Bill Keller
MIT Open Course Ware has a history of over 10 years
For more than a decade, educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university.
Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and ‘distributed’ learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a video game. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.
It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (The New York Times is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.)
But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Top-rated universities and colleges in the United States have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.
Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilise despots across the Arab world.
One development is a competition among prestige universities to open a branch campus in applied sciences in New York City. This is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial education that would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises and enrich the city’s economy. Stanford, which has provided much of the info-tech Viagra for Silicon Valley, and Cornell, a biotechnology powerhouse, appear to be the main rivals.
But more interesting than the contest between Stanford and Cornell is the one between Stanford and Stanford.
The Stanford bid for a New York campus is a bet on the value of place. The premise is that Stanford can repeat the success it achieved by marrying itself to the Silicon Valley marketplace. The school’s proposal (unsubtly titled ‘Silicon Valley II’) envisions a bricks-and- mortar residential campus on an island in the East River, built around a community of 100 faculty members and 2,200 students and strategically situated to catalyse new businesses in the city.
Meanwhile, one of Stanford’s most inventive dons, Professor Sebastian Thrun, is making an alternative claim on the future. Prof Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car.
He is offering his ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course online and free. His remote students will get the same lectures as campus students paying US$50,000 (S$65,400) a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a ‘statement of accomplishment’ (though not Stanford credit).
When The Times wrote about this last month, there were 58,000 students enrolled in the course. After the article, enrolment leapt to 130,000, from across the world.
Prof Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost any one. ‘Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 per cent of the cost,’ Prof Thrun told me.
The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. ‘I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,’ he said. ‘I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.’
Prof Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling – and will it last? Prof Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out by other online frontiersmen.
‘If we can solve this,’ he said, ‘I think it will disrupt all of higher education.’
Disrupt is right. It would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants. Many could go the way of local newspapers. There would be huge audiences and pay cheques for superstar teachers, but dimmer prospects for those who are less charismatic.
It’s ironic – or maybe just fitting – that this is playing out at Stanford, which has served as midwife to many disruptive technologies. By forging a symbiotic relationship with venture capital and teaching students how to navigate markets, Stanford claims to have spawned an estimated 5,000 businesses. This is a campus where graduate school applicants are routinely asked if they have done a start-up, and some professors have become very, very rich.
Mr John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Prof Thrun’s experiment, which he calls ‘an initial demonstration’, but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitised university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialised programmes and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education – for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.
But Mr Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he said. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.
As The Times’ Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work – training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.
The Stanford president is hardly a technophobe. Mr Hennessy came up through computer engineering, used his sabbatical to start a successful microprocessor company, and is on the boards of Google and Cisco Systems.
‘In the same way that a lot of things go into the cost of a newspaper that have nothing to do with the quality of the reporting – the cost of newsprint and delivery – we should ask the same thing about universities,’ Mr Hennessy told me. ‘When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable – as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience – and when is it secondary to the learning process?’
But, he noted: ‘One has to think about the sustainability of all these things. In the end, the content providers have to get paid.’
I see a larger point, familiar to all of us who have lived through digital-age disorder. There are disrupters, like Sebastian Thrun, or Napster, or the tweeting rebels in Tahrir Square. And there are adapters, like John Hennessy, or iTunes, or the novice statesmen trying to build a new Egypt. Progress depends on both.
Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.
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This article was first published by the Straits Times on 4 October 2011.
