The New York Times posted a story on online Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online. The story is a balanced discussion about how the Georgia Institute of Technology is going to offer a master’s in computer science through a MOOC. The story rehearses the usual opportunities and concerns. No one is really sure whether there will be significant savings for comparable quality.
I tend to think that free non-credit MOOCs are really just more content (to be compared with book or other web sites) that won’t do more than act as branding for institutions. It is the credit courses, and even more importantly credit programmes offered online or in hybrid formats that are worth watching as they could change access, costs, and the international distribution of higher education. For this reason the Georgia Institute for Technology experiment is worth watching. It is also worth remembering that there a number of online or distance graduate degrees already in place – MOOCs have drawn attention to the issue of scale and faculty attention, but distance access isn’t new.
“Online is a scale game, so the Georgia Tech thing is interesting,” said Phil Regier, executive vice provost of Arizona State University Online, which takes in $90 million annually in revenue. “What we’re seeing is different price points for different levels of faculty involvement. If you want no touch, or very little touch, they’ll deliver that for $6,000. If you want a higher-touch program, taught and graded by regular faculty, with a lot of faculty interaction, it’s going to be more expensive.”
I came to the story from Twitter post by Ian Bogost pointing to his blog entry WHAT GROWS WHEN MOOCS GROW? where he moves from commenting on the financial speculation behind MOOCs to asking what sort of growth we would see if there similar investment in other forms of growth,
The growth of private MOOC companies is driven almost entirely from financial speculation, speculation with an interest in private, short-term gain via industrialized scale. It’s worth imagining what other kinds of growth might be possible if we had the stomach for a different kind of speculation meant to benefit long-term social institutions like schools instead of just the market.