MIT and Harvard Offer Courses Online for Free

Where you have a four year degree program maybe it should be a two year program [with] students [coming] into a university having taken some online courses.”

While nobody can accurately predict the future of a system reform in education, these are not unprecedented beliefs. Technology is changing, and the world in which information is shared will change with it.

Internationalization and business

While edX writes on their website that they are a “not for profit, open source platform, collaborative” and “financially sustainable,” people like Bell seek to understand their motives more deeply.

“There must be something else behind the surprisingly rapid realization on the part of elite universities that they absolutely have to get into this game,” Bell writes in his article Impact, or the Business of University (available on Project Muse). “I think it is clear that a major motivation behind the rapid development of MOOCs is quite simply the following: this is a market.”

However, many universities are apprehensive about MOOCs for a number of reasons. First, the number of applicants for enrollment a university receives every year may, in fact, dwindle in response to being able to receive all of their courses online for free. The other main issue is how a less expensive option would be highly seductive for students who struggle to pay their tuition every year.

These two factors would certainly appear detrimental to the university’s business. Or would they?

Bell suggests the contrary. In his article, he cites Simon Marginson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, who writes: “Open courseware has the same logic as the winner-takes-all markets in celebrity actors or top movies or music discussed by Cornell sociologist Robert Frank. A tiny handful of producers and products dominate the global market, overwhelmingly. There is only one Elvis, and only one Harvard.”

And popularity, indeed, does bring in revenue. MOOCs are becoming more and more popular, especially in this past year. Thinking about university and internationalization, Nigel M. Healey, a professor at Trent University, writes that “a profit-maximising business, the ultimate explanation for the internationalisation of a company is that it increases long-term profits, either by reducing production costs and/or increasing market sales.”

According to Healey, while these trends of internationalization are happening in the field of higher education, they are not yet stable.

MOOCs remain internationalizing. They offer possibilities for students located internationally to pursue studies with some of the best institutions like Harvard or MIT with edX. With more interest world-wide from foreign students, universities may expect an increase in international interest in their programs. As Bell states, “it has long been the case that the most prestigious American universities are in a market to sell their “brand,” that is, to attract the most and the best applicants not only locally, but increasingly globally.”

Perhaps, then, MOOCs are the way of the future.

However, Healey predicts problems in understanding the amount of students enrolling into these courses. “The data are not routinely collected by national ministries of education or their agencies,” he explains. “And, to a lesser extent, because many of the online providers are private, for-profit institutions.”

Without being reviewed by education boards, a fear exists that the information given to the public could be slightly misunderstood.

High School Students and Credit

But this education process isn’t only for university-level students. Agarwal reports that people as young as high school students are taking the courses, and receiving credit for their work.

“Andover high school in the Massachusetts area had a dozen students take edX courses online,” Agarwal says, “and they got high school credit for doing that.”

The students claim edX helps to prepare them for the self-motivated work style of a university or college education, and believe that it offers what most high school classes can’t: a good idea of what awaits them in their post-secondary education.