Evaluating the value of free, online college courses
If you’ve ever taken an online course, you know how dry and unfulfilling they can be. But what if you could take such courses taught by professors at the country’s top institutions of higher learning.
Shane Wade
Opinion Editor
If you’ve ever taken an online course, you know how dry and unfulfilling they can be. But what if you could take such courses taught by professors at the country’s top institutions of higher learning.
And what if they were free?
Coursera is such a venture, offering classes that range from subjects like Game Theory to Introductory Astronomy to Computational Neuroscience. Currently the courses offer no college credit and are purely academic in nature.
Recently, the University of Virginia entered into a partnership with Coursera, offering four courses through the online education venture. In “UVA Today,” President Theresa Sullivan expressed that the venture would “in no way diminish the value of a U.Va. degree, but rather enhance our brand.”
Here, Sullivan strikes at one of the most beneficial parts of Coursera: brand advertising. While more traditional students, fresh out of high-school, will be less likely to slight 4-year institutions in favor of free online courses, Coursera does have a valuable appeal to the non-traditional student populace. But these students are the fringe populace.
While online learning is certainly not a new venture for companies, Coursera innovates the field by having legitimate ties to accredited and well-known universities. Although Coursera courses won’t give you credits and you can’t earn any sort of degree from them, they’re unique when compared to other similar education ventures. Coursera’s game-changing, but not so much as to disrupt the status quo of higher education in America.
To start with, college is more than attending classes, getting grades and receiving a diploma; it’s a deeply interactive and personal experience that shapes and consumes an individual. College is made up of social interactions, clubs and organizations, networking, life lessons and much, much more. To that end, the brick-and-mortar institutions are here to stay.
Furthermore, while students of Coursera might view the same lectures as typical students might, they are deprived of the opportunity to delve more in-depth in terms of engaging in open, instantaneous classroom discussions. An online forum isn’t remotely equivalent to a classroom setting.
Coursera is not going to have a Napster-like effect on colleges. While higher-education courses might be more accessible and open to the public, the higher-education experience is, for better or for worse, still limited. It’ll be interesting to see how, in a decade or so, colleges will adapt to these venture projects in terms of tuition rates and policies regarding professors, but as of now, physical institutions have nothing to fear from virtual ones.
According to Dean of Student Affairs, Ruban Rodrigeuz, VCU’s administration currently has no plans to join with Coursera. While it is a fine service to extend to the public, it takes away valuable time and resources from the providing institution. The three-hour minimum office hours a typical VCU professor would spend creating coursework and uploading PowerPoints for Coursera classes is better applied here, at a physical location with physical students. VCU offers a comparatively unique service for students by making our professors so readily accessible.
The proliferation and expansion of higher education to the virtual world isn’t the revolution that those working in the education have been waiting for. Use Coursera as a supplement to your more legitimate and substantial educational pursuits.
In education, you get out what you put in; a free course and a free education might sound alluring, but it won’t reward you with a degree. CT
