February 2013 - PESC

FEB RUA RY 2 013
Th e STANDARD NEWS A ND C OM M ENTA RY ON T EC HNOL OGY & STA NDA RDS IN EDUCA T ION
several hundred dollars per credit hour, and
courses typically carry three credit hours.
Randy Best, chairman and chief executive of
Academic Partnerships, talked about the program’s
goals in a conference call with reporters on
Wednesday. “We believe that it turns the MOOC …
into a practical tool,” he said.
The company says a number of its clients are
planning to offer MOOC2Degree courses, including
the University of Arkansas system, the University of
Cincinnati, the University of Texas at Arlington
College of Nursing, the University of West Florida,
and Cleveland State, Florida International, Lamar,
and Utah State Universities. (Another client,
Arizona State University, says it plans to participate
but will charge students who enroll there for
credits earned in its MOOCs.)
In trials at several of those institutions, where
prospective students were offered the opportunity
to take their first online course free, 72 to 84
percent of the participating students ended up
signing up for a second course, Mr. Best said.
Elizabeth Poster, dean of the Arlington nursing
college, told The Chronicle that she expected
thousands of students to register for a course that
the college plans to offer as a MOOC.
The assessments for that course, an elective in the
college’s online R.N. to B.S.N. program, will be just
as rigorous as those in a conventional online
course, said Ms. Poster. But the college will not be
able to afford to provide as much individual
support to students who enroll in the MOOC, she
added.
For example, in its current online courses, which
enroll up to several hundred students, the college
provides academic “coaches” who oversee cohorts
of 30 students each. If registrations shoot into the
thousands in the MOOC version of the course, the
college will not be able to scale up its support
infrastructure accordingly, said Ms. Poster. “We
can’t offer exactly the same resources, because it’s
just not possible,” she said.
Lawrence Johnson, interim provost at the
University of Cincinnati, also expressed doubt that
the university’s MOOC2Degree courses would be
able to provide students with the same level of
individual attention, even if the assessments and
the professors were the same as those for a typical
online course.
Ideally, the MOOC2Degree effort will not only
enable the universities to promote their online
programs while reducing the cost of degrees to
students, Mr. Best added in an interview, but it will
also help the universities identify students who are
well equipped to complete their online courses.
Retaining and graduating students has been
especially challenging for online programs—in part
because online students tend to be working adults,
and also because some students do not take well
to the medium. Universities tend to lose money on
dropouts.
MOOC2Degree is designed to give students a riskfree
way to try out a course before committing to
an online program, Mr. Best said. But the program
also aims to give its university clients a risk-free
way to try out students before admitting them, he
said.
Online education has given rise to sophisticated
tools for quantifying student performance—not
only how well they do on tests, but also how active
they are in discussion forums and how frequently
they engage with learning tools and materials that
are embedded in the online-learning platform.
Academic Partnerships has been investing in those
tools on behalf of its clients, Mr. Best said.
By the time a MOOC student applies to enroll at a
participating university, he said, admissions
officials—and, later, instructors—will already know
something about their habits and abilities.
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