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.