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Want a
top-notch university education but unable to commute the thousands of kilometers
to one of the world’s best universities—including Stanford, Brown, Columbia and
Princeton in the United States and Scotland’s University of Edinburgh and the
University of Toronto in Canada? Or perhaps you’re lacking the $54,000+ (about
41,700 euro) that some of those universities estimate it costs to enroll for
this academic year alone.
Well, it
may not be exactly the same—you can pretty much forget about getting course
credit for the moment—but MOOCs—or massive open online courses—are reshaping
higher education in the age of the Internet. Earlier this month, Coursera
became the biggest MOOC of all (others include edX and Academic Earth), when
more than a dozen American and international universities joined their online
network of free courses.
The
California-based start-up founded last year by two Stanford University computer
scientists now offers more than 200 courses to anyone who can access the
internet. (And according to a report released this week by the UN’s
International Telecommunications Union, one-third of the world’s population is
now online.
Online
education 101
Some 33
educational institutions offer courses from philosophy to mathematics to poetry
and guitar lessons through them—including new partners John Hopkins University,
the Berklee College of Music and EPF Lausanne in Switzerland. And there’s
currently an astounding 680,000 registered students from 190 countries.
With almost
81,000 “likes” on Facebook and comments from followers like Jabar Mhemed Salih,
who wrote, “Education for Everyone. Courses from top universities for free.كؤرساتي كمبيوتر بؤ هه مو ان . بئ به رام به ر,” it appears that Coursera is
reaching out to the masses worldwide, which is its goal.
Academics,
experts and pundits can debate the benefits and pitfalls of taking education
out of the classroom, the future of “brick and mortar” institutions and what
online education will look like when the institutions involved start to
monetize. But as Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng point out in a
recent Forbes article, for millions of people worldwide, the choice isn’t
between attending traditional classes or taking them online, but “between
online education and no education at all.”
The statistics
they present (culled from the World Bank) are sobering: college enrollment in
Africa is currently at six percent, only about one in 10 of Nigerians who want
to can actually attend college due to lack of space, and in Central Asia, while
the majority of people complete high school, less than half of those who do
continue on to university.
Coursera’s
founders are hoping to change that, making education “a fundamental human
right.” As the new academic year gets underway, several classes began this week,
including courses on organizational and data analysis, Greek and Roman
mythology and an introduction to logic. But it doesn’t take much logic to
reason that expanding the university classroom to include internet cafes in
Nairobi or student unions in Beijing is an A-plus idea.
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