Business

What's Holding Back Online Courses: Money, Quality, or Inertia?

By Derek Thompson

"We should focus on having at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses," Bill Gates wrote in his 2010 annual letter for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


The appeal is obvious and nearly universal. At a time when states are looking to cut spending on higher ed, and aspiring students are looking for great deals on quality college education, a downloadable one-size-fits-all course on, say, psychology would replace the need for expensive instruction. So why isn't Prof. Randall Stross nervous about being replaced by a piece of software?
Developing that best-in-the-world online course -- in which students would learn as much, or more, than in an ordinary classroom or a hybrid online class -- requires significant investment. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed about 15 sophisticated online courses, mostly in the sciences, spent $500,000 to $1 million to write software for each. But neither Carnegie Mellon nor other institutions, which are invited to use its online courses, dares to use them without having a human instructor, too.

One million dollars sounds like a lot of money. But it's the cost of six to eight Ivy League professors' one-year salaries, or 25 students' tuition at a top-twenty university. Twenty five students! That's a discussion section! The cost just doesn't sound prohibitive to me especially considering the deep benefits of creating a worldwide replacement for human-taught evergreen classes like Pysch 101. The challenge of designing an intellectually rigorous and widely accepted software program that top schools would take ... now that's a much taller barrier.


Read the full story at the New York Times.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter.