Brown steps onto cutting edge of online education

THE NEXT STEP: Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown University, says that the institution’s Massive Open Online Courses don’t offer college credits. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
THE NEXT STEP: Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown University, says that the institution’s Massive Open Online Courses don’t offer college credits. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

With the launch last week of the first two of three free Massive Open Online Courses, Brown University has joined the cutting edge of online higher education for the masses.
Such online college classes, offered by some of the country’s top universities free of charge to the general public, are a relatively new higher education innovation. Brown is launching the courses through Coursera, a social-technology company that partners with schools to run the classes.
But Brown is taking its role in MOOCs one step further, offering what Wendy Drexler, director of online development, believes is the country’s first such free course targeted directly at high school students.
“I can’t say [MOOCs are totally] new, because there were some as early as 2007 that were offered from some Canadian universities, but the Coursera [classes] are a pretty new situation,” Drexler said. “I think some other [schools] are just sitting back and waiting to see what is happening.”
MOOCs began to receive a plethora of media attention in 2012, when Coursera, along with Udacity and edX, similar companies, opened for business.
Coursera counts, in addition to Brown, schools including Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Rice University and Stanford University, among many others.
According to its website, Coursera’s goal is to promote a future in which top universities are “educating not only thousands of students, but millions” and to offer educational opportunities that now are only available to a select population to a broader group of interested learners.
These courses are not for-credit college courses, and Drexler said right now there is no thought of eventually having the Coursera classes becoming for-credit, though Brown will give participants certificates of completion.
Drexler said there are several reasons Brown decided to try out the online courses, including the new strategic-planning process currently under way with new President Christina H. Paxson. “One of the components is online learning and thinking about where Brown wants to be in that space,” Drexler said. “To participate with some other colleagues is kind of an experiment. I really do believe the idea is an interesting concept in, ‘Let’s share our content with the world and see what happens.’ ”
Brown last week began offering two MOOCs: “Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets” and “The Fiction of Relationship.” As of last week, an estimated 87,000 students had signed up for the courses. A third course, “Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications” will launch July 1.
“It’s really more of a way to go through the process and see what it does to infrastructure, to create the sources, what kind of resources [are needed] and to make some decisions going forward,” Drexler said.
The Chronicle of Higher Education in February conducted a survey of MOOC-participating professors.
That survey found that professors spent a median of 100 hours preparing for a MOOC and spent a median of eight hours a week on a MOOC while it was in session.
The survey also reported that more than 90 percent of professors were enthusiastic about online courses after having taught a MOOC but that less than half, 48 percent, felt the MOOC class was as academically challenging as a traditional classroom version of that class.
Participating professors said that their motivation for teaching a MOOC included increasing access to higher education (71.8 percent) and increasing their visibility and reputation (37.9 percent).
“Brown is really trying to take a very thoughtful approach [to online learning],” Drexler said. “These are being offered for the world by Brown faculty.”
Brown this summer also will offer its first exclusively online-for-credit class for undergraduates in creative nonfiction as a pilot run for online courses.
The university has for some time offered online courses for high school students that are designed as precollege programs for which students pay course fees, including in writing for college, crafting a video essay, anatomy, physiology and disease, lessons in leadership, and exploring engineering. Drexler said the decision to offer the engineering class for free, as the university broadens its ventures into free online courses, was made to find ways to reverse the trend of engineering students switching to different majors before graduation.
“We know that any [high school] student who is good in math and science often gets pushed into engineering as a potential professional field,” Drexler said. “The problem is that a lot of kids don’t really understand what engineering is. The idea is to help high school students really, truly understand.”
The course gives students an overview of engineering, asks them to interview an engineer, design a building using a free design-tool download, and then remodel that design based on given financial constraints. Students also are asked to develop a degree curriculum they would follow at an engineering school they are interested in attending.
Brown ran its first engineering course for high school students in April. Registration capped out at 500 last November.
The next course was scheduled to begin this month with more than 1,400 people signed up. It is difficult, Drexler said, to pinpoint how many enrolled participants are high school students as the course is open to anyone, but the university is working on building relationships with high school teachers to promote the course among interested students.
Students who enrolled in the free archaeology course are from every continent except Antarctica.
The eight-week course features “short lectures and hands-on demonstrations of everything from garbage archaeology to making a cuneiform tablet,” according to a Brown release.
The course is the first MOOC to be offered in archaeology, according to the university, and is being promoted by the Archaeological Institute of America. •

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