Today marks the beginning of a new frontier in Harvard education.
Starting today, Harvard offers CS50x: Intro to Computer Science and PH207x: Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research, to anyone in the world for free.
Over 70,000 are registered for CS50x, set to complete eight problem sets, two quizzes, and a final project: the exact same track that over 700 Harvard undergraduates have struggled through over the past month and a half.
While this freedom to take Harvard courses for free is exciting for the greater public, how should the Harvard student feel? The focus of the conversation surrounding these Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has neglected to consider how offering Harvard courses online affects Harvard students.
Fortunately for us, the realistic implications can only be positive. EdX will increase Harvard’s global presence and facilitate pedagogical improvements in the Harvard classroom.
Continued Prestige
There is simply no way to scale the quality of a Harvard undergraduate experience to hundreds of thousands of people. This means that while Harvard will gain greater publicity via edX, it will maintain the mystique of the Harvard undergraduate experience. The net result: continued, if not greater prestige.
The difference in quality is visible even in the course which probably best lends itself to the online format: CS50. In an interview with the Harvard Political Review, Professor David Malan, who teaches both CS50 and CS50x, said “in CS50, we try to provide particularly personal attention. We try to maintain 12-15 student-to-section leader ratios. With 70,000 students, we simply can’t do that.” Professor Malan added that students in CS50 receive in-person attention during office hours and also get greater feedback on problem sets with comments on style, scope, design, and correctness. Meanwhile, enrollees of CS50x will only receive a grade for correctness.
Harvard Provost Alan Garber, in an interview with the Harvard Political Review, affirmed that the College will remain focused on providing top-notch quality education for Harvard students: “edX is not a replacement for Harvard’s model of residential post-secondary education. As we expand the number and variety of courses offered, we want to ensure that we maintain the rigor of the traditional classroom.”
Even more relevant to the classroom, Provost Garber expressed his excitement that “the edX platform will allow researchers to capture data to study which teaching methods are the most useful,” adding that, “Our hope and expectation is that online materials from edX will be combined with classroom experiences at Harvard to produce a superior learning experience.”
edX and the Harvard Classroom
EdX and its companion MOOC providers will present researchers with unprecedented quantities of data on student learning, which may lead to Harvard classroom adaptions. Professor Andrew Ho of the Harvard Graduate School for Education spoke with the HPR, saying,
The edX platform allows us to ask a near limitless number of research questions…What works, and what is a distraction? How can we incorporate flexibility and individualization into the online experience in a way that enhances the shared experience that we consider the Harvard education to be?
Online, everything students do will be quantified, including factors like time spent, problems missed, problems answered correctly, and course attrition rate. Furthermore, because edX emphasizes mastery rather than assessment since students theoretically take edX courses for learning’s sake, the data should reveal purer insights into the learning process. Insights into learning optimization from edX could translate into changes in the Harvard classroom.
Large introductory lecture courses, especially in the sciences, are an obvious target for change. Large lecture courses, such as LS1a, incorporate participation elements to the lectures that compel students to attend instead of viewing lecturers online. Students spend much of freshman and sophomore year in these courses, waiting until they reach smaller, intensive research seminars. Ben Nelson, CEO of the education start-up The Minerva Project, suggested to the Harvard Political Review that, if adaptive learning models that may be used in edX prove superior to the conventional format, Harvard “will not be morally justified in teaching introductory calculus” and other intro courses in their conventional format.
Courses may have to adapt to integrate insights into learning gleaned from research done through edX. In an interview with the HPR, David Kuntz, the VP of Research and Development of the learning software company called Knewton, pointed out some of the advantages to using adaptive software. For instance, “a student’s teaching assistant could view her progress on a problem set and get more insight into what concepts she is struggling with or has mastered.”
Conventional views of the success of a lecture-based model are already falling away. In an interview with the HPR Founder of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun said, “When I give a lecture, 80 percent of it is autopilot.” Instead of having each student sit through the same material, courses may break down into more segmented instruction; each student receives the lessons he or she needs and learns the material based on the recommendations of software that has been perfected from MOOCs offered through edX.
As Provost Garber said, “Technology is already an important part of the ‘toolkit’ of our faculty, and advancements enabled by this initiative will have a direct impact on their approach to teaching our students.” The size of this “impact” is yet to be determined; edX may lead to a very different undergraduate experience five years in the future.
Thinking Big and Blurring Borders
EdX and MOOCs in general could change how colleges such as Harvard select their students or even the fundamental structure of a Harvard degree.
Universities like Harvard could use performance on MOOCs to cherry-pick the brightest students from around the world with far better information on their likely success than they now get from SATs or GPAs. MOOCs are already starting to factor into admissions.
Take the example of 12 students taking CS50 in the Wheaton School District. While these students will not receive grades from their high schools, Professor Malan said, “They will each receive a letter written by me saying that they took a Harvard computer science course.” Think those students will fare better in the admissions process? A meta-analysis of studies of online versus in-person instruction by the Department of Education found the two to be equally effective. With research bolstering the effectiveness of online education, and certification programs coming to fruition, there is no reason Harvard couldn’t use MOOCs to cherry-pick the best and brightest.
Harvard could also use the scalability of MOOCs to offer premium content to alumni, changing the way seniors view graduation. Udacity’s Founder Sebastian Thrun questioned the need for a four-year model: “The model we have now is educate for four years and then you’re gone. But education is becoming life-long. And people live longer. A single slice is no longer sufficient.” Therefore, MOOCs may enable Harvard alumni to continue taking Harvard courses, degree credits may blur, and a student concentrating in Applied Math could achieve the equivalent of a Masters Degree in Statistics post-graduation, certifying that with MOOC credits. Harvard could also offer exclusive content and accreditation to alumni, further increasing the appeal of getting into Harvard, as well as perhaps increasing alumni contributions.
Back to the Present
Harvard students should appreciate those things which are uniquely part of the Harvard experience. Students should value connections made with peers and faculty, and should deepen their involvement in activities outside the classroom. Indeed, these are what differentiate the HarvardX experience from the experience at Harvard College.