UNLOCKING the GATES HOW AND WHY LEADING UNIVERSITIES ARE OPENING UP ACCESS TO THEIR COURSES TAYLOR WALSH, in conjunction with Ithaka S+R PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html CONTENTS Foreword by William G. Bowen Preface 1 Introduction: Context and Background 2 Early Experiments: Fathom and AllLearn 3 Free and Comprehensive: MIT‘s OpenCourseWare 4 Digital Pedagogy: Carnegie Mellon‘s Open Learning Initiative 5 Quality over Quantity: Open Yale Courses 6 A Grassroots Initiative: webcast.berkeley 7 Closing the Gap in India: The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning 8 Conclusions Epilogue: Implications for the Future References List of Interviews To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html FOREWORD The seven case studies of ―online courseware‖ initiatives presented in Unlocking the Gates are instructive in a number of ways. At the most basic level, the rich detail provided by Taylor Walsh (on the basis of numerous interviews she conducted with the key participants, as well as her close examination of memos, reports, reviews, and other written materials) allows the reader to understand the thinking that went into the Fathom and AllLearn experiments, MIT‘s bold creation of OpenCourseWare (OCW), Carnegie Mellon‘s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), Open Yale Courses (OYC), webcast.berkeley, and India‘s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). Considered together, these seven initiatives illustrate the many different options open to universities that wish to undertake online courseware projects, which differ from the by-now standard distance education models.1 This compilation of case studies demonstrates that there are multiple choices to be made in determining how much to invest in online courseware, what subjects to present, what audience to target, and what objectives— educational or reputational—to pursue. There is nothing approaching a single model, and comparing such different projects teaches a variety of lessons. There was a time, not all that long ago, when some in higher education believed that digital technologies offered a ripe opportunity to advance the educational mission of the institution 1 Online courses in higher education typically take the form of credit-bearing distance education for enrolled students—some of whom take a mix of online and traditional on- campus courses, while others complete entire degree programs online. According to a 2009 report on online education in the United States commissioned by the Sloan Consortium, ―over 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2008 term,‖ placing the rate of higher education students who take at least one of their courses online at more than one in four (Allen, Elaine, and Jeff Seaman, ―Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,‖ report supported by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group, January 2010, 1). Colleges and universities can also use a growing number of specialized ―course modules‖ provided by for-profit companies such as Statistics.com—in effect, outsourcing some of their teaching. See Kolowich, Steve, ―The Specialists,‖ Inside Higher Ed, April 5, 2010. To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html ready to venture into this terrain and, simultaneously, to make money that the institution could use for purposes of all kinds. That assumption proved to be incorrect, and it is perhaps the major lesson to be learned from Columbia‘s ill-fated effort to sell content through Fathom to a broad public and from the ultimately unsuccessful effort of Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to market courseware to a primarily alumni constituency via a consortial entity called AllLearn. It is of course easier to understand what happened with hindsight than it was to anticipate problems at the start of these ambitious ventures; but the skeptic would have been right to warn against relying on untested assumptions when placing bets as big as the one Columbia placed on Fathom. The MIT OCW saga is the best known of these initiatives. The leadership at MIT also flirted with a for-profit model but concluded, following a careful study of different options that included advice from outside consultants, that there was no likelihood of a vibrant market for what MIT wanted to provide: online access to comprehensive course materials, but with no ―tutoring‖ in using them and no ―credentialing.‖ These two ―no‘s‖ are extremely important. Studies of online courses that involve continuing interactions with faculty have warned for years that providing such interactions can be demanding and expensive.2 We also know that it is the certificate or degree associated with completing a course of study that, in the minds of many, is what is really valuable (and thus marketable). Yet highly selective colleges and universities such as MIT have never seriously considered going down this ―credentialing‖ path. The reasons are both understandable and straightforward. Universities such as MIT believe that the educational 2 I discussed some of these issues, and other questions related to digitization and commercialization, in the Romanes Lecture that I gave at the University of Oxford in 2000 (Bowen, William G., ―At a Slight Angle to the Universe: The University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age,‖ http://www.mellon.org/news_publications/publications/romanes.pdf/view). To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html value that they offer to their carefully chosen students derives in large part from the on-campus and in-person setting in which teaching and research take place. They do not want to undercut this value proposition by giving ―MIT credit‖ for a very different online offering that, in their view, would not be of ―MIT quality.‖ Presenting some of their own on-campus courses in a strictly online mode could also compromise their ability to compete with other elite universities for the very best students—many of whom expect face-to-face contact with professors and regular in-class interactions with talented peers. Charles Vest, MIT‘s exceedingly able president at the time the OCW initiative was launched, was both clear and eloquent in stating that making the outlines of MIT courses available for free, worldwide, was in his mind a direct extension of MIT‘s basic educational mission and justifiable on those grounds alone. Vest also understood that a highly visible—and highly accessible—OCW would strengthen MIT‘s already stellar international reputation. In addition, MIT has found that its own student community benefits from easy online access to course syllabi, lecture notes, and other teaching materials which serve to enhance, not replace, traditional modes of instruction. Yale‘s more targeted effort to produce truly high-quality versions of some of its most popular courses, with the ―look and feel‖ of being in the Yale classroom, is said to have been well received by Yale‘s alumni and, like MIT OCW, has received significant positive attention from the press. Yale believes that it has gotten good value from its investment in OYC. Benefits do not have to be financial to be consequential. webcast.berkeley is intended primarily to serve instructional purposes on the home campus. This is an instance of a large public university investing its own resources in the creation of relatively low-tech online instructional materials. The contrast with the elegance of To view the website for this Ithaka S+R project, visit: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/unlockingthegates To purchase the book from Princeton University Press, visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9386.html OYC is striking. Severe resource constraints have clearly shaped Berkeley‘s approach and led it to pioneer in the development of low-cost instructional materials that are helpful to students who cannot attend a lecture at the time it is given or simply value the convenience of studying the material online at whatever time and place suit them. India‘s NPTEL represents yet another model that is suited to local circumstances. The Indian government has already begun investing heavily in online teaching because of its need to take fuller advantage of valuable teaching resources concentrated in elite institutes. The burgeoning demand for higher education in India argues strongly in favor of making fuller use of the country‘s top academic talent—of extending the reach of these faculty in cost-effective ways. It seems likely that other countries facing comparable needs to augment their teaching resources will experiment with similar models. Active government sponsorship of NPTEL addresses directly the considerable upfront investments in online resources that are required and also provides a valuable imprimatur. One project studied by Walsh, Carnegie Mellon‘s OLI, is so different from the others in certain key respects that I discuss it at greater length.