Computer-Generated Image by Richard Kolker for TIME
On Sept. 17, the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube.
The purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was
inciting protests around the world.
One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215 people in Pakistan
suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online physics course. The
free college-level class, created by a Silicon Valley start-up called
Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube videos embedded on its
website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had enrolled, including Khadijah
Niazi, a pigtailed 11-year-old in Lahore. She was on question six of
the final exam when she encountered a curt message saying “this site is
unavailable.”
(GOOGLE+ HANGOUT: Can Online Mega Courses Change Education?)
Niazi was devastated. She’d worked hard to master this physics class
before her 12th birthday, just one week away. Now what? Niazi posted a
lament on the class discussion board: “I am very angry, but I will not
quit.”
In every country, education changes so slowly that it can be hard to
detect progress. But what happened next was truly different. Within an
hour, Maziar Kosarifar, a young man taking the class in Malaysia, began
posting detailed descriptions for Niazi of the test questions in each
video. Rosa Brigída, a novice physics professor taking the class from
Portugal, tried to create a workaround so Niazi could bypass YouTube; it
didn’t work. From England, William, 12, promised to help and warned
Niazi not to write anything too negative about her government online.
None of these students had met one another in person. The class
directory included people from 125 countries. But after weeks in the
class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple
harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same
carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a
rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let
anyone lock it up.
By late that night, the Portuguese professor had successfully
downloaded all the videos and then uploaded them to an uncensored
photo-sharing site. It took her four hours, but it worked. The next day,
Niazi passed the final exam with the highest distinction. “Yayyyyyyy,”
she wrote in a new post. (Actually, she used 43 y’s, but you get
the idea.) She was the youngest girl ever to complete Udacity’s
Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average college
freshman.
That same day, Niazi signed up for Computer Science 101 along with
her twin brother Muhammad. In England, William began downloading the
videos for them. High-End Learning on the Cheap
The hype about online learning is older than Niazi. In the late
1990s, Cisco CEO John Chambers predicted that “education over the
Internet is going to be so big, it is going to make e-mail usage look
like a rounding error.” There was just one problem: online classes were
not, generally speaking, very good. To this day, most are dry,
uninspired affairs, consisting of a patchwork of online readings,
written Q&As and low-budget lecture videos. Many students
nevertheless pay hundreds of dollars for these classes — 3 in 10 college
students report taking at least one online course, up from 1 in 10 in
2003 — but afterward, most are no better off than they would have been
at their local community college.
Now, several forces have aligned to revive the hope that the Internet
(or rather, humans using the Internet from Lahore to Palo Alto, Calif.)
may finally disrupt higher education — not by simply replacing the
distribution method but by reinventing the actual product. New
technology, from cloud computing to social media, has dramatically
lowered the costs and increased the odds of creating a decent online
education platform. In the past year alone, start-ups like Udacity,
Coursera and edX — each with an elite-university imprimatur — have put
219 college-level courses online, free of charge. Many traditional
colleges are offering classes and even entire degree programs online.
Demand for new skills has reached an all-time high. People on every
continent have realized that to thrive in the modern economy, they need
to be able to think, reason, code and calculate at higher levels than
before.
At the same time, the country that led the world in higher education
is now leading its youngest generation into a deep hole. According to
the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, Americans owe some $914 billion in student loans;
other estimates say the total tops $1 trillion. That’s more than the
nation’s entire credit-card debt. On average, a college degree still
pays for itself (and then some) over the course of a career. But about
40% of students at four-year colleges do not manage to get that degree
within six years. Regardless, student loans have to be repaid; unlike
other kinds of debt, they generally cannot be shed in bankruptcy. The
government can withhold tax refunds and garnish paychecks until it gets
its money back — stifling young people’s options and their spending
power.
For all that debt, Americans are increasingly unsure about what they
are getting. Three semesters of college education have a “barely
noticeable” impact on critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing
skills, according to research published in the 2011 book Academically Adrift.
In a new poll sponsored by TIME and the Carnegie Corporation of New
York, 80% of the 1,000 U.S. adults surveyed said that at many colleges,
the education students receive is not worth what they pay for it. And
41% of the 540 college presidents and senior administrators surveyed
agreed with them.
(MORE: TIME/Carnegie’s Higher Education Poll)
Arriving at this perilous intersection of high demand, uneven supply
and absurd prices are massive open online courses (endowed with the
unfortunate acronym MOOCs), which became respectable this year thanks to
investments from big-name brands like Harvard, Stanford and MIT.
Venture capitalists have taken a keen interest too, and the business
model is hard to resist: the physics class Niazi was taking cost only
about $2 per student to produce.
Already, the hyperventilating has outpaced reality; desperate parents
are praying that free online universities will finally pop the tuition
bubble — and nervous college officials don’t want to miss out on a
potential gold rush. The signs of change are everywhere, and so are the
signs of panic. This spring, Harvard and MIT put $60 million into a
nonprofit MOOC (rhymes with duke) venture called edX. A month later, the
president of the University of Virginia abruptly stepped down — and was
then quickly reinstated — after an anxious board member read about
other universities’ MOOCs in the Wall Street Journal.
One way or another, it seems likely that more people will eventually
learn more for less money. Finally. The next question might be, Which
people How the Brain Learns
This fall, to glimpse the future of higher education, I visited
classes in brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen MOOCs.
I dropped most of the latter because they were not very good. Or
rather, they would have been fine in person, nestled in a 19th century
hall at Princeton University, but online, they could not compete with
the other distractions on my computer.
I stuck with the one class that held my attention, the physics class
offered by Udacity. I don’t particularly like physics, which is why I’d
managed to avoid studying it for the previous 38 years. What surprised
me was the way the class was taught. It was designed according to how
the brain actually learns. In other words, it had almost nothing in
common with most classes I’d taken before. Minute 1: Physics 100 began with a whirling video montage of
Italy, slow-motion fountains and boys playing soccer on the beach. It
felt a little odd, like Rick Steves’ Physics, but it was a huge
improvement over many other online classes I sampled, which started with
a poorly lit professor staring creepily into a camera.
When the Udacity professor appeared, he looked as if he were about
12; in fact, he was all of 25. “I’m Andy Brown, the instructor for this
course, and here we are, on location in Siracusa, Italy!” He had a crew
cut and an undergraduate degree from MIT; he did not have a Ph.D. or
tenure, which would turn out to be to his advantage.
“This course is really designed for anyone … In Unit 1, we’re going
to begin with a question that fascinated the Greeks: How big is our
planet?” To answer this question, Brown had gone to the birthplace of
Archimedes, a mathematician who had tried to answer the same question
over 2,000 years ago.
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