I have written about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) before. These are where a college puts a course online and allows anyone to take it for free. There are thousands of these courses available and more are being added all the time. As a matter of fact, in the past four months 190 different universities have announced 600 free online courses. Some people point to the increasing costs of higher education, but I think this trend is pointing in the opposite direction.

JetBlue has developed an employee education benefit package that goes well beyond tuition reimbursement.  They have partnered with Thomas Edison State University to provide a degree program for their employees called JetBlue Scholars.  The program combines online education, open source course materials, exams for credit and education coaching.  The result is a flexible and cost effective education model that could become a template for other employers. And because the education is not done in a classroom, the students can complete their degrees while continuing to work full-time.

According to and article in Business Wire, this model eliminates “the costs of classrooms, dorms, sports teams and hardcover books.”  I would add that using online education also eliminates the bulk of the cost of the instructors themselves.  One instructor recording an excellent video lecture provides that lecture to millions of students, and for many years.  The cost of a traditional college education is still climbing, so this low-cost model should be very attractive. And once it reaches critical mass it will start to draw students away from traditional colleges, putting pressure on the upward trend in college costs.  There will always be those who value the traditional college experience, but a separate path is evolving for those who don’t think the extra expense is worth it.

It is a sign that online college education is here to stay. Coursera has found a way to make money, provide value to colleges and was rewarded with some fresh investment. According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education investors poured in an additional $60 million in venture-capital.  They may have heard that colleges are finding more ways to make use of the Coursera platform and very few are dropping out of the project once they get involved.

And the platform is now generating revenue. They are providing shorter professional-development courses and project-based courses, both of which have nominal fees. They have also started to offer graded assignments for a fee. I think they may have or be close to a sustainable model.

If you are considering taking an online course or just curious about online education, you might want to check out the Online Schools Guidebook, put out by Accredited Schools Online.  And it really is like a book, since the guidebook page has the equivalent of 25 pages of information.  This includes some great material on free resources and trends.

The main page also has a searchable list of schools and programs from all over the country.  It including several ways to filter the data and generate maps of their locations.

It may seem modest, but I think this is a turning points in higher education.  According to this article, Arizona State has partnered with edX to create the Global Freshman Academy.  This new program will let students attempt any of 12 freshman courses (for credit) with a cost of only $45 per class up front. When the student passes the course they can choose to pay an additional fee ($200 or less per credit) to have those credits applied to their college transcript. Students who purchase the credits can can request an official transcript from the university to show their letter grades and prove their attainment of college credit.  They can use these credits if they decide to apply to ASU or another college. Anyone who doesn’t want credit can take the same courses with no upfront cost.

So one obvious difference is that you can decide after you take the class if you want to pay for the credits.  That way you don’t invest thousands, only to lose it all if you can’t pass. And these credits cost about half of what ASU’s normal online courses cost.

But what I see as the real difference is that there is no admission required to take these courses for credit. You can try a real, for-credit, college course without the application, admissions tests, essays, etc. The turning point in my mind is that colleges are starting to experiment with creative configurations like this one.

I wonder if my love of independent study and my interest in MOOCs is related to my having had more than my share of bad professors.  The “M” in MOOC stands for “massive” and there is no way a weak course or a weak professor are going to be successful as a MOOC.  That is why most MOOCs are good courses taught by an exceptional instructor and even improved over time.  So I would much rather take a MOOC than take a live course with a weak instructor.

After three bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree I have had more than my share of college professors, both good and bad.  Some of the bad ones were really bad.  In my opinion, the worst class/professor combination I ever had was my marketing class at Trenton State College while working on my masters degree. She was disorganized, the class requirements changed mid stream and there was little meaningful instruction.  Thankfully that professor was gone after one year.  I like to think that was partly due to the conversation I had with the dean after my class was over.

A few years later I was working for a hospital and was talking to one of my staff.  She was a very sharp older woman who was taking some night courses at a college in downtown Philadelphia.  She told me that she liked all of her classes but that she was struggling in her marketing class.  I commiserated, saying that the one class I had trouble with in graduate school was marketing, but only because I had an awful professor. I mentioned the professor’s name and was met with a stunned look.  The same professor was still teaching, just at a different school.

MOOCs aren’t perfect, but they getting better fast. It is still too early to know all the changes they will bring, but major changes are on the way. Just think of how quickly Wikipedia has changed the encyclopedia business.

Here are four articles that show how people are experimenting and improving MOOCs.

Faculty members at Stanford describe how they are improving student interaction and participation.

A Huffington Post article describes how on-line forums can be a viable substitute for in-class discussions

An article in Forbes discusses their experiment in flipping the MOOC (watching the lectures on your own time).

MOOCulus offers an engaging method for students to practice Calculus problems while taking the Calculus class (MOOC) at Coursera.  It even comes with a free open source Calculus textbook that you can download as a PDF.

I have written about this before, but how long can the current college textbook business model last when one intelligent person can assemble a free textbook and release it to the world?

Stanford Online has teamed up with edX and Google Course Builder to create a free and open source platform for running massive open online courses (MOOCs) called Open edX.  The platform is currently being used by edX to offer free courses from Harvard, MIT and other universities.  It is also used by Stanford Online to offer their online content.  In 2014 they will open mooc.org, a site for building and hosting MOOCs.

The coming shakeout in higher education is accelerating.

According to this article in the Atlantic the idea of flipping the classroom is both preferred by the students AND actually raises test scores. In a two year study test scores went up 2.5% in each of the two years for a cumulative gain of over 5%.

Also, before taking the flipped class a large majority of the students said they preferred the traditional lecture model.  After taking a flipped class an even larger majority (90%) said the preferred the new flipped class.

And just wait until instructors master the flipped model.