MOOCs give higher education a run for its money

The cost of higher education is drowning students in debt, but college degrees are increasingly important in careers. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering free to low-cost online college classes, might have the solution for students. But how MOOCs might change traditional higher education and post-secondary credentials is less clear.

Completing MOOC courses originally earned students no college credit. But people are beginning to pursue various kinds of credentials, including entire degrees, through the MOOC format, paying a small percentage of what traditional degree paths cost.

In a 2012 article “The Year of the MOOC,” The New York Times told how “the revolution that has higher education gasping” began. It started when more than 150,000 people signed up for a 2011 online class taught by Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun.

In January of this year, Georgia Tech partnered with Udacity, a MOOC platform co-founded by Thrun, to create an accredited master’s degree in computer science delivered through MOOC-like classes. The course content is open to the public on Udacity, but students who wish to earn a degree must apply to Georgia Tech, pay tuition, and stay on a semester schedule. Though the exact cost will vary, Georgia Tech estimates students will pay about $6,600 and take three years to complete the program.

“This program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO, in a statement on the master’s program.

The “skills gap” in America refers to millions of jobs that go unfilled due to lack of skilled workers. A 2012 report by McKinsey Global Institute, a management consulting firm, estimatee the global economy could be short 38 to 40 million college and postgraduate workers by 2020. In an effort to make education accessible and create a stream of potential employees, AT&T contributed $2 million to Georgia Tech’s online computer science graduate program.

Classes began in January, and Georgia Tech had over 1,250 students enrolled in August. That is more than four times the number of students in the on-campus program. Though Georgia Tech says the objective content of computer science fits well in MOOC format, the grading and administration necessary to administer degrees through MOOCs still requires human interaction. Meeting that need proves challenging with a significantly increased number of students.

Udacity is also working with businesses like AT&T, Facebook, and Google to create courses for “nanodegrees,” credentials created by Udacity that will take students about six to 12 months and cost about $200 per month. Nanodegrees are not official college degrees but include a series of Udacity MOOCs, a capstone project, and one-on-one guidance from a Udacity coach. Set to begin this fall, according to the Udacity website, nanodegrees aim to train students in high-demand skills such as web and iOS developing and data analyzing.

Companies like Cloudera, Autodesk, and Salesforce.com endorse nanodegrees on Udacity’s website, and AT&T has 100 paid internships for top nanodegree graduates. Udacity is working towards more companies recognizing nanodegrees as well.

“The basic problem we face is that 19th-century rules for education and employment no longer apply in the 21st century,” said Thrun in his essay “Credentials that Work.”

Yet some mourn the possibility of losing the liberal arts in the press to prepare people for jobs. “Students’ long-term success does not depend on short-term business cycles or the technical demands of the latest ‘hot’ industry,” wrote Carol Geary Schneider, president of the association of American Colleges and Universities, in a 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education commentary. She quotes Steve Jobs, saying, “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”