Online Courses And The Changing Classroom

The New York Times called 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.” Massive open online courses arrived with enormous energy: Coursera launched in April 2012, founded by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng; edX launched two months later as a nonprofit from MIT and Harvard; Udacity, founded by Sebastian Thrun after his Stanford AI course enrolled 160,000 students online in 2011, was already operating. By September 2013, millions of students worldwide have enrolled in courses on these platforms, often from institutions they could not have attended in person.

I find this genuinely exciting, and I also find the early results complicated in ways worth thinking about carefully.

What MOOCs have made possible

The access argument is real. A student in a city without a strong computer science department can now take Andrew Ng’s machine learning course, which Coursera reports has enrolled over a million students. Someone working full-time can watch lectures at midnight. A person curious about quantum mechanics can take an MIT OpenCourseWare course that would otherwise require being physically admitted to Cambridge.

For most of human history, access to a good teacher depended on proximity. The lecture — one expert speaking to a room of students — does not scale. Online, the same lecture reaches a million people at the same cost as reaching one.

The completion rate problem

The complication that has emerged quickly is completion rates. Early data from Coursera and edX suggests that most enrolled students do not finish the course. Some estimates put the completion rate at 10 percent or lower, depending on how “completion” is defined.

This is not surprising if you think about who enrolls and why. A person sitting at home faces no social contract — no class to walk into, no teacher who notices the empty seat, no classmates who will ask about last week’s assignment. Enrollment is free and frictionless. Continuing requires sustained motivation that formal university structure partially provides by design.

The question is whether low completion rates indicate a failure of the format or a different kind of success. If the goal is maximum learning per enrolled student, 10 percent completion is poor. If the goal is maximum access to useful content — including for people who want to learn one concept from week three without taking the full course — the framing changes.

What changes in the physical classroom

The more interesting question, in my view, is what online courses do to the existing classroom rather than whether they replace it.

If lecture content is available on video, the case for using classroom time to deliver that content weakens. The classroom has a resource that online courses struggle to replicate: other people. Discussion, argument, immediate questions, peer feedback, the kind of learning that happens when someone explains a concept incorrectly and the group corrects it — none of these require a professor at a whiteboard.

The “flipped classroom” model takes this seriously: students watch lectures at home as homework, and class time is used for problem solving, discussion, and active work. Several universities are experimenting with this. It is early, and the implementation matters enormously, but the direction seems right.

What universities provide that videos do not

A degree signals completion and effort in a way that a course certificate does not, at least not yet. Laboratories, equipment, and hands-on projects require physical space. Mentorship relationships and networks form through proximity in ways that online forums replicate imperfectly. The social experience of being a student — shared meals, shared frustration, shared achievement — is not something a platform can package.

I do not think Coursera is going to replace universities. I do think it changes what universities need to defend. The parts of a university experience that online courses cannot replicate are worth preserving and improving. The parts that are simply lectures — which can now be delivered to a million people at once — are worth reconsidering.

Education has gained another door. The question is what happens to the existing building once students have more ways to enter.