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 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 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 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. As Walsh explains in detail in Chapter 4, Carnegie Mellon used generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to construct entirely new online introductory courses in fields such as statistics. What is distinctive about the OLI approach is that it does not simply mimic traditional classroom methods of teaching; rather, it uses embedded cognitive tutors, interactive techniques, and rapid feedback to create a rich learning environment that takes full advantage of the features of the online medium. And there is some evidence that students who use this sophisticated form of online teaching in basic courses such as introductory statistics have learning outcomes at least as good as—and sometimes better than—those of comparable students taught in the traditional way.

The potential ramifications of the OLI approach should be thought about in the context of the current financial constraints that are afflicting higher education. In contemplating the long-run uses of various types of sophisticated online courseware, such as the OLI courses, it is essential to recognize the dramatic changes in the economic landscape that have occurred between the time when the initiatives Walsh has studied were first undertaken (in the late 1990s through 2006) and today. As William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland, observed,

Kirwan then goes on to call attention to “the dim prospects for recovery in the foreseeable future.”³ In the case of the state university systems in particular, where there may be the best opportunity to make use of new online courseware, I am every bit as pessimistic as Kirwan. I am skeptical that these state systems will ever again enjoy the level of general support from state governments for teaching programs that they have known in the past. The fiscal realities of the states (including deep-seated opposition to new taxes), combined with the pressures for more spending on programs of other kinds (including prisons and health care), make it very unlikely that state appropriations for teaching programs will recover. Moreover, we should not forget that, as three experienced University of Michigan administrators have pointed out, “State support of public universities, on a per student basis, has been declining for over two decades; it was at the lowest level in 25 years even before the current economic crisis, which has caused state after state to further reduce appropriations for higher education, with cuts ranging as high as 20 percent to 30 percent.”⁴

One obvious implication of this dire situation is that it is going to be exceedingly difficult for educational institutions—private as well as public—to experiment with the creation of new online courseware initiatives or even to continue to subsidize the costs of current initiatives unless there are compelling reasons for making such investments. As Walsh points out, to date all of the U.S. initiatives have been funded either internally or by foundations pursuing philanthropic aims (with the Hewlett Foundation having been by far the most important grant maker in this field). Questions of sustainability have been regularly raised but rarely answered.

At the same time, I think that present and prospective economic realities dictate that there be a serious rethinking of the way some forms of instruction are provided, especially in those parts of the public sector that have been hurt the most by funding cuts. It is in this context that Carnegie Mellon’s OLI is especially interesting—not so much for its near-term impact on teaching in the “parent sector” in which it was born (the world of the elite private research university) as for its potential impact in the much larger and much needier public sector.

The OLI is exciting precisely because it may offer the possibility of achieving real productivity gains by substituting well-designed online instruction for the labor-intensive ways in which we still teach many basic courses, including some that lend themselves to less labor-intensive teaching methods.⁵ I am well aware that in some quarters speaking of “productivity gains” is close to blasphemy. But we have to get over that mindset: we just can’t afford to continue doing business as usual. We have to find ways to do more with less. Resources saved in this way could be redeployed to teach more students or, conceivably, to teach advanced students more effectively.

Some readers may know that I am a co-author (with William J. Baumol) of an explanation for rising costs in higher education that has stood the test of time. Writing initially about the performing arts, Baumol and I argued that the costs of labor-intensive activities such as performances by string quartets and standard classroom teaching would inevitably rise faster than costs in general—i.e., faster than the general inflation rate. This phenomenon is sometimes called “the cost disease,” and its presence in higher education, going back a century or more, is well documented.⁶ Now, more than 40 years after we first articulated the economic basis for the cost disease, I am wondering if the time is finally at hand when new methods of using online teaching technologies in basic introductory courses might change things. I have been on record for some time as being skeptical about the likely effects on productivity in higher education of various new technologies.⁷ But the evidence that Walsh presents about the work at Carnegie Mellon has caused me to rethink my position. This could turn out to be the time when a modest number of large investments aimed at developing online courses in applicable subjects (those in which there is more or less a single right answer to basic questions) could have a large impact. I agree with Bill Gates that developing a small number of really well-designed online courses is preferable to having a large number of less-effective offerings.⁸ There should be opportunities here to take advantage of substantial economies of scale, even though creating mechanisms for assembling the needed capital could prove challenging.

If these optimistic ruminations prove to have merit—and that is what we must find out through further research—it might be possible to save significant amounts of resources while actually improving outcomes. I don’t know if this is only wishful thinking, but I am increasingly convinced that the fiscal realities of our time obligate us to at least examine carefully new ideas for providing instruction. And the examination needs to be rigorous. Walsh is clear in noting that careful evaluation of the actual impact of most of these projects has been difficult and limited. Of course, the market itself rendered a verdict on Fathom and AllLearn. The OLI initiative is intriguing in part because it lends itself to standard statistical assessments of outcomes—of what was achieved, and at what cost.

Additionally, a word should be said about the likelihood that various online learning projects will have different impacts within the various sectors of higher education. I think we need to be realistic in the assumptions we make about what is likely to happen in different settings. Institutions like Yale and MIT may be willing and able to continue to support initiatives that are important to them in terms of their missions and their reputations. But few other institutions will be in a position to make such investments, especially in the present financial climate. Universities such as Carnegie Mellon, with great faculty strength in cognitive science and a track record of pioneering work in instructional technologies, should be encouraged to continue to create innovative online teaching environments—and ways need to be found for the educational community at large to help underwrite their work. It is unlikely, however, that the highly selective private colleges and universities (including Carnegie Mellon itself) will be the consumers of such courseware, at least in the near term. As already explained, these universities specialize in an educational model that puts a high premium on direct faculty-student interaction, even in beginning courses. Over time, even the most selective institutions may also find ways (and I suspect that they will) to use online courseware to enhance their educational offerings. Students who enroll at these universities will, increasingly, come to college expecting to find much instructional material available electronically, and colleges and universities would be unwise to ignore this appetite for online resources.

Today the greatest opportunity to use approaches such as the OLI to improve educational outcomes and reduce costs seems to me to exist within the public sector—in both community colleges and BA-granting institutions. The economic need to conserve resources is greatest here, and the scale of the institutions meshes well with this approach. The most courageous of the state systems will have an opportunity (as Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of SUNY, has suggested) to re-imagine the faculty role in undergraduate education. They will do this by providing more opportunities for the ablest teachers to have an even greater impact on education than they do today, especially at advanced levels. In time, some of these public institutions, hard pressed as they are today to meet escalating demands on them, could be models for cost-effective modes of teaching basic courses that at least some of today’s “richer” institutions will want to emulate.

Countries such as India are at still another place along this instructional continuum. They have an especially pressing need for new methods of delivering content to rapidly increasing student populations. Many of their elite institutions have the research and intellectual capacity to invent or to adapt new teaching technologies, and centralized funding will enable them to invest collectively and for the long run. Government sponsorship may also reduce the risk that internal disagreements—i.e., faculty opposition—will threaten the success of a project. It may be in countries such as India that online courseware will have its greatest impact in the next decade.

A final point, perhaps obvious in what has already been said, is that a hundred flowers should be allowed to bloom. Each institution has its own peculiarities and its own history. What makes sense for University A today may never make sense for University B, or may make sense for University B only ten years from now. This variety of experiences, and of time horizons, should be considered a good thing, not a cause for either envy or boasting.

Unlocking the Gates is a splendid introduction to a fascinating and fast-changing world. Unless I am badly mistaken, over time all sectors of higher education will be affected in one way or another by what are truly transformational changes in the way knowledge is created and disseminated. Now that increasing numbers of universities, including some of the most prestigious, are using technology to let the world into their precincts, it will never again be possible to lock the gates.

William G. Bowen

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.

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).

³ Kirwan, William E., “The Research University of the Future,” speech delivered March 22, 2010, before the AAU Government Relations Professionals, www.aau.edu/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=10590.

⁴ Courant, Paul, James Duderstadt, and Edie Goldenberg, “Needed: A National Strategy to Preserve Public Research Universities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, January 3, 2010, http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plan-to-Save-Americas/63358/. For a vivid account of the situation in the state of Nevada, see Hebel, Sara, “State Cuts Are Pushing Public Colleges into Peril,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, March 14, 2010.

She writes: “As the chancellor of Nevada’s higher-education system faced yet another round of budget cuts last month, he said that he had no reason to make misleading claims that ‘the sky is falling’ on public colleges in his state. The truth, he said, is that it is. . . . Weeks later state lawmakers approved a 6.9 percent mid-year cut for higher education, a reduction that came on top of a 24 percent cut in state funds the system had already been dealt in last year’s budget session. As a result, Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a ‘distinct possibility’ for the future, the chancellor says.”

⁵ In my view, Carnegie Mellon was wise to focus its efforts on courses like introductory statistics, in which there are more or less standard notions of core content and at least something approaching “a single right answer” to many questions. It is far from clear to me that the OLI approach would be as useful in teaching subjects that generally require much more nuanced discussion, such as literature, ethics, and international politics.

⁶ Bowen, William G., “The Economics of the Major Private Universities,” Carnegie Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Berkeley, Calif., 1968.

⁷ Bowen, “At a Slight Angle to the Universe.”

⁸ Gates, Bill, “2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates,” http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2010/Pages/bill-gates-annual-letter.aspx.