Free Online courses, Student Loans Needed to Pay for College

As the current business model of U.S. higher education buckles under the growing weight of astonishing tuition increases and severe debt from student loans, an inclination among some schools to offer free online classes could end up changing everything.In the same way that printed newspapers began supplementing their traditional media with free online editions in the 1990s which transformed the way newspapers did business and made the news largely free for Internet consumers U.S. colleges and universities are beginning to supplement their paid course offerings with free online courses. While free online classes aren’t likely to make college free for students who go online, they could help higher education become more affordable and reverse the trend of having to borrower increasingly expensive student loans to pay for college.

For example, Stanford now offers an online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class for free. The class promises student feedback and provides a résumé-worthy, though unaccredited, Statement of Accomplishment.The university had to halt registration after 135,000 students from around the world enrolled. And Stanford isn’t alone. MIT, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and dozens of other leading universities are beginning to offer free online classes as well.The advantage to free online courses is that they provide universities with global exposure. Free online courses have allowed the University to increase its international presence,said Diana Kleiner, professor and director of Open Yale Courses. Oxford University says that it’s online offerings aren’t free classes but are instead recruiting and promotional tools Internet to Bring Down the Sky-High Cost of Higher Ed, Experts Say,Fox News, Sept. 3, 2011.

While many free Internet courses may not be able to replicate teaching methods online and aren’t meant to cannibalize tuition the majority of the 400 free courses for major universities don’t provide access to faculty or certification for credit the growing use of online learning will end up driving down the cost of a traditional education and make it easier to pay for college, according to Henry Eyring, author of The Innovative University.Erying cites per-course pricing instead of semester-based pricing as well as an emerging option of taking an online course for free and paying a fee for credit upon completion as two concurrent trends that, along with free online courses, are changing the business model of higher education. Erying says that schools that fail to embrace the inevitable change could face irrelevancy or even extinction.Online learning will disrupt only those traditional universities and colleges that don’t adopt it,Eyring said.The much greater risk will be to institutions that are imitating the elite schools’ emphasis on scholarship and graduate programs but aren’t investing in online learning innovations for their undergraduate students.