In Chinese high schools, only the strong survive. The measure of “fitness” in this darwinian system is the college entrance exam, know in Mandarin as the “Gao Kao”, which determines acceptance to the state-funded university system. The Mainland’s growth in GDP over the past few decades has fueled a rise in the number of students who pay hefty fees to attend universities in foreign countries or to study at private institutions here in China. However, the vast majority of Chinese learners have no other option than to toil away in a ferociously competitive system.
When demand far exceeds supply in a country of 1.3 billion people, the scale of the remedy has to be very large indeed, perhaps even gargantuan. In the field of education, there has been a lot of chatter about a recent innovation that may be useful in just this kind of scenario. In April of last year, two professors at Stanford University created Coursera, an online platform to host what are now being called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The concept was simple; have top university professors teach courses that can be accessed for free by millions of web users across the globe. Within 5 months of its launch, 1.3 million students had registered on the site.
Coursera is not the only platform for MOOCs out there, but it currently seems to hold the number one slot. The social enterprise currently partners with 33 universities and has a course catalog with 217 offerings. The site’s success has the higher education community buzzing about the potential of this learning platform. Academic credit is one major challenge currently facing MOOCs, given the difficulties with the prevention of cheating in an online environment. Despite the obstacles, some are already calling this an revolution in education. One thing is for sure, MOOCs are growing rapidly and many universities are tripping over one another to get on the bandwagon.
In August of 2012, Coursera released a report stating that 61.5 percent of its registered students were located outside of the United States, where the company is based. The home countries of enrolled students topping the charts at the time were Brazil, India, and China. The wide reach of MOOCs makes them an effective delivery system for continuing education opportunities anywhere that university systems exhibit large gaps between demand and capacity. However, it seem unlikely that MOOCs would offer any sort of meaningful degree program unless a system could be created that did not syphon off tuition-paying learners; physical universities worldwide are currently trying to balance books by taking on Chinese students who can afford to pay full price.
As we have seen recently with print publications that provide articles on their websites, free access to content in some industries can be a challenge for long term business prospects. Education could well also fall into that category. Even if universities do not make a profit on their services, professors and electric bills must still be paid. So where does that leave this admirable social experiment?
It is possible that MOOCs will probably just continue to offer a smattering of great survey courses to a curious world. Unless a conglomerate of top schools is created to offer an online degree program that takes advantage of economies of scale by reaching millions of students, it seems unlikely that valuable credits will be handed out. Remember, in the US most schools require students to pay regular tuition when studying abroad to prevent financial losses. Despite lingering questions, MOOCs are based in a principled idea that reaffirm one’s faith in humanity.
