Economic Centre of Gravity

We all know economic power is shifting away from the US toward China.  This interesting chart by McKinsey, based on data from Angus Maddison of University of Groningen, shows how economic power has shifted from AD1 to present day, along with forecasts into the future.  Not surprisingly, the centre of gravity has shifted most rapidly between 2000 and 2010, since we all know that all rates of change have accelerated in recent days.

This map definitely recalled for me some of the themes in History of the World Since 1300, the wonderful Coursera course by Jeremy Adelman of Princeton that I took last year.  I sent Adelman a copy of the map and he cautioned that the data was hugely controversial.  He was surprised that the 1950 data was not further west, given the dominance of California and trans-Pacific exchanges. Adelman also pointed out how Euro-centric the image was: you could picture that shift shooting out over the Pacific rather than creeping back across Europe.

Zeikow's comments on his first MOOC

Many people to whom I've bubbled (or babbled as the case may be) about Coursera have been a bit skeptical about how seriously students would follow a course they never bothered to pay for and for which they will not get a formal credit.  Frankly, so was I.

Professor Zelikov, who taught The Modern World: Global History Since 1760, provided some information in his farewell message now that the course is over.

• 47,000 enrolled
• 26,000 sampled at least some part of the class.  Since there's no money exchanging hands here, it's pretty easy to enrol on a whim and then not bother to participate.
• 13-15,000 really 'gave it a go' in Zelikov's words
• 5,000 earned Statements of Accomplishments
• 5,000 audited the course seriously but did not get a Statement of Accomplishment.  This group would include me.  I followed all the lectures, took some notes, took all the quizzes and got almost everything right.  But I started the course late and never caught up, so I guess my quizzes didn't count, as I didn't get a Statement of Accomplishment.

It looks as if about a third of the people who enrolled actually took the course seriously.  For a course where a student had no 'skin in the game' in terms of a registration fee, this seems like an high rate of participation.  And it suggests they were all interested in pure learning, since even a Statement of Accomplishment probably doesn't buy you anything.  Yet.  Maybe sometime soon Coursera credentials will be worth something more than self-satisfaction.

Zelikov is clearly very gratified by his own participation in the course.  He's a busy man, a dean at University of Virginia, so I'm sure this represented a huge commitment of time for him. 

Coursera's Signature Track

When disruptive innovations arrive in an industry, people often judge their impact by what they see at that initial entry point.  However, those innovations undergo constant improvements, taking them on a trajectory far beyond their industry entry point.

One of the objections to MOOCs is the fact students can't get a validated certification of what they've learned in the course.  Coursera has already taken steps toward remedying that.  There is now a Signature Track which allows you to get certification that you have successfully passed the course.

For the course I'm just starting, Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship, I have just received a message offering me the option to take a Signature Track, which will get me certification.  Coursera will validate that I am who I say I am in two ways - through video identification as I sit in front of my computer, and by verifying my identity by matching up to my typing pattern.  For this I would pay $69, although I'm given a early-bird discount to $39 for this new feature.  Taking the course without credit is still free.

Coursera has moved swiftly along the path of sustaining innovation.  Those venture capitalists who invested in Coursera are going to start seeing revenue!

Coursera takes off

Coursera has just announced that they hit three million students during March.  One year.  Three million students.  These students took over ten million courses.  Quick - do the math.  That's over three courses per student on average.  That would make me not so unusual for registering for ten:  I've completed three, am in the midst of five (two very half-heartedly), have abandoned one, and one more has just started.

I'd be very interested to see a breakdown of the geographic distribution of the students.  Certainly, I found the distribution in World History Since 1300 to be very broad and the students very diverse.

edX, the Harvard-MIT platform has far fewer courses, and far fewer students (in the thousands, not the millions as far as I can see).  Is there a critical mass factor in course selection?  Will more people 'shop' for courses, where there are more courses?  The bigger you are, the bigger you'll get?

As a frequent-flyer member of Coursera, so to speak, I'm certainly more likely to browse the courses there.  However, I did register for an edX course recently: Michael Sandel's famous Harvard course on Justice.

Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies

Having enthused in a previous post about how much I enjoyed my first Coursera course, History of the World Since 1300, it's only fair to report that, like any university, there are good courses and bad courses at Coursera.  I put Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies, given by James Green of the University of Maryland in the latter category.  [Full disclosure: I teach a course called Managing Innovation in a couple of different MBA programs, and so I have strong views about the topic.]

The title of the course suggested it would be about innovation, but it was really about entrepreneurship.  The concepts in the course would be of some value to someone starting a business, but they would not enlighten one about how to undertake innovation.

The delivery style was plodding and studded with several annoying speech habits*.  The professor mostly read off very detailed slides in a slow monotonic voice and I was ever so glad of the Coursera feature that allows you to speed up the lecture to 1.5 times normal speed.  Even the navigation and exercises of the course were not as well thought out as other Coursera courses.  All in all, I don't recommend this course.

* many non-value-adding repetitions of 'with that', 'in that way', 'what that means', 'for that', 'within that' and so on.

MOOCs - A Coming Onslaught

I've been writing about, talking about, thinking about and taking MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for quite a while now.   I've just read Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times article about MOOCs.  He and I are pretty much on the same page - although a lot more people read his page than mine!  Of course, Clayton Christensen has been talking about education being ripe for disruptive innovation for years and published Disrupting Class five years ago.

Friedman points to the emergence of Professor as Rock Star.  I've long made the point that, with the globalization of education, the few will rise to the top and drive out mediocrity. Friedman describes how  Harvard Humanities professor Michael Sandel, has become a rock star in Korea and China.  I first heard Sandel speak at the TED conference in 2010 and I've just signed up for his upcoming Justice course on edX, the joint MOOC platform of Harvard and MIT.  Regular readers of this blog may soon read more about that course.

Who wants to learn high school math from a crappy, or even mediocre, high school math teacher when you can learn from the incredibly popular and engaging Salman Khan at Khan Academy?  Who wants to learn history from a schmuck at a third-tier university when you can learn at the feet of Jeremy Adelman of Princeton?  (see my rave review of his Coursera course here.)

I've mused about this rock star phenomenon with my students in the Managing Innovation course I've been teaching in two different MBA programs since retirement from full time employment.  I consider myself a 'pretty good' teacher, regularly earning Teaching Excellence awards at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and complimentary comments from students.   But world class?  I think not.  Clayton Christensen is not teaching online yet, but if someone were to be given the chance to learn from this rock star, the pre-eminent world expert on innovation, or from Lib Gibson, they'd be crazy to choose me.

So what are the prospects for a good-but-not-world-class professor?  As lectures become available online, institutions are experimenting with flipping the classroom model: watch the lectures online in your own time at your own pace  and do homework or discussions during class.  San Jose State is flipping that classroom with MIT's introductory Circuits and Electronics course and College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto is doing the same with Salman Khan's math videos.   Perhaps there'd be scope for people like me running those discussions.  But this prospect would be rather gloomy if teaching was my chosen career.  Such outsourcing would definitely diminish my value.

Another of Friedman's points is about the coming shift from the Time Served model of education to the Stuff Learned model.  Sitting through high school, and getting a graduation certificate (of uncertain pedigree since different high schools have such different standards), will no longer be the benchmark.  Rather, your actual competence in a subject will be measured.

A good example of this is my own abortive registration for Calculus: Single Variable by Professor Ghrist of University of Pennsylvania.  I had two motives.  One was a crazy desire to refresh my memory about calculus and one was to see Professor Ghrist's teaching methodology, which looked downright exciting.  I was advised to take a self-administered test before starting the course to ensure I had the right background: if I scored less than 80%, think twice about registering.  So, I have a Masters in Math, and I've even taught first year calculus - a mere 43 years ago - although I've never used a stitch of what I learned.  The Axiomatic Foundations of Algebraic Topology (my thesis topic) doesn't exactly come up in everyday conversations.  Well, I was even rustier than expected and I didn't come near scoring 80%.  So I self-selected out of the course.  (Maybe I'll go to Khan Academy and brush up on some of that prerequisite stuff).

So how does this differ from what happens now?  I'm sure that with a credential like a Masters in Math, I'd have been accepted into that course.  In the bricks-and-mortars world, my bum in that seat would have denied a chance for another more worthy student.  In the world of 'infinite' capacity, I can decide whether to take the course or not, without impacting access for anybody else.  And there was a great online tool to help inform my decision.

Top 10 Things about 'A History of the World Since 1300'

I've written a few times about MOOCs, massive open online courses (here,  here, here, and here).  I loved the first course I took at Coursera - A History of the World Since 1300.

And here's the Top 10 things I liked:

The professor: 

Jeremy Adelman was fabulous.  He's a superb story-teller with an extraordinary command of language and history is after all a fascinating story.  I would take any course from him, just to luxuriate in his teaching style again.

The global point of view:

The course was a fantastic survey of a wide swath of history.  And it delivered on its promise of taking a world view.  Despite coming from an American university, it did not overemphasize the US story, nor betray an American point of view on subjects.  Like so many westerners, my (modest) knowledge of history centred on Europe.  This course greatly broadened my horizons.  "Europe was just a side show in WW II".  That statement startled me, but it's clearly true when you look at what happened in Asia and Russia.  That's typical of the mental readjustment I experienced.

The focus on major currents of history:

There was more emphasis on the major ebbs and flows of history, and less on particular political figures and dates.  The big theme of the course was the long term - though sometimes discontinuous - march of our world from isolated, self-sufficient villages to a interrelated, interdependent global society.  History seen through this lens has a certain inevitability.  Specific decisions in particular countries of situations caused blips in the details, but history moves inexorably forward.

The relative datelessness:
Liberation from the tyranny of dates!  The course infrequently mentioned specific dates.  This sometimes had the disadvantage of leaving me a bit at sea: was this happening in China at the same time as that development in India, or after it?  However, overall, I loved the approach of looking at broad sweeping patterns rather than specific dates.

Emphasis on Ideas:
Adelman talked a lot about ideas and their influence on history.  Sometimes we can be discouraged about how little attention is paid to big ideas.  But this course illustrated the incredible impact of ideas, sometimes suddenly but usually gradually over a long period.  We heard more about philosophers, scientists and economists than about politicians. Queen Victoria got a passing mention, but the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith were central figures.

The students:

I loved the variety among the 90,000 students in the course.  From highly educated, to those who had not had access to higher education.  Current students to retirees.  Scientists to humanists.  Soldiers to housewives.  We heard from these students in the discussion forums and the live-streamed Precepts.  I had my papers marked by students from Germany, Australia, Chile, Austria, China, US and India.  What a 'global feeling'.

The 'extras':

However, the course was greatly enriched with the Global Dialogues, mostly conversations with some of the leading lights of the Princeton History department, the discussion forums, and the precepts with students.  The textbook was excellent, although it was a lot of reading per week.

The homework:
While relatively straightforward, the homework questions, and for that matter the quizzes, were well thought out and unambiguously stated.  The essays forced me to crystallize my learning, and it was illuminating to both grade others' papers and to receive the grades myself.  The essays were generally of very high quality and good learning tools.  About 3-5% of the students wrote the essays, so I assume the ones who would produce the best essays self-selected to write them.

The technology:

I loved that the video was such high quality, that the navigation was intuitive, and that it just plain always worked.

Lectures 5: History of the World Since 1300

The 15th and 16th Centuries saw a stampede of Europeans rushing to create colonies in Asia.  And they arrived as bullies.  With superior firepower to all the countries in Asia, including powerful China, they overcame wherever they went.  China was able to defend their territory and relegate the Europeans  to the margins in China.  This was fine because they were primarily after trading bases anyway.

Portugal went out to an early lead in Asia.  Vasco de Gama led the charge by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid the Muslim blockade.  And a rapacious, brutal explorer he was, bombarding ports and butchering sailors.   Pires followed, arriving in China with a similar absence of respect.  There was retribution by the Chinese, who executed Pires and resolved to keep Europeans at the periphery of their country.  Nevertheless, through European military technology, Portugal took Goa (1510), Melaka (1511), Hormuz (1515) and Macao (1535).  This was a totally different pattern from the style of conquest in Mexico. The Portuguese did not create an institutional system in their outposts, and their success was ephemeral.

Meanwhile, Spain took Manila in 1571 and transformed it into an important port for trans-shipment of silver from the Americas to China, displacing Japanese silver.  Manila Galleons carried 15 tons of silver a year along this 'China Road'.

The Dutch also acquired territories in Asia, taking Java in 1519 and establishing their permanent headquarters base for the Dutch East India Company.  But they went beyond just trading, and established plantations to grow nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and cloves.

After their initial success, Europeans faced some setbacks.  They had a growing need for profits to fund the religious wars in Europe.  Yet their fierce rivalry with each other was driving up the costs of maintaining and fortifying these Asian outposts.  Meanwhile, profits were dropping as the Arabs fought back by reopening the Red Sea Ports, and flooding the market with pepper and reducing its price.

Coursera and Peer Evaluation

Readers of this blog know how enthusiastic I am about taking a course on world history on Coursera.  I've loved learning the history, and the experience has provoked many thoughts about the future of education (see this post).  Education is undergoing the process of disruptive innovation, and it's about to explode.

I've just discovered a TED talk by Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera from TED Global this summer.  It outlines some of the motivations of the founders of Coursera and talks more about data on the efficacy of online teaching.

She quoted Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times:

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. 

How true that is.

MOOCs (massive online open courses) in the social sciences must figure out a way to include written work as part of the course.  For a class of more 80,000 students, like The History of the World Since 1300,  what is desperately necessary - evaluation of those essays - meets what is suddenly possible - mass technology-enabled anonymous peer evaluation.

But can peer evaluation be effective and fair?  Koller showed some fascinating data on peer evaluation (which she acknowledged was based on relatively small samples).  Here's her chart of the very high correlation between peer grades and the grade a teacher would offer.

Even more surprising was the chart showing that self-evaluation correlated even more highly with the teacher grade (given some software that prohibited perfect scores).

I'm eager to see what my peers think of my first essay handed in a few days ago.  Coursera also asks students to self-evaluate their essays.  Coursera is so cleverly designed that I'm sure this data will all be collected and form the basis of future publications on the effectiveness of peer evaluation.  It is truly a new age!

History of the World Since 1300

The first lecture of History of the World Since 1300 was wonderful.  The course promised a world view of history, and it's already showing in the readings and the lecture.

I was impressed with the perfect technology.  I started to view the first lecture shortly after 6 pm when it first became available, and it was great - no problem with buffering on the beautiful high definition video.  The first lecture was divided into five segments, with a quiz question after each segment.  You can download the video in MP4 format, and there is a text version of the lectures as well (called subtitles, but really just a separate written text).

The first lecture focused on the growth in trade as the driver of linkages around the world.  In the back story about earlier times, Professor Adelman talked about early trade between the countryside and villages, which allowed the villages to grow because of the agricultural produce from the rural areas. As people become able to produce more than required just for survival, 'luxury' items  start to move great distances along overland trade routes like the Silk Route.  Such trade is driven by products with a high value to bulk ratio.  Camels can't carry all that much and so you want to ship light, valuable goods like spices, cinnamon and pepper.  The emergence of maritime trade routes, enabled through improved maritime technology like bigger ships, the compass and charts, meant that heavier goods like teak, ivory, sugar, earthenware, lead and glass could flow along the trade routes.  

We see the beginning of the great entrepot centres like Aleppo (in the news about Syria lately) and Samarkand (in today's Uzbekistan) that served the overland routes and the maritime entrepots of Calicut (Kozhikode in Kerala in Southern India), Melaka (in present-day Malaysia), Aden (in present-day Yemen) and Venice.  In all cases, it's Arab merchants who dominate trade, using close, trusted family connections to carry out trade, and they become the first money lenders to facilitate trade.

The lecture and the readings brings together the spread of religion and the interlinking of the world.  Buddhism spread along trade routes, and in turn facilitated trade by developing bonds between people.  From the above mention of maritime technology, Adelman foreshadows future world trends caused by technology changes.  He had already spoken of China's strength and power largely driven by their harnessing of water through irrigation, dams, land reclamation and sewage handling.  But a key theme has been the development of wealth and the trading of wealth driving world development.  Indeed, Adelman's first introduction pointed to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations:  Smith argued that wealth was an engine of social interaction, and clearly Adelman subscribes to this notion.

Adelman ended with a segment on Genghis Khan.  Did you know that in 25 years the Mongols conquered an area larger than the Romans conquered in 400 years?  The Mongols came from the Northern Asian plains, with little opportunity to develop beyond subsistence level.  With so few resources of their own, their approach to developing wealth was to plunder it through conquest.  They travelled light and conquered quickly, depending on surprise, terror and their superior horse-based warfare for victory.  They wiped out the rulers in conquered areas and replaced them with Mongol rulers (often sons of Genghis Khan), they left the common people in place and living much as usual.  They needed these people in place to provide the goods for their support.  You can't plunder much from a society that isn't producing any more.  Trade flourished under the Mongols, bringing lemons and carrots from Persia to China and noodles and playing cards to Europe.  But there were exchanges beyond goods.  German miners found their way to China to improve mining practices there and Chinese doctors found their way to Persia.

Past  related blog posts:

• discussion of Coursera as a disruption innovation in eduction here
• post on the way the course will run - a fascinating view of the advantages of an online course here
• talking of The Wealth of Nations, I reported on a fascinating chart article from The Economist, on the first effort to actually measure the wealth of nations, as opposed to their income which is captured in GDP

History of the World Since 1300

In a previous post I described signing up for a course at Coursera and why I think MOOCs (massive open online course) are going to revolutionize education.  The first lectures will be posted next Sunday and today I received a message from Professor Adelman about how the course will be organized and what will be expected of me - and 70,000 other students!!!  If I want to take this seriously, it's going to be lots of work.

Here's what is on offer and what's expected of me:

Lectures

•  There are two 1-hour lectures a week.  These will be posted on Sunday night.  Each lecture will be available until the end of the course.  The lectures will be interpolated with quizzes that test assimilation of facts and also demand analysis.
• There was an earlier statement that there would be a progress metric - I'm assuming there will be an automated way of ascertaining if I actually watched the lectures and answered these quizzes.

Textbook

• The text Worlds Together, Worlds Apart has 11 chapters, and one chapter will be assigned each week, with one chapter spanning two weeks.  I've been sporadically reading this book for a couple of weeks now, and have completed a 'prequel' chapter and am most of the way through the first chapter.  Time to step up the pace.
• When I was shopping for the text in August, there was no e-book version, the hardcover cost $120 in Canada, $80+ in the US and there was a loose leaf version for $60+ in the US.  I opted for the loose leaf version, based on cost and the convenience of carrying around a smaller weight. Today, the book was ranked #203 on Amazon in the US and the text is out of stock in Canada.  We can certainly see one motivation for Adelman to do this course, as he's a co-author of the book.
• It's a long time since I read a text book.  This doesn't look anything like a text I might have had 'back in the day'.  Glossy pages, oodles of maps, text boxes of interesting excerpts from letters and diaries of the period, guiding questions for chapters and sections.  It feels a bit spoon-fed compared to my educational past, but very nice indeed.

Assignments

• There will be assignments every two weeks, six in all.  Students will have a choice of three different essay questions on which to write a 650-word essay.
• For a good essay, you must have strong evidence, a compelling argument and clear exposition.  Each student will be asked to evaluate five essays, assigning a score of 1 to 3 on each of evidence, argument and exposition.  When I heard there were assignments, I assumed we'd have to mark each others'.  There's a nice guideline to writing and evaluating essays.  I like the simplicity of the evaluation approach.  There's also a field for putting in comments.  I expect to learn a lot from reading other students' essays, as well as their feedback on mine.

Global Dialogues

• Each week there will be a live discussion between Princeton on-campus students and visiting professors.  Adelman will choose from questions submitted by on-line students to pose during the dialogue.  The discussions will be recorded and made available on the site.

Discussion Forums

• Students are invited to join in discussion forums.  Up-votes for the most useful posts will help students sift through the vast material.  Already, there are lots of posts there.  The first one I read provided links to the BBC radio series on the history of the world through 100 objects from the British Museum.  I hope they're all as relevant as that one.  Adelman responded to that one, so I expect we'll see him from time to time on the discussion forums.

Technology

• The site has an introductory video by Adelman, describing roughly what I've described above (and what's available in writing on the site).  I was happy to see him self-identify as a Canadian right off the top.  (Readers of this blog will know I'm Canadian myself).  The video was gorgeous high definition and the sound was perfect.  Really impressive.
• Hosting a course like this with so many students - did I mention 70,000 were registered? - is challenging.  There were a couple of moments today when I noticed the site was unavailable, and I suppose there will be a few more glitches before all is said and done. (added note:  there was a message from Coursera today saying that their domain name server Godaddy was down for a few hours yesterday but that Coursera had just switched to Amazon for domain name services and were now back up.  It would be fascinating to know just which off-the-shelf services Coursera is using to lick the technology challenge.)  But the experience so far is marvellous: nice organization, good navigation, intuitive and clear, and high quality.  It's great that such a great shared platform will be shared, not only by the students in this course, but the many other courses being offered.

I'm excited about the start of the course next week, and also filled with a bit of trepidation.  I'll keep posting on the subject.

Revolution in Education

Adelman and the ivied walls of Princeton

When my daughter attended Princeton, I was filled with immense pride and a dollop of envy.  The pedagogical experience was awesome - the small classes and individual attention from world class faculty showed the wisdom of her decision to eschew Harvard in favour of Princeton.  


Now I've just registered to take A History of the World Since 1300 from Princeton professor Jeremy Adelman, starting this September.  How, you might ask, is this woman in Toronto taking a course at Princeton?  Coursera is the answer.  Coursera offers online courses from 17 of the world's top universities, free. I certainly won't get the individualized learning experience of an undergrad at Princeton, but I will learn from one of their top faculty.


And that's not all:  I also registered for Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship taught by Bob Barnes and Marilyn Lombardi of Duke, and Critical Thinking in Global Challenges by Celine Caquineau and Mayank Dutia of University of Edinburgh.  The breadth of choice, even at this early stage, is amazing.  To peruse the courses on offer at Coursera is to be a kid in a candy store.

There is one downside - in Adelman's email to me confirming registration, he already handed out pre-reading.  

Thank you for your interest in global history.  This is a course I have taught for many years, and I never cease to find it a source of excitement.  We will be in touch with more details when the class starts.  But in the meantime, you should feel free to start reading the recommended textbook, Worlds Together, World Apart (3rd edition), Volume 2.

Hmm, some things are the same about online education.

This course will run for 24 lectures of 50 minutes each, with regular assignments of map tests and short essays.  The lectures are expected to take two hours, including the embedded assignments, plus two hours for writing and three hours for reading each week.  

In 1997, Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his book The Innovator's Dilemma (named one of the six best business books of all time by The Economist) and Coursera is disruptive innovation at its finest - a product that is "not as good as" that offered at traditional institutions.  At least not by traditional standards.  You can forget the ivy-clad walls, the chance to talk to the prof in person after class, parties, football games, and most importantly, that certificate on the wall saying you're a Princeton grad.  However, it's vastly more convenient and accessible for people who would not otherwise be able to attend university, let alone storied Princeton.  Many advocates argue that, for many topics, online learning is actually better, because of the frequent progress testing, and the ability to proceed at an individualized pace.   And did I mention it's free?  That's what disruptive innovation is all about, less good on traditional attributes, but 'disrupting' an industry through the introduction of some new attribute that overturns our whole view of the industry, in this case the opportunity to take a Princeton course while staying at home in Toronto, doing it on my own time, and doing it for free. 


A typical reaction of people vested in an industry threatened by disruption is to treat the disruptor with disdain.   It's no different in education.   I've met people who sneer at a degree from University of Phoenix, a pioneer in online education and the largest university in the US, and liken it to a mail-order degree.  And an MBA from Athabaska?  Pshaw.  It doesn't hold a candle to an MBA from one of Canada's prestigious programs.  


However, disruptive innovations undergo continuous improvement over time, and ultimately challenge the leading incumbents.  Just look at the universities involved in Coursera, and it's hard to justify disdain: University of California (Berkley and San Francisco), California Institute of Technology, Duke, Ecole Polytechnique National de Lausanne, University of Edinburgh, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, John Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, University of Michigan, University of Washington.  Then, there's edX, started by Harvard and MIT and recently joined by University of California at Berkeley, offering mostly courses in Computer Science.  Clearly, the big names are jockeying for position in this new arena.  

The limitations of online education are sure to be diminished over time.  New generations find online social media as satisfying as real-life interactions and they may not miss university social life quite as much as the older generation expects them to.  For this history course, Princeton is not offering an official credit, but will provide, with my approval, data documenting my progress and performance.  This is definitely inferior to a course credit or degree from Princeton, for students or potential employers. 


However, it doesn't take much imagination to envision testing centres, similar to those for SAT tests, to enable those taking courses online to get official credits for the courses they take.  How will an employer respond to an applicant who has a full load of course credits, spread over 8 world-class universities, but no degree from a single one of them?  It unbundles the idea of a 'degree' as we've known it.   


Will students get very picky about where they take course and from whom?  Think of a student given the choice between taking a course from a local university, potentially from an unseasoned or just plain weak professor, or taking the same material from a renowned professor who's earned a global reputation for this course?  As a adjunct professor in a couple of MBA programs myself, I can certainly understand the threat of this competitive breeze down my neck.  Teaching faculty could be disrupted as much as the institutions themselves. 


Coursera's founders are from Stanford and they are funded by two Silicon Valley venture capitalists.  It's not been stated what the eventual business model will be - is the initial free offering to be superseded by fee-based courses once the concept is established?  Stanford Department of Engineering was a pioneer in online courses online: a graduate course in Artificial Intelligence last year attracted a remarkable 160,000 students from 190 countries.  


Of course, it's not an either/or decision.  Online courses are already popular with 'regular' college students.   As reported in the Sloan Consortium 2011 report, almost one third of students at college in the US are taking an online course.  Online education can also be a supplement to traditional education.  Perhaps the greatest success story of online education is the Kahn Academy.  Started 'accidentally' by Salman Kahn who was tutoring some cousins at a distance through online lectures - no fancy technology, just a YouTube video of Kahn with his engaging manner and the equivalent of a black board for notes.  Those first efforts have led to a site with over 3,000 videos and millions of views (see Kahn's TED talk for more information about some of the revolutionary techniques being used in K-12 curricula).  


As education costs continue to spiral upward, the cost effectiveness of online education will become even more important - consider that one Stanford prof teaching 160,000 students!  It could also lead to the unbundling of university degrees, the enhancement of the brands and success of the top universities and the erosion of second-rate institutions, the need for much fewer teaching faculty - in short a revolution in education.  It's happened in many other industries.  There's no reason education would be exempt.


Education is in for a revolution.  I'm excited to be a small part of this revolution as a student of my first online course.