Tens of thousands of students attend dedicated online colleges and hybrid universities (universities that offer both on-campus and online courses). Companies like Coursera, Udacity, and edX, all of which offer free online courses, are ready to enter the online education marketplace. But even these companies need to make a profit, and some are turning to traditional, brick-and-mortar universities to do so. With the job market as competitive as it is, future college students want to ensure they receive the best education possible in order to compete. Knowing the various options available may help streamline college application decisions.
Coursera started with a model, well-known to many university professors as the “flipped classroom,” in which instructors record their lectures and offer interactive elements to better engage with their students. The advantage of this method is that instructors can spend less time lecturing and more time interacting and communicating with their students. Students have a better chance to ask questions retain the information they need to be successful in that course.
Moving beyond this method, Coursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller created a format for students to take free courses online. Utilizing any number of reliable Internet services such as Verizon High Speed Internet and countless others, students can complete assignments virtually anywhere. They’ve even started working with mobile device technologies so that students can still complete some work on their smartphones or tablets. Yet Coursera, as well as Udacity and edX, has realized that partnering with traditional universities is not only the best method to continue running their operations, but possibly the best recipe for student success.
In the fall of 2012, San Jose State University selected edX’s flipped classroom pilot program for their Introduction to Circuit Analysis course which at that time had a 41 percent failure rate. That failure rate dropped to 9 percent after only semester of integrating the flipped classroom approach. San Jose State also agreed to host five online courses through Udacity for one semester. More than half the students in the program failed the final exam, prompting the university to cancel their agreement. This goes to show that the online-only model may not work as well as an integrated on-campus approach.
So what does this mean?
On-campus instruction shouldn’t be substituted with online instruction. Instead, a combination of the two may be the better approach. Utilizing not just the flipped classroom approach but new technologies such as Google Glass can prove to be highly effective. Used as a supplemental tool, Google Glass can offer a number of advantages to both instructors and students. Remote teaching and one-on-one tutor sessions are just two benefits. Instructors can create:
- First-person video guides for shared class involvement in real-time
- Timetables/schedules for lectures, instructors, and students
- Mini-documentaries to improve storytelling in the classroom
The future of online education seems to be tied to on-campus instruction. Thus far, this combination seems to be the most fruitful.
