Education’s Subtle Transformation

A’ Harvard education. . . for free? With a computer and Internet access, it’s possible, but you won’t get a diploma. This fall, Harvard and WGBH are broadcasting one of Harvard’s most popular classes, Justice with Professor Michael Sandel, on TV and YouTube. The cornerstone of the Harvard-WGBH production is a sleek, user-friendly website with course readings, study questions and quizzes, catapulting viewers at home into the cavernous wooden lecture hall with Sandel and his more than 1,000 students in the heat of moral argument.

Sandel has taught at Harvard since 1980, and more than 14,000 students have taken his Justice class.

‘What Michael is looking to do is continue the conversation about his class with the public,’ WGBH spokeswoman Kate Hathaway said.

Offering a college course to the public isn’t new, but in recent years, the number of online course websites with detailed content has been on the rise, due in part to a subtle revolution in higher education. Harvard’s Justice course fits this trend of universities opening their classrooms to showcase content, share ideas, and encourage collaboration, that some say will transform our education model.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the pioneer in free online course information when they launched OpenCourseWare in 2000, a website that at the time only provided users with course syllabi for a few classes. Since then, MIT’s site has grown into a gigantic database of course material with lectures, readings, assignments and exams. Now, websites independent of universities such as Academic Earth and YouTube EDU gather lecture videos from universities across the country that users can watch for free online.

Richard Ludlow, founder and chief executive office of the site Academic Earth, launched in January of 2009, said websites like his are popping up because the technology now allows it to be affordable. The cost is relatively low for sites such as these, and there is a potentially large benefit, whether it is public relations for the university, in licensing content, or just because of altruism, Ludlow said.

Ludlow used MIT’s OpenCourseWare when he was an undergraduate at Yale, using the site to help him with a difficult class.

‘I was taking linear algebra and I was having difficulty understanding my TA and I wanted an alternative way of learning the material,’ he said. ‘I used MIT’s OpenCourseWare.’

The idea for Academic Earth came from his positive experience with MIT’s website.

Academic Earth receives about 400,000 total visits per month, compared to MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which receives about one million per month. Though WGBH would not release the number of visitors to the Harvard Justice site, the first of Sandel’s lectures has close to 15,000 views on YouTube. Hathaway said other universities like UC-Berkeley have ordered the DVD series to help supplement their courses.

MIT says about half of their visitors define themselves as self-learners, a third are students and the rest are divided among educators and unidentified visitors. Ludlow said that many people come to the site and want to earn credit.

Though users can’t earn credit from websites such as Academic Earth, the content is most commonly used as a resource to supplement university classes, for teachers looking to how others are teaching similar material, for lifelong learners and the intellectually curious, and for people who are abroad and don’t have direct access to an institution.

While the majority of visitors to MIT’s site are self-learners, believers in online education say that the percentage of students and educators using these sites in the future will rise.

The emergence of these websites points to the gradual reshaping of higher education, Frank Mulgrew, director of Online Programs at Post University in Connecticut.

‘The traditional model is that the faculty is the value of the education,’ Mulgrew said.

But with universities making content available for free online, the faculty member will be more effective as an aggregator of the available information online, Mulgrew said.

‘Faculty think that it’s what is in their head that makes them valuable, that means they want a closed system,’ he said.

Recent studies have shown lectures to be inefficient as long-term learning tools, but when students are able to revisit a lecture or are offered additional resources to supplement the course, such as in an online or integrated setting, students are more successful.

The overwhelming majority of students at Post University’s online program watch lecture videos online two or three times, Mulgrew said.

‘The more you actively you participate, the more you will remember,’ Mulgrew said. ‘With online education, that repetition is a huge part of it. Classes are being designed so that the student is active and they have many resources they can put together.’

Much of the value of OCW is the so-called rewind factor; unlike in a lecture hall, you can replay what you’ve seen as many times as you want. The focal point of the Harvard-WGBH series is the high quality of the videos put together by WGBH’s production team.

‘We wanted people to feel like they have a front row seat in his class,’ Hathaway said. ‘We weren’t trying to make it into a documentary, we were trying to portray the classroom experience.’

In the videos, Sandel strides on stage to the electronic tune of a Law & Order-like theme song, his sharp grey suit matching the color of his ebbing hairline, and tells his students, ‘This is a course about justice and we begin with a story.’ He details a moral dilemma that leaves students with a question: If you had to choose between killing one person to save the lives of five others, or killing the five to save the life of the one, what would you do? The discussion will continue.