PREFACE
The world’s great universities are defined by walls. Physical walls demarcate the space of the campus and distinguish it from its surroundings, but less visible barriers also block entry to those outside. Tens of thousands of students apply to each of the most selective U.S. universities every year, yet only a small fraction are admitted through the gates. Since the formation of the modern university nearly two centuries ago, this fact has troubled many, prompting reform efforts on a number of fronts. Advocates have fought to eliminate impediments to higher education on the basis of class, gender, religion, and race—with impressive success. Yet significant barriers remain, especially to the top-tier universities.
The internet may prove to be the most powerful tool yet in the struggle for greater access to higher education. Digital technology and the networked environment offer transformative possibilities for how information is delivered, who can view it, and at what cost. Not only has the quantity of scholarly materials available online exploded over the past two decades, but hundreds of online programs and courses—even entire online-only universities—have offered new forms of access to education around the world. Technology has presented institutions of higher learning with the opportunity to revamp their practice. But across the higher-education spectrum, the rate of change has been decidedly uneven, ranging from enthusiastic overhauls to cautious, incremental adjustments. While the most elite universities have implemented a wealth of digital technologies to enhance, for example, administrative and communications-related functions affecting enrolled students’ daily lives, in few cases have they applied that technology to more radical ends, such as expanding the audiences their core undergraduate programs can reach.
Unlocking the Gates examines one small but important set of experiments in such expansion: projects initiated by elite universities to share online course materials with the public and unlock their gates to the world. Collectively dubbed “online courseware” for the purposes of this book, the initiatives profiled here involve converting traditional course content, originally developed for enrolled students, into web-based versions available to a mass audience. Although relatively limited in number, these experiments have been closely watched. The stature and prestige of the universities involved ensured that the outcomes, whether positive or negative, would have repercussions across higher education. The few highly selective institutions currently pursuing online courseware may prove to be outliers; perhaps most universities in the very top tier will never drastically alter the audiences their teaching materials reach in light of technological advances. But, as this book shows, the online courseware initiatives undertaken by some of the world’s best universities may be harbingers of major changes to come.
Out of a complex mix of motives and goals, these universities have elected to give away portions of their core intellectual assets to learners beyond their traditional student populations. In one sense, online courseware radically expands access to education, as it exposes the university’s course content to audiences no longer limited by geography, age, or prior qualifications; anyone with a computer and internet access is welcome. But unlike longer-standing efforts to broaden educational access through admissions measures like need-based aid or affirmative action, online courseware has offered only limited exposure to and participation in the traditional university experience. Barriers to content may be lowered, but other key aspects of a university education—peer and faculty interactions, advising, grading, and (perhaps most significantly) the granting of credit and awarding of degrees—often remain available exclusively to enrolled students. Why would a university choose to give (or sell) its course materials to the general public? What are the implications of those decisions? And how might these first forays into online courseware shed light on greater changes to come for the selective university in the twenty-first century?
Scope and Organization
Unlocking the Gates is organized as a series of case studies that illustrate the histories of individual online courseware projects. These particular initiatives were selected from numerous examples of related projects to convey the variety of approaches that participating universities have taken to online courseware.
Case studies of two now-defunct initiatives—Fathom, a Columbia University-led for-profit endeavor, and AllLearn, a consortial effort on the part of Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to sell courseware primarily to their alumni—point to challenges faced by revenue-generating projects and provide crucial context for the subsequent development of open and free programs. The story of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)—the first and most prominent of such open initiatives, and the only one to provide course materials (e.g., syllabi, homework assignments, lecture notes) from virtually every course taught there—describes many foundational principles of the field. A chapter on Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) highlights a unique effort to incorporate the university’s expertise in the science of learning into a fully interactive online environment, open to the public and geared toward achieving measurable learning outcomes. Open Yale Courses (OYC) and webcast.berkeley offer two distinct approaches to video-based lecture capture, providing recorded lectures so that remote users can glimpse the traditional classroom experience at these universities. Finally, a chapter on India’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) provides an international perspective, describing a partnership between government and higher education to address challenges of national importance. Three of the seven programs profiled here in depth—MIT OCW, the OLI, and OYC—were funded primarily by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which also supported much of the research for this book.
Collectively the case studies included here represent a range of funding models (foundation-, government-, and self-funded) and hail from geographically diverse—though all highly selective—public and private parent institutions. They demonstrate that online courseware is not a monolithic concept; there are as many ways to design and operate an online courseware project as there are universities doing so. And as the following chapters will demonstrate, online courseware projects respond to and fuel specific institutional goals: each initiative is shaped by the circumstances of its host institution—the strategic opportunities the parent university is choosing to pursue, its particular strengths and weaknesses, and its resource base all influence its online courseware offerings.
The case studies describe each initiative’s beginnings, unique objectives, business model, course offerings, relationship with its host institution(s) and funder(s), efforts at self-evaluation, and plans for financial sustainability. An introductory chapter sets the context in which these initiatives emerged, and the concluding chapter analyzes them in relation to one another and draws a set of findings from the facts laid out in the case studies. The conclusion also addresses some of the broader questions these initiatives raise for the higher-education sector, including: How can universities distinguish themselves in competition for reputation, students, and faculty as their research and teaching outputs become more widely available online? How will the open-access trends sweeping the online world affect the business model and societal role of the elite university, traditionally sealed off to the vast majority of the public? Can selective higher-education institutions maintain the essential strategies that have sustained them for centuries while redefining access to the knowledge they produce via new technologies? An epilogue explores the potential effects of these online courseware experiments on higher education, even at the most selective institutions.
A Note on Methodology
Research for this book began in June 2008 and concluded in April 2010; it relied primarily on information gathered from interviews and primary and secondary documents.
The research started with a landscape review of the online courseware field aimed at selecting exemplary projects as subjects for the case studies at the core of the book. Several initiatives at selective universities were chosen from an array of existing projects to convey the variability of online courseware, as well as to highlight points of comparison and contrast between programs.
Extensive literature reviews of media coverage and other secondary literature were undertaken at an early stage of the research. Archival materials and other primary sources, provided by the projects themselves as well as by funders, were consulted whenever possible. The volume of preserved and available documents varied widely from one initiative to the next. For instance, MIT OCW has kept an extensive, if uncatalogued, archive of documents related to the project’s history, but it has not been possible to locate any original records of Fathom and AllLearn, perhaps due to their independent status as organizations separate from the universities that created them. Budget figures and usage statistics cited here are self-reported, although Google Analytics data were consulted for the projects that have subscribed to that tool and were willing to grant access to the data.
Naturally investigations of these online resources relied on extensive consultation of each project’s website. Researching Fathom and AllLearn, initiatives that were shuttered several years ago and no longer have live websites, required the use of the Internet Archive. However, this useful but imperfect tool does not preserve all of these websites’ former functionality, limiting the ability to fully recreate the user experience in those cases.
Over 80 individuals were interviewed in the course of researching this book. For each project profiled, interviews were conducted with project directors and other key staffers, associated faculty members, and senior university administrators (including current and former presidents and provosts), almost always in conjunction with site visits to relevant campuses. Program staff at key foundations were also interviewed. Whenever possible, interviews were conducted in person by the author, and they often included follow-up communication in the form of brief phone calls or email messages. A full list of on-the-record interviews is included after the reference list at the back of the book.
Prior to publication, project leaders from each initiative profiled here were given the opportunity to review the relevant chapter to provide any needed corrections or further explanation. Editing of the manuscript concluded in July 2010.
Acknowledgments
This book has been enabled in every way by the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In addition to providing funding that allowed me to explore the online courseware space full time, the Foundation’s leadership and the staff of the education program—whose efforts in the area of Open Educational Resources have been nothing short of pioneering—were unfailingly generous with their broad and deep knowledge of this field. Specific thanks are due to Paul Brest, Marshall “Mike” Smith, Catherine Casserly, Victor Vuchic, Jennie Fong, Phoenix Wang, Kathy Nicholson, and Sally Tracy. The transparency that Hewlett demonstrated by permitting unfettered access to Foundation records, as well as its encouragement of a dispassionate and objective study of a field it has seeded, truly embraced the spirit of openness that it encourages in its grantees.
Creating an account of such recent history is impossible without the cooperation of those who were there. In writing this book I have had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many of the principal figures in the field. These leaders in higher education shared their time, insights, and candid recollections to help me piece together an oral history of online courseware’s development. Special thanks are also due to each of the project leaders, who, in addition to providing archival materials and relevant usage data, often served as gracious hosts during my visits to their respective campuses. In this regard, I am particularly grateful to Mangala Sunder Krishnan of IIT Madras for his assistance in planning a productive research trip to India in the spring of 2009.
This project found its first champions in Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R’s manager of research, and Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA. I am indebted to them for having the idea to take on such a study in the first place, for trusting me to adapt and execute their concept, and, above all, for their constant counsel and guidance. Schonfeld in particular has shepherded this project from inception to completion and has served as my primary interlocutor on the analysis that follows. In offering incisive, always constructive feedback that proved essential in shaping the direction of this book, Guthrie was joined by Laura Brown, ITHAKA’s executive vice president of strategy and research.
Since commencing this project in June 2008, I have had the privilege of belonging to a truly gifted team of strategic thinkers who work daily to help the academic community transform scholarly communications. In addition to Brown and Schonfeld, I am deeply indebted to the other members of the Ithaka S+R team. Particular thanks are due to Ross Housewright, who was frequently the first reader of these pages, and to Sabrina Manville, Nancy Maron, and Kirby Smith for their prescient editorial comments on issues large and small. Kate Wittenberg’s willingness to share her considerable expertise in the publication process, as well as Tom Nygren’s assistance in framing this book’s prefatory section, were an enormous help. The provocative questions posed by members of S+R, also including Jennifer Kim and Matthew Loy, were powerful drivers in shaping my thinking on this subject matter and its presentation, and their readiness to turn a sharp editorial eye on the manuscript has improved the present volume immensely. Perhaps most of all, I am thankful for my colleagues’ friendship and encouragement; they have both kept me on track and provided welcome distraction throughout the long process of bringing this book to publication.
Beyond S+R, I have benefited from the help of ITHAKA’s finance and legal teams in some of the administrative tasks related to this project. Marita LaMonica and Heidi McGregor, of ITHAKA’s marketing and communications group, deserve special mention for their welcome contributions. The research assistance provided by Mellon Foundation librarians Lisa Bonifacic and Ellen Nasto, as well as S+R intern Julia TerMaat, was nothing short of heroic. And day-to-day office life was enlivened considerably by Berna-dette Aquart and Deborah Longino. The collegial atmosphere bred at ITHAKA was the ideal environment in which to research and write one’s first book, and I will always be grateful to those who made it so.
Several outside readers—Henry Bienen, Saul Fisher, Ira Fuchs, Dan Greenstein, Diane Harley, Clifford Lynch, Christopher Mackie, and Jo Ellen Parker—generously read the manuscript in full at an early stage and provided invaluable suggestions. The productive feedback from these experts in their fields was a major contribution to this book’s final state.
I have been aided at all stages of this project by the wise counsel of William G. Bowen, whose gracious offer to write the foreword was only the most obvious of his many kindnesses toward me over the past several years.
I am grateful to everyone at Princeton University Press who endeavored to help bring this book to fruition, with particular thanks owed to my editor, Peter Dougherty, who both instantly “got” what I was trying to do and pushed me to think about the topic in new ways. His very patient assistant Christopher Chung, Terri O’Prey and Dimitri Karetnikov of the Press’s editing and production team, and the meticulous Peter Strupp and the staff of Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc., have also been a pleasure to work with.
The final word of thanks is, of course, for my family: Richard, Candice, and Logan Walsh, and Sam Ryan. Their love, support, and much-needed good humor have enabled everything else.
I could never have written this book without the participation and assistance of so many. But reliant as I have been on the helpful contributions of others, responsibility for any shortcomings or errors rests solely with me.