on the concept of justice.

In an open letter, the philosophy professors warned that such collaboration could mark beginning of a long-term effort to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Sandel offers a MOOC through a non-profit platform edX. EdX is the MOOC provider that the administration at San Jose State has recommended it faculty members to use in order to supplement their own teaching.

San Jose State is one of the first universities to incorporate MOOCs into their traditional curriculum.

The philosophy professors suggest that Sandel and other teachers are personally responsible for the effects of their MOOC courses, which in their opinion is the eminent elimination of professors.

When it comes to technology tools aimed at reducing operating costs, it is not uncommon for professors to distrust the intentions of university administrators—especially in California, where years of budget cuts have made faculty members especially leery of such “disruptive innovations.”

Mohammad A. Noor, a professor of biology at Duke University, asserts that professors cannot be held responsible for how a MOOC is used. He thinks that it is ultimately the choice of the faculty to say what their students use for a course.

Also, if the MOOCs are in fact being used by colleges to replace and dismantle departments, that it is the fault of a “reckless” administration, not the professor who furnished the MOOC.

“I don’t see it as particularly my business how people use the stuff once I put it out there,” Mr. Noor says—though he adds that if dismantling departments were all a MOOC was being used for, “then I’d stop.”

Another Duke professor, Roger Barr, believes his obligation is to his students taking his MOOC, not to other colleagues who believe that their career is in jeopardy. Sarah Eichhorn, a math lecturer at the University of California at Irvine, says that creating a MOOC is the equivalent of writing a textbook or producing open resources that are available for other teachers.

Ms. Eichhorn says she was surprised when the San Jose State philosophy professors went after Mr. Sandel. “I think it’s a professor’s job to make education available,” she says, “not to restrict it.”

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Georgia Institute of Technology announced that it will offer a two-year master’s degree in computer science in the format of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), reports Douglas Belkin of the Wall Street Journal.

Georgia Tech is the first top-tier school to offer this type of online program for a graduate degree. The program will be offered through Udacity, a widely-used MOOC platform.

The course is available to anyone, but in order to obtain the degree from Georgia Tech the student must gain admission and pay the course fees, which will amount to between $6,000 and $7,000. Students must have a bachelors degree in computer science or the work equivalent and earn a grade of B or higher in the first two classes.

The program’s startup cost to create online lectures runs between $200,000 and $300,000. However, the school estimates that it will only have to hire one teacher for every hundred students as opposed to one for every ten or twenty students, allowing the school to keep costs low.

This program comes at an exciting time as the cost of education is growing rapidly and there is a need for computer scientists.

 “There is currently a significant shortage of computer scientists in the country, and the government projects that there will be for years to come. Through 2018, the demand for computer software engineers is projected to increase by 34%—among the most of any occupation in the country, according to a 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.”

The university hopes to admit everyone who meets university requirements. Eventually it is estimated to enroll 10,000 students into the program, which is nearly half the size of Georgia Tech’s student body on campus, according to Justin Pope of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some worry that the quality of education will falter on such a large scale. Georgia Tech assures that the university will be able to maintain its high standards.

 ”This is a full-service degree,” Bras said. “We have our name reputation and excellence behind it. These people will be assessed graded, take exams, have help, will have access to individuals that answer questions.”

Another concern of faculty expressed by Benjamin Flowers, an architecture professor and chair the graduate curriculum committee, is that the degree will lose some of it value since there will be such a large turnout of graduates.

 ”One of the key attributes of educational distinction has always been that you control the number of people that have degrees from your institution,” Flowers said. “Are we producing something that’s of genuine value and in demand, or is it something we’re producing because there’s an arms race in place and we’re trying not to be left behind?”

With admission standards being comparable to the traditional Georgia Tech computer science masters program, the school assures that the program will not be an easier route to a Georgia Tech credential.

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For American college students, tuition isn’t the only expense that can appear insurmountable. Talk to anyone who has ever had to pull out their credit card at the campus book store and you’re likely to hear a litany of complains about the excessive cost of college textbooks. It’s good to know someone is paying attention.

On the whole, it isn’t really surprising that it was Coursera – the for-profit platform for massive online open courses – who was doing the listening and moved to help. After all, the company’s goal is reinvent higher education around the world and after offering free courses, offering free textbooks appears to be a logical next step.

Well – mostly free. Students who enroll in MOOCs offered on Coursera would get access to college textbooks from publishers like Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE and Wiley, but they won’t get to keep them. Books will be available on e-readers but students won’t be able to print or download them. They would also lose access to them once the MOOC concludes.

Chegg, the textbook rental company will be providing the platform to bring the texts to the students.

Koller said the agreement will help instructors who felt restricted in what they could require students to read. She also said it will help publishers market full versions of their books to those interested in buying them.

Koller says that the arrangement will bring significant benefits to students who don’t have the income to purchase college texts. In other words, the same income group that Koller hopes will most benefit from MOOCs – those for whom a traditional higher education diploma might be more of economically unachievable pipe dream.

But she said there would be significant benefit for a global learning community that has flocked to free online education.
“So many of our students really can’t afford the price of a textbook,” Koller said. For many, she said, “even a $30 or $40 e-book is the cost of a month or two of wages.”

At least one MOOC professor is applauding the new agreement between Coursera, Chegg and the textbook publishers. Cynthia L. Selfe, who teachers English at Ohio State University and is part of the faculty group that leads Writing II: Rhetorical Composing which started on Coursera this spring, the arrangement will benefit her students once she’s able to add books from Bedford/St. Martin’s in the coming weeks.

“Remember, this is a course offered for free,” Selfe said. “You can imagine that many of the people might not have access to a lot of the learning resources they might want or need.”

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Chief Information Officers from over 40 colleges and universities around the country gathered for a panel during The Higher Education Technology Forum in San Diego last weekend to talk about the impact massive online open courses are likely to have on higher education. The conference, organized by Consero, was an invitation-only event that looked to pose and answer questions about technology and higher ed.

The MOOC panel included among the participants three CIOs whose schools made important decisions about participating in the MOOC movement. Gayle Barton’s school – Amherst College – recently voted down a partnership with the non-profit edX consortium. David Baird’s Wesleyan University makes use of services provided by the popular for-profit MOOC platform Coursera. While Patricia Schoknecht’s Rollins College has indicated that it will be offering massive online open courses, they’ll do it using their own in-house platform.

“When I started last July, online education was the last thing on my mind,” Barton said. Amherst is a small liberal arts college in Amherst, Mass., known for small class sizes and faculty-student research collaboration. Yet after Amherst was approached first by 2U (formerly 2tor) and then Coursera, she felt responsible to investigate other options. She approached edX, the non-profit started by MIT and Harvard, that so far supports a relatively exclusive club of a dozen universities, as well as Udacity, which like Coursera is a for-profit company. 2U offers a cloud-based online education platform that allows schools to charge tuition.

“Those of us working on it felt that edX was the best fit because of their focus on very high quality courses and helping people do that,” Barton said. She figured Amherst needed the help coming up to speed on online education. In addition, she thought it would be valuable to get access to the assessment and analytics tools built into the edX platform.

MOOCs put schools – and their CIOs – in a tight spot. Actively or passively supporting MOOCs, or even offering some independently or on a third-party platform, could serve to undermine the message that a college degree from their own institution is worth as much as $50,000 in tuition a year. Yet schools that fail to embrace MOOCs risk getting left behind – and risk allowing other schools to set the agenda.

It’s a dangerous position to be in, especially if the free courses available to everyone eventually become viewed the same way as traditional college courses are now.

Yet Wesleyan, a private university in Middletown, Conn., is willing to take the risk, Baird said. “We decided we’d be better able to position ourselves if we’re involved than if we’re standing on the sidelines.”

Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth was in the process of closing a deal with Coursera when Baird joined the university in August. Although Wesleyan also consulted with faculty as part of the decision-making process, the deal was cut over the summer when many professors were away, Baird said. A six-week course on The Language of Hollywood recently wrapped up, and the film studies professor who offered it is so enthusiastic he plans to do it again in the fall.

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OpenupEd is the new European portal for massive online open courses, typically known as MOOCs, supported by the European Commission. Chris Parr writes in the Times Higher Education Supplement that the site contains a course database that includes varied offerings from fiction writing to mathematics. Each partner institution offers the courses via their own website, and the fact that partners include the UK’s Open University adds considerable legitimacy and heft to the enterprise.

Androulla Vassiliou is the European commissioner for education, culture, multilingualism and youth and is excited by the project and its capacity. He said that OpenupEd had the capacity and potential to extend educational opportunities to tens of thousands of students and would help European universities become more flexible and open to innovation in their teaching methods.

“The Moocs movement has already proved popular, especially in the US, but this pan-European launch takes the scheme to a new level. It reflects European values such as equity, quality and diversity and the partners involved are a guarantee for high-quality learning,” he added.

While Europe often lags slightly behind the US in terms of technological progress it appears the EC is keen not to be left behind by US progress on education innovation.

The OpenupEd site has university partners in France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, UK, Russia, Turkey and Israel. Courses are available in all of the countries’ native languages, and Arabic, and range from 20 to 200 hours of study.

The courses carry academic credit and can lead to recognition of progress with completion certificates or credit certificates which the participating student can use towards a degree. Students will have to bear the cost of the certificates, which ranges from 25 Euros to 400 Euros depending on the specific course and institution.

The OpenupEd sites claims that their offering reflects European values with a focus on equity, quality and diversity. They aim to expand the concept of an ‘open’ education beyond that of simply being free from charge and accessible. The learner will be at the center of the experience, taking advantage of high quality learning materials specifically designed for self-study.

EADTU president Will Swann, who was formerly the director of students for the Open University, said:

“The pan-European Moocs initiative shows our collective passion to further innovate. We look to expand with a growing range of courses from the launch partners, and we will welcome new partners from across the world who share our vision and practice of flexible, responsive higher education.”

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As much potential as Massive Online Open Courses might have to change the future, little of that potential can be unlocked until a way can be found to test the participants’ knowledge gains in a secure way. That’s where a company like ProctorU comes in with a way to proctor online exams to confirm the identity of the test-taker and ensure there’s no cheating. ProctorU brings that security to anywhere there’s a student with a computer taking a MOOC exam: in the kitchen, in the office, in the bedroom or even in a classroom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that recent years have seen the growth of companies like ProctorU, right along with the growing popularity of online courses at the college and even high school level.

It works like this: Schools allow their students to enroll in a distance learning course where they move through the material at their own pace, but when it comes exam time, ProctorU is there to monitor via webcam as students take the exam to assure that no cheating takes place.

The old biases against online education have begun to erode, but companies that offer remote-proctoring services still face an uphill battle in persuading skeptics, many of whom believe that the duty of preserving academic integrity should not be entrusted to online watchers who are often thousands of miles from the test-takers. So ProctorU and other players have installed a battery of protocols aimed at making their systems as airtight as possible.

The result is a monitoring regime that can seem a bit Orwellian. Rather than one proctor sitting at the head of a physical classroom and roaming the aisles every once in a while, remote proctors peer into a student’s home, seize control of her computer, and stare at her face for the duration of a test, reading her body language for signs of impropriety.

Even those who do the job sometimes feel like they’re intruding too much into the students’ lives. That was certainly the experience of Rebekah Lovaas, who began her career in the sector proctoring exams for Kryterion, a company similar to ProctorU. She did that job for three years before being promoted to the post of operations analyst, and she admits she was never quite able to completely let go of the discomfort that comes from peeking into someone’s ultimate personal space.

Each online-proctoring company has developed its own approach. Some monitor live feeds; others record students via Webcam and watch the recordings. Some require students to share a view of their computer monitor, and empower a proctor to override their cursor if necessary; others simply make students install software that makes it impossible to use Web browsers or chat programs while the exam is in progress.

The companies make bold claims about their effectiveness, arguing their services are not just equal to but better than in-person proctoring. “The level of supervision over the Web is much more intense,” said William Dorman, chief executive at Kryterion. “Frankly,” he said, “we can spot any cheating.”

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An online petition opposing the measure that would require California Public Universities to grant online credit for courses offered by approved online course providers has drawn over 1,600 signatures already, The Daily Californian reports. The measure, called SB 520 and introduced in California State Senate, would require schools making up the Cal State, UC and Community College systems to accept for credit courses offered by MOOC providers like Udacity and Coursera.

The petition is being sponsored by the UC Berkeley Faculty Association – a group that has come out swinging against the bill almost as soon as it was announced. The petition says that the proposal is a wrongheaded way of addressing accessibility and affordability issues surrounding higher education in the state.

“This bill will lower academic standards (particularly in key skills such as writing, math, and basic analysis), augment the educational divide along socioeconomic lines, and diminish the ability for underrepresented minorities to excel in higher education,” the petition reads.

Steinberg could not be reached for comment on the petition.

The petition has been circulating since late last month and a copy was forwarded to Steinberg who had no comment at the time. But earlier that month he released a statement pointing out that more than 7,000 students in California Public University system were stuck on waiting lists for courses critical to their graduation scheduled.

More than 80% of 112 community college courses had waiting lists as well.

But Philip Stark, a signatory of the petition and a UC Berkeley professor of statistics, disagrees.

“I have taught hybrid courses, large for-credit online courses, and a (massively open online course) with about 52,000 students,” Stark said in a comment on the petition. “It is quite difficult to approach the pedagogical quality of a good face-to-face course with an online course. If there are to be UC-quality online courses, they likely will come from UC and from its peer institutions, not from just any commercial provider.”

Other groups opposed to the bill are UC Academic Senate which published an open letter to its members last week expressing concerns over how the drafting process for the measure was handled. In the letter, it was pointed out that the bill was put together without any input from university faculty or administrators.

According to Steinberg, even if the measure has no chance of passage the discussion it has inspired in the higher education sphere is important enough. He pointed out that with tuition growth outpacing income growth, without some radical intervention it won’t be long before a college education is completely beyond the means of an average middle class American family.

Steinberg wants to find a way to fix the problem that over 7,000 students remain on waiting lists for community college slots in the state, while fewer than 16% graduate from the public university system in four years.

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Stanford University will be working together with the online education platform edX to improve the software which powers its massive online open courses, as well releasing an API to allow other colleges and universities open access to use the software for their own needs.

The move announced this Wednesday is expected to contribute to the growth of MOOCs since it will relieve smaller schools of the need to invest in infrastructure to offer courses of their own.

The improved platform will come with tools that will help schools evaluate the effectiveness of the courses they offer in order to be better able to tailor them to the unique needs of their students. The source code for the platform – which was initially a partnership between Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — will be released online in June.

“We hope to have a platform that really makes online learning better for everybody in the world,” edX President Anant Agarwal said. His nonprofit organization was founded by MIT and Harvard University last year and now includes 12 universities who have put massive open online courses, or MOOCs, online or will do so by next year.

Agarwal, an MIT professor, likened the Stanford agreement to having formerly rival car manufacturers deciding to work together to design a new car; the result, he said, will be a faster and more efficient vehicle that then can be used for many different types of passengers and trips.

Although a number of schools have joined the edX initiative since its launch, Stanford is not one of them, despite the new commitment it has now made to the platform. It isn’t clear if the university will be financially investing in edX or even offer online courses through it. Currently the school uses its own proprietary platform to offer online classes targeted at the students enrolled in its traditional courses as well as offering limited free access to the public over the internet. The courses do not currently award college credit.

John Mitchell, Stanford’s vice provost for online learning, didn’t rule out using edX for its online offerings in the future, saying merely that all decisions will be made on case-by-case basis.

Whatever the actual portal to online classes, improving the edX open access platform will make all operations more efficient at Stanford and elsewhere, Mitchell said.  For example, the improved platform may be better able to track connections between how well students perform on tests to how often they replay portions of videotaped lectures they they may find confusing; that can help professors improve course material, he said.

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