By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: October 31, 2013 48 Comments
Coursera, a California-based venture that has enrolled five million
students in its free online courses, announced on Thursday a partnership
with the United States government to create “learning hubs” around the
world where students can go to get Internet access to free courses
supplemented by weekly in-person class discussions with local teachers
or facilitators.
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The learning hubs represent a new stage in the evolution of “massive
open online courses,” or MOOCs, and address two issues: the lack of
reliable Internet access in some countries, and the growing conviction
that students do better if they can discuss course materials, and meet
at least occasionally with a teacher or facilitator.
“Our mission is education for everyone, and we’ve seen that when we can
bring a community of learners together with a facilitator or teacher who
can engage the students, it enhances the learning experience and
increases the completion rate,” said Lila Ibrahim, the president of Coursera.
“It will vary with the location and the organization we’re working
with, but we want to bring in some teacher or facilitator who can be the
glue for the class.”
Early this year, using courses from Coursera and other online providers,
the State Department ran a pilot program to open space where people
could take free online courses in priority fields, including science and
technology subjects, Americana and entrepreneurship.
“Some of them took it above and beyond, and decided to host facilitated
discussions with the courses,” said Meghann Curtis, the State
Department’s deputy assistant secretary for academic programs. “Over the
summer, when we looked at the success stories, we identified
facilitated discussions as something that seemed to work.”
Coursera is joining forces with the State Department’s MOOC Camp
Initiative, now operating in 40 countries — about half using Coursera
courses, and the other half courses from such providers as edX and Open Yale,
whose courses are also available free on the Internet. But beyond
having its courses used, Coursera is taking an active role in the
project.
“We have a list of MOOCs from different providers that we suggest, but
Coursera has had a unique interest in working with us to collect the
data to understand the learning outcomes from facilitated discussions,
and has given us additional materials to give out to the facilitators,”
Ms. Curtis said.
The classes are small, some with only 15 students and none with the hundreds or thousands of students who enroll online.
In a pilot program in Bolivia, South Korea and Indonesia, Ms. Ibrahim
said, the completion rate for those in classes that met for discussion
once a week — and provided access to career services, another part of
the pilot — was 40 percent, compared with only 10 percent of those who
worked online only.
For the State Department, Ms. Curtis said, the appeal of the MOOCs is
that they can be used to reach students anywhere, exposing them to
American universities and college-level discussion, and perhaps spurring
a desire to study in the United States.
Instruction in the classes is in English, she said, and neither the
facilitators nor the MOOC providers are getting paid. Many facilitators
are foreign service officers, retired teachers, or those who had a
Fulbright or other travel grant.
Both Coursera, the largest MOOC provider, and edX, the nonprofit
Harvard-M.I.T. venture that is the second largest, began two years ago
by offering wholly online courses, but are now working with universities
to offer blended, or hybrid, courses. Both are also working with a
growing number of overseas partners. including universities in
Australia, Switzerland, China and elsewhere, sometimes with courses
offered in languages other than English.
In October edX announced that it would be working with the French higher
education minister to offer online courses in France, and that its
platform had also been chosen to power China’s new online learning
portal, Xuetangx. EdX is also working with the International Monetary
Fund to offer training.
Coursera, which now has 100 university partners, has developed a network
of translators who are making the materials in some courses available
in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and
Ukrainian.
Increasingly, though, American MOOC providers are facing competition
from a growing crop of foreign MOOC providers, such as Germany’s
Iversity and Brazil’s Veduca.
Along with the State Department, Coursera’s partners for the learning
hubs include the University of Trinidad and Tobago, Overcoming Faith
Academy Kenya, Digital October, Bluebells School International and Lady
Sriram College, Learning Links Foundation and Tapthetech.org.
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