Beyond the Skepticism

It’s only been about a year since massive open online courses (MOOCs) burst onto the higher education scene. But it hasn’t taken long in many quarters of our community for acclaim to accede to skepticism, and excitement about MOOCs to fade amid charges of excessive hype.

All of that’s understandable during such challenging times for American higher education, as presidents and professors alike grapple with issues of affordability, access and accountability. After all, no one innovation will ever be a cureall, no matter how much attention it gets.

This is a good time for all of us in higher education to take a step back and study the disruptive potential of MOOCs and other innovations. The American Council on Education, for instance, has an ongoing and wide-ranging research and evaluation effort to examine the academic potential of MOOCs and attempt to answer questions about whether they can help support degree completion, deepen college curriculums and increase learning productivity.

I was interested, therefore, in the findings of Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology. Over all, and perhaps to no one’s surprise, many faculty members expressed reservations about online courses in general and about MOOCs in particular. Several responses highlighted this skepticism, but also, I believe, showed where ACE’s work can be of assistance.

Just 22 percent of the faculty who responded to the survey agreed that "higher education should award credit for MOOCs." However, 66 percent said that a very important indicator of a quality online course is whether it has been "independently certified for quality."

It has been well-publicized that one aspect of ACE’s MOOC evaluation and research initiative is to review some specific MOOCs for potential college credit recommendations. So far, in fact, we have determined that 11 such courses across three major MOOC platforms met criteria for credit recommendations: Five from Coursera, five from Udacity  and one from edX.

But what may be less well-known is that reviewing MOOCs for credit recommendations involves the same work ACE has been successfully undertaking for many years to evaluate learning that takes place outside traditional degree programs. And faculty should keep in mind that it is their colleagues who are responsible for carrying out these reviews.

Since 1945, ACE has evaluated military training and experiences to determine their eligibility for credit recommendations. In 1974, the ACE College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT®) was formed to extend these reviews to the workplace and to major departments of government. Decisions about this and all transfer credit are up to individual institutions on a case-by-case basis, as they should be, but there is a network of some 2,000 institutions that have agreed to consider ACE credit recommendations.

Many of these courses are found in military and workplace settings, but they also have for a number of years included “traditional” online courses that now are more than a decade old.

Each course review is led by a team of at least two experienced and trained faculty assessors, drawn from a variety of institutions and geographic regions. Each faculty assessor's expertise is relevant to the course under review and all must have significant teaching experience. The reviewers look at textbooks and other instructional materials, course syllabuses, assessment methods, lab and class exercises, instructor qualifications and, for online courses, instructional design, assessments, student authentication and exam proctoring.

In the process of these rigorous reviews, it is not unusual for a faculty team to make recommendations for improvements to MOOCs and other types of courses.

The final recommendations are always a consensus of the team, and they are based on consistent standards that are national in scope and not linked to the standards of any one particular institution. It is up to ACE faculty reviewers to decide how much credit to recommend based on the scope and depth of the course, with decisions about whether to grant credit at the discretion of degree-granting institutions.

Final recommendations are published on ACE's online National Guide to College Credit for Workforce Training. Once approved for credit recommendations, courses must be re-reviewed every three years to maintain their status.

The promise of MOOCs remains an open question, but it’s clear that online learning overall will play an increasingly important role as the higher education community works to serve millions of adult learners and help our country meet the goal of boosting the number of Americans with a postsecondary degree, certificate or credential. About two-thirds of American college students now are post-traditional learners whose pursuit of additional knowledge and skill is interlaced with time commitments to jobs and family responsibilities.

The 2012 Survey of Online Learning by the Babson Survey Research Group  showed that more than 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 from 2010, and that 32 percent of higher education students now take at least one course online. And while just 2.6 percent of our institutions reported currently having a MOOC, an additional 9.4 percent said that MOOCs were being planned.

ACE, of course, isn’t the only entity that can help assure faculty of the quality of online courses, including MOOCs. And it’s worth noting that ACE’s MOOC initiative is part of our broader push to expand the area of prior learning assessment in ways appropriate for both post-traditional students and American’s diverse system of colleges and universities.

Indeed, as my ACE colleague Cathy Sandeen recently noted, there are many ways to develop a more truly interconnected higher education system that helps more Americans complete postsecondary degrees, credentials and certificates.

Yes, MOOCs have received a lot of hype. But that just makes it all the more important to continue with efforts to assess where and how they might fit into the higher education landscape.