Coursera CEO: Reports Of Mass Disruption To Higher Ed Greatly Exaggerated

And when this does happen which colleges are most vulnerable in your opinion?

What great residential universities and colleges offer we are a long way from being able to replicate. We can transmit the content really effectively, and in some circumstances more effectively, but we can’t offer the full educational package online. We are getting better and better at using the platform to develop critical thinking skills. That is a work in progress but it is not at a level of the deep intellectual give-and-take in a seminar. The extreme polar cases are the Oxford and Cambridge tutorials which take that to the limit, plus the fact that you are agglomerating thousands of students in one residential setting. It is something that is pretty durable.

Vulnerable are other schools that provide a less intense experience. The more they are commuter colleges without a residential component, the more at risk they are. And then there is the question of when people will use MOOCs as a substitute. If the choice is to go back to school for a degree in computer science or taking courses from Coursera, that is already a close call for a lot of people. But again, none of this is going to happen fast. Internet time moves at light speed but universities run on a very different time clock.

Of course, one of the things that make this disruptive is the economic model behind MOOCs. Can you speak to that?

The per student cost to deliver a MOOC is a fraction of what it costs on campus. For the straight MOOC, it’s generally estimated that the university’s costs are on average $50,000 to create a course. If that course has 50,000 learners enrolled, it’s $1 a student or about $5 a student for those who might finish the course. That’s a lot cheaper than anything you can do offline.

The degree-granting authority of a university has long been a key asset of higher education’s business model. But with this week’s announcement of a MOOC-based MBA degree at the University of Illinois, that seems to have opened the door for more immediate disruption.

This is a really innovative and interesting way of combining MOOCs with a degree program. The University of Illinois will create eight specializations on Coursera. One of them, digital marketing, is already up and running. Learners can take them for free, or get a verified certificate by paying for them. And students who either before taking them or having taken one or two wish to apply to the university for an MBA degree may do so.

They are selective admissions but one of the interesting features will be that Illinois can judge an applicant’s capability based simply on the competence showed in those taken MOOCs. This is an avenue for people who would never have the paper record to get a first class MBA to get one. The degree entails another level of engagement above the MOOCs. A student has to take six of the eight specializations and then on top of it you will get a layer of deeper engagement and activity that will be a higher-priced premium offering. At a total cost of roughly $20,000, the tuition is steeply discounted from what an MBA would cost a state resident in Illinois. The pioneering part is that this is built on the foundation of free online courses. We love this idea. It is really creative.

In this world, everything is an experiment. I think it’s likely to work and generate many more degree programs based on MOOCs. Schools that want to put their degrees online have other options decoupled from MOOCs, and I think you will see a flourishing ecosystem where many online degrees will not be linked to MOOCs. But for the University of Illinois, this will be a way to get broad scale and higher revenue at the same time.

The critics of MOOCs often note that a relatively small percentage of those who register to take a free online course actually complete it. The research shows it can be under 5%. Why is that so?

It’s similar to what you have at many universities. At Yale, undergraduates can shop their courses for only six days or whatever. You can shop much longer with MOOCs, and entering a course is like sampling it. The low completion rates are due to people who sign up and never show up or quit in the first week when life gets in the way.

If a learner does a week’s worth of work, then 30% to 50% of the people get to the end. And then there are people who get to the end and don’t do the assignments. I often watch lectures without completing a course or an assignment. o there are many people who are getting something out of them who don’t complete them.

Completion rates go way up if you pay. Some people do make a pre-commitment, but a lot of people wait to the end to pay. Completion drives payment, though payment helps to incentivize completion. We are trying to be learner friendly. For every product decision we make, the mantra is learners first. That is how service-oriented companies win. They win when they think of their customers first. In the long run, putting our learners first is going to be the best for them and for us.

Critics also worry about the rigor of some of these courses and the grading of them. Do you worry about that?

It’s up to the instructor how to set the grading. They can do it anyway they want. We have assessment tools on the platform, a whole variety of machine-graded assessments that are not just multiple-choice questions. We can machine grade computer code, mathematical expressions and short answers. And while it’s often surprising to academics, it turns out that peer grading works really well. We crowd source it. Instructors find the assessments made by a group of peer graders correlate very highly with their own assessments. This works really well when the professor has set a clear rubric.