By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: April 29, 2013
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| Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction provider in Mountain View, Calif. |
Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus
needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing
classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out,
often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public
institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students
must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have
left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes
they need.
To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation,
universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive
open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to
anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings.
While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students
around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and
very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready
for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses,
universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online
materials, in hopes of improving success rates.
Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material
from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to
earn credit for them.
“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it
makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi,
the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail,
but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of
failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what
went wrong and do better.”
In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity,
a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether
round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can
help more students make their way through three fully online basic math
courses.
The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students
and local high school and community college students, began in January,
so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are
promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding
those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology
and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.
San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX,
a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding
hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a
grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So
last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T.
professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask
whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the
first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live
classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the
president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal
agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer
the blended class last fall.
The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section
passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.
“We’re engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is
similar, we will not have the traditional version next year,” said
Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. “It would be educational
malpractice.”
It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the
edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions
focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures.
Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is
crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses.
