Massive, yes but perhaps not a fit

Last year the heavyweights of American higher education embraced Massive Open Online Courses, the Internet-based, usually-free interactive classes that many feel could soon transform college.
Led by schools including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, MOOCS, as the online courses are known, vaulted from obscurity into the next big thing as institutions raced to join powerful consortiums beaming content around the world.
In the first quarter of this year, more than 2 million people were registered with one leading MOOC consortium, Coursera, alone.
Expensive and complicated to make, MOOCs have so far been the exclusive domain of the large institutions with the resources and reputations to attract students from around the world.
In Rhode Island, the lone entrant into MOOCS has, unsurprisingly, been Brown University, which joined Coursera last year and has created three MOOCs burnishing the school’s brand with thousands of users already.
It’s still murky, however, whether any of the state’s smaller colleges and universities will ever venture into MOOCS or, if not, how the growing prominence of online learning will affect their standing in the education market.
In a report released this summer, ratings agency Moody’s predicted that the expansion of MOOCs globally would be a financial boon to universities on the whole, especially the large institutions now able to access a much larger market than they can with traditional classes.
But Moody’s said MOOCs could ultimately accelerate “stratification” of the higher-education market and be “credit negative” for smaller colleges that don’t have the money or reputation to compete online nationally or internationally.
“Many smaller colleges will not have the brand name or star faculty to join a network or attract students,” the Moody’s report said. “As MOOCs transition to a more fully developed platform, with free and revenue-generating components, negative credit implications will begin to materialize for many small colleges that have historically attracted students based on proximity or price.” So what are smaller Rhode Island colleges doing to cope in this new online world?
“Right now we have to watch MOOCs carefully,” said Providence College Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Hugh F. Lena. “They are interesting but perhaps more of a fad until the issue of revenue has been resolved. We would be very cautious to offer courses online to large number of students.”
While Providence College watches how MOOCS evolve, like other small liberal arts schools, it is steadily bolstering its technical resources and experimenting with more and more online learning.
PC has one entirely online course for continuing education students in religious studies and has other hybrid courses that involve both classroom time and remote learning. It has also hired a second full-time instructional technology staffer and is planning to approve a new technology strategic plan this fall that Lena said should include a “modest” expansion in online learning for both continuing students and undergraduates.
So far, MOOCS have remained almost entirely free and almost no schools have offered credit toward a degree for completing them.
Lena said until one or both of those thresholds are crossed, the true direction and impact of MOOCS will not be clear or hit home.
But like many liberal arts schools that rely on tuition from residential students, Lema acknowledged that, with the traditional 18-to-21-year-old college population shrinking over the next decade, the potential for market disruption from a new online model is real.
“Clearly tuition schools like ours are going to have to be mindful to the threat that online and MOOCs present for a different higher-education financial model in the future,” Lena said “Some schools are pulling out of MOOCS. If we see the signs that our market share of residential undergrads is going to interact with an already declining demographic, that is a real threat to us.” At Salve Regina University in Newport, Dean of Professional Studies Traci Warrington said MOOCs are now being used to supplement materials in traditional courses and give faculty an idea about the latest curriculum and methods.
Nearly all colleges are moving at least somewhat toward a “flipped classroom,” in which students absorb traditional lecture material online and in-person classroom time is used for discussion and analysis.
Salve’s MBA program, although not massive or open, is delivered online, but Warrington said the school does not have any current plans to explore a MOOC.
“As a small institution that values small classes and student-teacher interaction and a personal assessment of each student, we see the value in the content it is delivering, but don’t see it as a threat to traditional liberal arts education,” Warrington said.
Of Rhode Island’s non-Ivy League private colleges, Johnson and Wales University in Providence appears to be exploring fully online courses most aggressively, although a MOOC still appears some distance away.
JWU moved a bachelor’s completion program for culinary students with associates degrees fully online this year and starting in the fall of 2014 the school’s MBA program will migrate entirely online.
In 2007, JWU began investing in a digital educational content management system from Blackboard Inc. that includes the video capabilities needed to produce a MOOC.
“It is a competitive imperative,” said Cindy Parker, dean of JWU’s School Online and Continuing Education, about Internet learning. “Institutions today need to think about online delivery because it is a significant trend and will not reverse itself, especially at the graduate level.” At Roger Williams University in Bristol, President Donald J. Farish likened MOOCS in some ways to textbooks, which used to be rare in colleges where professors would cobble together their own materials from primary sources. For traditional undergraduate education, Farish said he could see schools contracting with MOOC producers for access to certain courses, but everything would be guided by a professor.
RWU has an online legal course it teaches in partnership with the U.S. Navy for servicemen stationed around the world and the school is searching for a new Providence facility for continuing and graduate programs that will have improved online infrastructure.
The most significant impact of MOOCs, Farish said, could be in graduate, continuing and technical education, growing segments of the market that schools are going to rely on as the traditional undergraduate population shrinks.
“The need for adults to get more education is exploding – even for people already with degrees to pick up a skill, or stay current or change careers – it’s an untapped market that schools will need to keep revenues up,” Farish said.
Farish said he didn’t see the major research universities completely taking over online education because of their need to retain some level of exclusivity and the potential reputational harm that may result from appearing too commercial.
In that way, the head-start for-profit schools have gotten on nonprofits online may end up being just as significant.
When smaller Rhode Island colleges do break into MOOCs, Farish and the other school executives believe it will probably be in subjects where they have already carved out a niche, like PC and religion, RWU and maritime law, Salve and RWU in cyber security, or JWU and food.
“Personally I welcome MOOCS and anything that expands educational opportunities is inherently a good thing,” Farish said. •

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