Rachel Stanley (Elon) on Free Classes from Top Schools: Can They Stay Free?

In the midst of all this, public and private universities (often some of the most elite and most expensive) have begun to offer free, open, online classes known as massive online open courses (MOOC). Started by Stanford earlier this year, MOOCs allow an enormous number of students (often in the hundreds of thousands) to take classes on a variety of subjects from regular university professors. Subjects of offered courses vary, but they do tend to focus on technological and natural sciences with less emphasis on the humanities and social sciences.

At face value, what could be the downside of free, online courses in a variety of subjects open to anyone anywhere in the world? Well, unfortunately, there could be a few.

Even though the three major platforms for MOOCs are offering courses for free, that may not always be the case. (Even though edX, the partnership between Harvard and MIT, is non-profit, its predecessor Coursera is already for-profit.) While the current free status of these courses may be liberating higher education, there is no credit offered for any of these classes. A student could complete a significant part of a traditional on-campus education through these classes, but could she or he use the experience to get a job? Will graduate schools ever recognize the participation in these courses?

MOOCs have been held up as an innovative way to liberate education, to bring top-quality American university courses to people all around the world. But Professor Noliwe Rooks of Cornell University worries about this. “Only 35% of households earning less than $25,000 have broadband access to the Internet, compared with 94% of households with income in excess of $100,000... Only half of black and Latino homes have Internet connections at all, compared with almost 65% of white households.” Is this educational trend of moving towards greater and more constant use of the Internet alienating those who need education the most? Professor Rooks’ statistics only mentioned Internet access disparities in the US; imagine if we examined the numbers from the developing world...

There are serious benefits and significant limitations to the new, free, online classes coming out of these top universities. I’m no mind reader, but I can hope for what these MOOCs’ existence will bring to the future of higher education:
• Hopefully MOOCs will expand the number and type of people that have access to higher education. While their online format helps many access these courses, perhaps their existence will spur greater efforts into making Internet accessible for all so that the technological gap does not grow.
• Maybe MOOCs will make traditional universities reconsider the ways that they use and raise tuition rates and make employers and graduate schools reconsider what they look for in an applicant.
• Even if MOOCs cannot or do not stay free, hopefully they can remain beneficial to a large group of people. Perhaps they will have a cost but offer course credit in exchange for that small cost.