Duke's popularity in Massive Open Online Courses is booming, but the University remains divided on whether or not to offer course credit.
“In terms of the number of Coursera courses produced, Duke is one of the top 10 schools,” said Lynne O’Brien, associate vice provost for digital and online education initiatives. “Out of the top 20 Coursera courses of all time, Duke has three of those.”
These large online offerings, more commonly known as MOOCs, are on the rise as more and more universities embrace their potential to provide quality learning for greater audiences, often free of charge. Coursera is an online interface for offering courses to an international audience.
Beginning in Fall 2015, there will be a total of 42 MOOCs offered by Duke faculty through Coursera—up from the 33 offered in the 2014-15 academic year.
This growth has been met with mixed feedback. Some Duke professors have found that teaching MOOCs has changed the way they structure their on-campus curriculums. As the medium has grown, however, there remain questions about these courses’ academic viability and eligibility for college credit.
Amid this uncertainty, some educators see a space for innovation. O’Brien added that Duke continues to encourage faculty to experiment with this new educational forum.
“Every year for the last three years, we’ve done a call for proposals where faculty could say different types of online courses they’d like to try,” O’Brien said. “Faculty who are interested in doing something can get support and funding and help getting started.”
For some, the advantages of MOOCs include being able to reach a larger audience that would not necessarily be able to pursue a traditional education. When Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, assistant professor of statistical science, created her Coursera course, “Data Analysis and Statistical Inference,” she kept in mind international and domestic audiences that might lack access to quality teaching material.
“For someone who has a full-time job, they need something they can do on their own time. For a student from a developing nation, this might be the only opportunity to learn statistics, or at least statistics from an institution known for its high quality,” Cetinkaya-Rundel said.
The primary reason Coursera courses will not translate to course credits for students is that MOOCs “are not equivalent to the full Duke course experience,” O'Brien wrote in an email Sunday, citing a shorter timespan and a lack of “assignments and activities.”
But for some like Leonard White—associate professor at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and teacher of a “Medical Neuroscience” Coursera course—remaining among the world's most innovative universities means being the first elite institution to consider giving students credit for MOOCs.
“I don’t think it's so much a matter of the course quality as much as administrative policy,” White said. “The decision to award transfer credit is made by looking at a syllabus, which might be just a list of topics, and the accepted quality of the institution, which isn’t much to go on. With an online course we have the ability to thoroughly assess its quality and content, yet we aren’t in the position of awarding credit.”
White noted that the money spent on a course might play into the decision of whether it deserves transfer credit or not.
“It seems to me that if someone pays big bucks to take a course it's very likely to transfer into a place like Duke, whereas an online course that the student does not pay for has no chance of transferring into Duke,” he said. “That’s frustrating, because it deprives students an opportunity to benefit from a really great experience.”
White added that in his course, he combines traditional online teaching methods with interactive technology.
“We have a very robust discussion forum that’s almost like having Facebook embedded in the course,” White said. “I also try to do a Google hangout once every two weeks as an opportunity to provide a live, face-to-face interaction for students who want to participate in that.”
Even though MOOCs are currently not eligible for college transfer credit, O’Brien said that online courses are extremely valuable resources for students and encouraged students to explore their options.
“I don’t think these courses will replace the traditional on-campus college education,” O’Brien said. “However, if people need extra practice or extra help, or if students want to sample a course before they take it as a regular credit course, or if they don’t need a full-credit course but just need some background, an online course can provide all of those things.”
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