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"July 19, 2012 Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses 1 Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford U.: "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas are being written down and erased and written down and erased." Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world's best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company-and the universities involved-make money to sustain them? Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners. The contract reveals that even Coursera isn't yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies," lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone. Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford, describes the list as an act of "brainstorming" rather than a set plan. "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c

"Online course start-ups offer virtually free college By Jon Marcus, Published: January 21 An emerging group of entrepreneurs with influential backing is seeking to lower the cost of higher education from as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year to nearly nothing. These new arrivals are harnessing the Internet to offer online courses, which isn't new. But their classes are free, or almost free. Most traditional universities have refused to award academic credit for such online studies. Now the start-ups are discovering a way around that monopoly, by inventing credentials that "graduates" can take directly to employers instead of university degrees. "If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous," said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor. org, a nonprofit organization based in the District. Established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor, it offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors. Another nonprofit initiative is Peer-to-Peer University, based in California. Known as P2PU, it offers free online courses and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Web browser. A third is University of the People, also based in California, which offers more than 40 online courses. It charges students a one-time $10 to $50 application fee. Among its backers is the Clinton Global Initiative. The content these providers supply comes from top universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University and the University of Michigan. Those are among about 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement. The universities aim to widen access to course content for prospective students and others. At MIT, a pioneer of open courseware, half of incoming freshmen report that they've looked at MIT online courses and a third say it influenced their decision to go the

"December 19, 2010 2 Studies Shed New Light on the Meaning of Course Evaluations By David Glenn Under the mandate of a recently enacted state law, the Web sites of public colleges and universities in Texas will soon include student-evaluation ratings for each and every undergraduate course. Bored and curious people around the planet-steelworkers in Ukraine, lawyers in Peru, clerical workers in India-will be able, if they're so inclined, to learn how students feel about Geology 3430 at Texas State University at San Marcos. But how should the public interpret those ratings? Are student-course evaluations a reasonable gauge of quality? Are they correlated with genuine measures of learning? And what about students who choose not to fill out the forms-does their absence skew the data? Two recent studies shed new light on those old questions. In one, three economists at the University of California at Riverside looked at a pool of more than 1100 students who took a remedial-mathematics course at a large university in the West (presumably Riverside) between 2007 and 2009. According to a working paper describing the study, the course was taught by 33 different instructors to 97 different sections during that period. The instructors had a good deal of freedom in their teaching and grading practices-but every student in every section had to pass a common high-stakes final exam, which they took after filling out their course evaluations. That high-stakes end-of-the-semester test allowed the Riverside economists to directly measure student learning. The researchers also had access to the students' pretest scores from the beginning of the semester, so they were able to track each student's gains. Most studies of course evaluations have lacked such clean measures of learning. Grades are an imperfect tool, as students' course ratings are usually strongly correlated with their grades in the course. Because of that powerful correlation, some studies have suggested that

"Explaining Gaps in Readiness for College-Level Math: The Role of High School Courses Issue/Topic: Curriculum--Mathematics; High School--College Readiness; Postsecondary Participation--Access Author(s): Long, Mark; Iatarola, Patrice; Conger, Dylan Organization(s): Evans School, University of Washington; Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Florida State University; Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University Publication: Education Finance and Policy Season: Winter 2009 Background: Despite substantial increases in high school graduation requirements, almost one-third of US college freshmen are unprepared for college-level math. Students who are low income, Hispanic and black are least likely to be prepared for college-level coursework, and females are slightly less likely to be ready than males. Little of the prior research in this area has focused on the contribution of high school courses to demographic and socioeconomic gaps in secondary and postsecondary success. Purpose: To estimate how much of the racial, socioeconomical and gender gaps in high school and postsecondary outcomes are determined by the courses that students take while in high school. Findings/Results: Less than half of the black and poor students and just over half of the Hispanic students in the sample were prepared for college-level math - far below the readiness rates for whites, Asian and nonpoor students. 1. The courses students take in high school contribute significantly to their college readiness, with the largest gains occurring at Algebra 2 (the minimum level of math required to graduate even with a college preparatory diploma in Florida is Algebra 1). 2. The slight male advantage in college math readiness is not explained by course-taking differentials because female students already take more advanced math courses than males. This finding is consistent with other work on gender disparities. 3. The results suggest

September / October 2009 College for $99 a Month The next generation of online education could be great for students-and catastrophic for universities. by Kevin Carey Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor's degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn't going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual-hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought-she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk? Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) December 16, 2010 'It Should Be Fine' Perhaps all of the back-and-forth about StraighterLine - the news stories, the blog posts, the assorted incidents of backlash, the endless tug-of-war over who awards credit for what - might be boiled down to two essential questions: Are StraighterLine's courses truly more or less equivalent to the courses that many college students are already taking? And, more broadly, at what point does any educational experience - specifically, in StraighterLine's case, an introductory-level general education class - become worthy of college credit? The former question addresses the level on which Burck Smith would like for his brainchild to be evaluated; the latter is an issue that he actively seeks to avoid. In a long series of emails over the course of several weeks, as well as one 90-minute telephone interview, Smith repeatedly and expressly urged me to "make sure to compare our courses to other colleges' general education courses with whatever evaluation standards they use rather than what they say they do or wish they did." "…[E]veryone else is doing the same thing," Smith said, "but they're allowed to be accredited and approved and sort of part of the club." If one accepts Smith's terms of debate, it is difficult to argue with him. Surely accredited institutions offer plenty of courses that are not of the utmost quality. And colleges and universities do turn a profit on many large, introductory-level courses - particularly courses that are taught by low-paid temporary instructors, or broadcast online to vast numbers of students - and that profit is used, as Carey's Washington Monthly article puts it, "to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else." How colleges pay their classical Chinese poetry experts is not Smith's concern; on the contrary, he views himself as something of a consumers' adv

"January 9, 2011 State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts Money-saving effort at 2-year colleges faces vexing problems By Martha Ann Overland It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra. Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30? Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?" So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month. The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be

"MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? December 19, 2011 - 3:36pm By Audrey Watters A big announcement from MIT today: the university is launching a new online learning initiative, MITx, one that will allow non-enrolled students to take online courses and receive certification if they successfully complete them. MIT has long been known for being on the leading edge of higher education experimentation, most notably with MIT OpenCourseware. The decision by MIT faculty to make all of their course materials freely and openly available online is now a decade old, and some 100 million people have downloaded and accessed that content. But even with a catalog that boasts over 2,000 courses, MIT OCW has always been just that: courseware. All the syllabi, handouts, and quizzes, but no interaction with professors, no interaction with fellow learners, no grades, no college credit. MITx will act as a middle tier, of sorts, something between the traditional, on-campus experience of formally enrolled MIT students and the open and informal learning opportunities afforded by open courseware. But "this is not MIT light," insists Provost L. Rafael Reif. What MITx is is still very much under construction. The first class should be available in the spring of 2012, and it's not clear what course(s) will be offered (although it's a probably a safe bet that it's a science or engineering class). MIT describes MITx as a self-paced course, one with "interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication." While the course itself will be free (and the custom-created course materials will be openly licensed, as with all MIT courses), students who wish to be graded will be able to pay for certification. There's no indication yet of what that fee will be. Nor is it clear how assessment for MITx will work -- will all students take quizzes and submit homework or just those who are paying for certification? Will students have access to instructors? If so, how?

" MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates December 19, 2011 - 4:28am The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online -- today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT. MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning. The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online. An FAQ from MIT offers more details on the new program. While MIT has been widely praised for OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open" educational movement has shifted to programs like the Khan Academy (through which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and an initiative at Stanford University that makes courses available -- courses for which some German universities are providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in OpenCourseWare. 35 Disqus Like Dislike Login Add New Comment Image Real-time updating is enabled. (Pause) Showing 1 comment william czander In 1997, Peter Drucker made a profound prediction he predicted that in 30 years the mortar and brick university campuses would be driven out of existence by their inexorable tuition, He did not predict the financi

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu

"Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity Written by Sue Gee Monday, 23 January 2012 16:07 Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity - an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. Attendees at this year's DLD (Digital Life,Design) , Conference being held in Munich, Germany and livestreamed around the world, were probably expecting to hear Sebastian Thrun say something of Google's Driverless Car project, but instead that was only covered in the session introduction. (See video below for the full presentation.) DLDTalkThrun Instead Thrun's talk, University 2.0, was devoted to the idea of online education, in particular the experiences and consequences of delivering the Online AI class. As Thrun also explains on his homepage: One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" to the world online, free of charge. We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career. Speaking at DLD12, Thrun gave other interesting contrasts between the real-world class and the online one: there were more online students from the small country of Lithuania there on all the courses at Stanford combined and while no Standford student had a perfect score on the course, 248 online students scored 100% - i.e completed the assignments and exam question without a single wrong answer. Something that I don't think he should be as proud about i

"Udacity and the future of online universities By Felix Salmon January 23, 2012 The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway. Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online - he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well. Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun's talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford. Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running "weeder" classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed - by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary u

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

"A Disrupted Higher-Ed System January 26, 2012, 2:40 pm By Jeff Selingo The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players. What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and "rebuilt with people at the center." In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville. But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed? While amenities and services on campuses have been redesigned in the last decade with students clearly at the center, the core of the academic experience for students today is almost exactly the same as it was for their parents decades ago. While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them. We all know that's one of the key drivers of rising college costs. Higher ed is people intensive, and for many prospective students and their parents, the professor-centered academic experience is well worth the high price and will be for a long time. It's one reason why high-quality institutions really have little to worry about. But we also know that the traditional academic experience isn't for everyone these days. The students we used to call "nontraditional" are now a majority, yet we have way too many colleges chasing after high-achieving 18-to-24-year-olds

"StraighterLine's challenge to the rising cost of college Baltimore startup offers 'first year of college' online for $999 By Gus G. Sentementes, The Baltimore Sun October 31, 2010 After putting off finishing her college degree for more than two decades, Elizabeth Smith this year needed just one more class - an algebra course - to earn her bachelor's degree in theater arts. The full-time worker and single mother of two didn't have time or money to spare, so she signed up for a course offered by Baltimore-based StraighterLine Inc. She finished the course in seven days over the summer, working on her laptop as her kids frolicked in a pool. And the course cost only $138 - a fraction of the price for a similar course at a four-year or community college. At a time when a year of college can cost as much as a luxury car, StraighterLine Inc. offers a cheap alternative: online courses starting at $138 a month, or $999 for a year of "101"-style classes typically taken by freshmen, ranging from mathematics to English to business statistics. The startup has high hopes of altering the economics of higher education by solely offering online courses a la carte - and no degrees. It joins other for-profit companies that offer online education to students seeking lower prices and flexibility in course schedules. "

"April 5, 2011 Governing Boards Turn to Technology to Reinvent the University By Jack Stripling Gathered for a national conference on college trusteeship here on Tuesday morning, board members from across the country said they are looking for cybersolutions to solve some of the most vexing problems their colleges face. If there was a recurring theme at the three-day conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, it was that a major rethinking of instruction through broader use of online learning is the only real hope for reinventing the business of higher education. Mark G. Yudof, who knows a thing or two about confronting diminished resources, suggested on Monday that it's a mistake to believe that small-scale changes in purchasing agreements or reduced course offerings will rescue the University of California system, where Mr. Yudof is president. Instead, colleges will need to aggressively alter the way they deliver courses, relying more heavily on online instruction, he said. It is a "myth" in higher education that "we can cut our way into survival," Mr. Yudof said. Enter Carol A. Twigg, who offered an alternative here on Tuesday. As president and chief executive of the National Center for Academic Transformation, Ms. Twigg has argued for more than a decade that, when used effectively, technology can both improve student achievement and reduce costs. "This is not rocket science," she said during a presentation. The center has redesigned courses on more than 100 college campuses, and Ms. Twigg points toward a body of evidence suggesting that course sections can be scaled up to serve many more students without sacrificing quality. While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg sa

"Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up January 23, 2012, 4:53 pm By Nick DeSantis The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience. Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital - Life - Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters. During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than "a camera, a pen and a napkin." Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course's popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said. Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, "the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago," he said. He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn't continue teaching in a traditional setting. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said. One o