Your keystrokes will find you out. Students tempted to enlist outside help for their college tests risk disqualification if the pace and style with which they type their answers does not fit their unique “keystroke biometrics”.
This novel method of verifying that students are doing their own work is being pioneered by Coursera, one of the digital education start-ups that is rattling ivory towers and intriguing investors with so-called “Moocs” – “massive open online courses”.
Cheating in your essays is just one time-honoured practice in higher education that is being upended by technology. In the past year, Coursera has signed up 33 leading universities to offer more than 200 online courses to 2.2m users – and to do it for free.
The Mooc movement began in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig tried to create an online version of their 200-student Stanford University artificial intelligence class. Some 160,000 people from 209 countries signed up.
Dr Thrun went on to launch Udacity. Like Coursera, which was founded by two Stanford computer scientists, and edX, a non-profit institution set up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Udacity has created a destination for students seeking online courses. Their websites attract millions of people to hundreds of free courses being run by dozens of leading institutions – and the whole infrastructure has been created in the past 18 months.
“We reached our first million users faster than Facebook,” says Andew Ng, co-founder of Coursera.
Universities are naturally conservative; it is an industry where being ancient sells. But commentators from Clay Shirky, the New York University media professor, to Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of the Open University, call the Mooc movement “the Napster moment” for higher education.
Much as the free peer-to-peer digital music service broke albums into tracks while demolishing record labels’ power over distribution and pricing, the analogy goes, colleges now face similar disaggregation and monumental disruption.
iBooks: not so many Apples for teacher
In 1996, Steve Jobs said that education’s failings could not be fixed by technology.
But by 2012, his successors sounded more confident, telling a splashy gathering at the Guggenheim Museum that Apple could help bring education out of the “dark ages”.
A year after the launch of a digital textbook section in Apple’s iBooks store, education is one content market Apple has yet to transform. Few titles have sold more than a few thousand copies in iBooks, publishers say.
“Online education is about to change the entirety of education in the elite university system,” says Roger Faxon, a board member of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. “The question is really: is the faculty ready because the students are ready?”
As the former chief executive of EMI, the home of The Beatles, Mr Faxon is better placed than most to judge the Napster analogy. Universities “are dealing with it in a much more open way than the music industry was,” he says. But there is a lesson from the labels’ costly battle against a technology that, ultimately, consumers want: “Don’t fight the disruption. Co-opt it.”
Some 6.7m US students, or 32 per cent of those in higher education, now take one or more of their courses online, says a Babson Survey Research Group study released last week, that was part-funded by Pearson, the education company that owns the Financial Times. The phenomenon is also spreading from the US. The Open University, the British distance-learning university, has pooled 10 UK universities including Exeter, Bristol and Southampton, into a new venture, Futurelearn.
Two years ago, “I’d no idea this insane hype machine would kick in”, says Ben Nelson, who has launched not a Mooc platform but a digitally driven “elite university” called The Minerva Project.
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Universities have long published lectures and materials online. Mooc platforms differ in that students follow a programme and can have work assessed, either by automated quizzes or classmates. This allows the platforms to issue certificates to confirm course completion. This sets Moocs apart from the online lectures published on Apple’s “iTunes U” service – or the thousands of short video lessons from Salman Khan’s “Khan Academy”, published on YouTube.
Online lecture hits
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s “bold experiment in distributed education”, including progress reports and a “statement of accomplishment” for students started in October 2011. About 160,000 people from 209 countries signed up, 23,000 graduated and Thrun resigned from Stanford to launch Udacity, now a leading Mooc platform.
Khan Academy – Communism
Salman Khan’s non-profit site says students can “learn almost anything for free” from its video tutorials, which cover topics from linear equations to raising money for a start-up. Available on YouTube, videos such as his 15-minute lecture on communism feature his multicoloured handwriting and doodles against a simple black background with his narration in the background.
Coursera – Equine Nutrition
Mooc platforms such as Coursera are branching out from their original core subjects in computer science. This five-lecture course, presented by a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, uses quiz questions to test students’ understanding as the course goes along. Those who complete it receive a certificate, but not a formal Edinburgh qualification.
edX – Justice
More than 15,000 students have taken Michael Sandel’s political philosophy course at Harvard University. Far more can now access it for free online. The course on edX, a non-profit institution set up by Harvard and MIT, offers the ability to discuss the topic with instructors and other students and a “certificate of mastery” at the end under the HarvardX brand.
Open Yale – Financial Markets
Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University, paces around the front of a lecture hall, apologising for his cold as he explains covariance in these videos of his 2011 course on markets. Organised into 23 lectures and three exams, it is available on YouTube, iTunes U and Open Yale, which aims to expand access to education but offers no credits or certificates.
Most analysts agree that the digital disruption is being driven this time by pressures on both the institutions and students. The restricted supply of university places has proved unable to satisfy demand, pushing up prices.
Over 20 years, adjusting for inflation, headline tuition and fees at the average non-profit four-year college in the US have risen from $17,000 to $29,000. Debt from outstanding student loans is approaching $1tn and colleges have accumulated more than $300m of debt, up 88 per cent since 2001, as they invested in amenities to justify ever-increasing fees.
Andrew Rosen, chief executive of Kaplan, the higher education division of The Washington Post Company, and author of Change.edu, talks of “Club College”, saying: “There’s only so much money to go around and we’re spending it on luxurious frills rather than on classrooms for less advantaged students.”
To some, the status quo ante is faintly ridiculous. “Imagine you go back 40 years and you were given 25 to 30 per cent of all the future presidents, CEOs and cultural figures in the world,” says Mr Nelson. “Would you take them and put them in separation for four years in the hills of New Hampshire and tell them to drink and ski and have fun? I don’t think so.”
Unbundling higher education, letting students opt out of funding the football team to pay only for the instruction they want, will allow Minerva to cut the cost of an Ivy League college by more than half, says Mr Nelson. This will be disruptive, says Chris Vollmer, media expert at consultants Booz & Co. But the limits of a physical campus meant that many qualified students were turned away. “As higher ed goes digital, these demand constraints will be loosened considerably, especially around the top-tier universities,” he says.
For several years, the fastest growth in demand has come from areas far from traditional campuses, as an expanding middle class in emerging markets has been able to pay for western education.
The Parthenon Group, an education consultancy, estimates that the number of Chinese students enrolled in North American, UK and Australian universities rose from 224,000 in 2006 to 399,000 in 2012, and will grow to 491,000 by 2017.
For those turned away, online courses offer an alternative. “I think that in 10 years’ time everyone will have free access to a high-quality education,” Mr Ng predicts. As many Coursera students come from Asia, South America and Africa as from North America.
Institutions hope that concepts they develop for Moocs could be used to inform regular courses. Jeff Haywood, vice-principal of Edinburgh University, says: “This is educational R&D. You can explore and try things in the Mooc space that you cannot do in the traditional for-fee degree curriculum.”
He also stresses that the institution has philanthropic motives. “We are not in it for money. I shall be happy if we break even … Universities have a mission to offer education as widely as they are able to.”
Mr Vollmer says “it’s more of a Netflix moment than a Napster one”. Providers of higher education have not lost control of digital distribution as record labels did. Instead, legal digital aggregators and distributors are emerging, often backed by established institutions, and should create valuable complementary services.
Whether the movement lives up to these hopes is unclear. Online learning providers first have to persuade students a digital education can fulfil their aspirations. For now, very few Moocs have been accredited, although in November the American Council on Education said it would consider five to 10 Moocs for certification, allowing them to count towards degrees.
Whatever formal qualifications such courses offer, they will not carry the same prestige as a Cambridge or Columbia degree, which involves passing an initial selection. Dropout rates are also far higher online than on campus. Coursera says 70 per cent of students who complete the first week abandon their courses, while just 14 per cent of those who signed up to Dr Norvig and Dr Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” completed it.
Mr Ng’s main concern is the student experience. “I think [online] learning needs to be much more social. We make some of our best friends in college,” he says. Coursera is experimenting with “community-building” tools, including video and text chat.
Minerva’s Mr Nelson is trying to overcome academics’ resistance to online learning by targeting them at points in their career when traditional universities frustrate them, such as the wait for a tenured position, campus moves that uproot academic spouses or retirement, when an emeritus professor may want to go off-campus without leaving academia.
Employers also need to be able to trust qualifications given for remote learning. Hence Coursera’s use of keyboard biometrics – known as “Signature Track”. Udacity and edX demand supervised examinations using testing centres run by Pearson for students wanting official credentials.
Mr Ng says paid-for certificates checked by Signature Track will be one of its biggest revenue sources this year but the business model of the online learning industry remains uncertain, with many of its pioneers providing content for free.
Mr Vollmer believes that Mooc platforms will find revenues by charging employers for introductions to their top students, licensing content to universities and community colleges.
The Open University hopes Futurelearn Mooc students will sign up for its paid distance-learning courses. Other universities could reap such a benefit, too. Prof Haywood predicts Edinburgh will soon have as many students taking paid-for online master’s degree courses as it currently has students on campus.
Drawing a comparison with Google’s range of free services, Mr Boxall says “the big money product of Moocs is the huge numbers of self-selecting and committed users, who become a valuable market either for in-app purchases [such as certificates of completion] or for third-party services”.
The aggregators who get big fast stand the best chance of making that money, Mr Vollmer says, adding that top-tier universities with the brands and quality to attract global demand, and a few “rock star” professors should also benefit.
Those most at risk are lower-tier educational institutions that could look unjustifiably expensive if the free alternatives improve.
To adapt, Mr Nelson argues, colleges should focus on offering “close student-professor interaction and debate” and discard low-value work that can be better done online. “I firmly believe that in five years there won’t be a single university that will offer a calculus class,” he says.
Tests of this so-called “flipped classroom” have been encouraging. San José State University found that students who watched edX engineering lectures at home and discussed them in twice-weekly classes scored higher than those taking the traditional course.
Affordable courses that fit around day jobs should also allow all of us to take “booster shots” of education throughout our careers rather than coasting for 40 years on what we learnt in college, Mr Ng says.
Yet the ivory tower will still have its place. “The real value of attending Stanford or Princeton or Caltech is not just the content,” Mr Ng says. “If your son or daughter is admitted to Princeton, for goodness sake tell them to go to Princeton rather than staying home.”