Georgia Tech has been tapped to participate in a national effort to expand free student access to quality online college courses.The college received $150,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create three introductory courses to be taught online. The classes in physics, psychology,Materials Science and first-year composition will be offered next fall and geared toward students who have yet to start college or earn a degree.The foundation awarded grants to nine colleges, including Duke University and Ohio State University, to develop these massive open online courses, also known as MOOCs. It was part of a series of 12 awards worth more than $3 million to invest in this growing market.“MOOCs are an exciting innovation,Dan Greenstein, director of postsecondary success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a statement. “They hold great promise but are not without challenges, and we are still discovering their full potential.These online courses are part of a series of higher education experiments as colleges test what services they can provide through advanced technology and improved efficiency. It comes as many question the cost of higher education and students demand more control over what they learn and where they go to class.MOOCs allow thousands of students regardless of age, location or income to learn and acquire skills without paying tuition or earning a degree.
Students currently don’t receive credit for these courses, but there is an effort to change that.The Gates Foundation’s awards included a grant to the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for higher education, to determine whether some of these online courses should be eligible for credit. Students would treat the credits just like others when they transfer from one college to another.Colleges will offer courses to ACE for potential accreditation and Tech is studying this option, said Richard DeMillo, director of the institute’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
That credit review combined with the type of courses Georgia Tech and others will develop through the Gates Foundation unites the MOOC movement with the state and national completion agenda, a push to have more adults earn some type of certificate or degree beyond a high school diploma.These Gates Foundation awards address one of higher education’s most pressing problems: bending the cost curve and improving learning outcomes for introductory courses,” DeMillo said.If we are successful, courses like these will be a shift in both quality and cost for the vast majority of American college students.Tech entered the MOOC arena this semester by joining Coursera, a group founded in 2011 by professors from Stanford University that is now one of the largest providers of these classes.More than 40,000 students registered for Tech’s first free Coursera class, Computational Investing Part I. Registration is currently open for eight different Coursera courses led by Tech professors, and so far more than 140,000 students have signed up.Emory University also belongs to Coursera and is scheduled to offer its first courses next semester.
