Online class program draws mixed reactions

Posted: September 17, 2012 at 6:15 am


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Brown community members expressed a mixture of excitement and wariness in response to the Universitys announcement that it will commence two online education pilot projects next year. Many lauded the decision, first announced Sept. 5 in an email from Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, as an appropriate modernization and expansion of access to higher education, but some voiced concern that the courses could represent shoddy imitations of the classroom experience.

Next summer, the University will offer a few for-credit courses online only for Brown summer session students. The University will also join the online course platform Coursera, which offers free, not-for-credit classes to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.

I think its very much in line with the kind of philosophy that we had with the New Curriculum and that Brown has sort of been a leader in, said Ira Magaziner 69 P06 P07 P10, an architect of the Universitys distinctive curriculum. Expanding access would, he added, put more educational control in the hands of students. Professor of Comparative Literature Arnold Weinstein, whose class COLT 1420T: The Fiction of Relationship will be one of the first three Brown classes offered on Coursera, considered the development in the context of the broader timeline of higher education, noting that in medieval universities, only professors were allowed access to libraries and books.

This is part of that same trajectory or story of increasingly empowered students, Weinstein said.

The instantaneous public relations boost that accompanies a Coursera partnership will benefit the University, said Provost Mark Schlissel P15. We can use the Coursera platform to, in effect, advertise the quality of Browns educational efforts to the broader world, he said. So were not thinking of Coursera as eventually becoming part of a Brown students education. Were thinking of it as a way to show the broader world what a Brown education is like. Others worried the resources necessary for such an endeavor would distract from the Universitys mission of serving students on campus.

I think it does distract away from those faculty members core involvement, if you will, with the curriculum at hand and with the students at hand, said Stephen Nelson, higher education expert and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown. Theres no free lunch.

Not-for-credit courses To make time for Coursera preparations, each of the three involved faculty members will teach one fewer in-person class at Brown this year, though Schlissel said the University is providing each affected department with additional funding to compensate for the lost course. Weinstein said he would retire teaching The Fiction of Relationship after teaching it online.

But Professor of Computer Science Philip Klein, who will be transferring CSCI 0530: Directions: The Matrix in Computer Science to Coursera, said working with so many students on an online platform would help him identify teaching areas that require improvement more easily than if he were in a Brown classroom.

We have a chance to collect data at a much greater scale than ever before, and thats going to have a big impact on education, Klein said. Thats a really important thing for people to realize that Brown education will be improved as a consequence of this. But not everyone is convinced that the education through Coursera will measure up to Brown standards. Iman Jenkins 14 said she is worried about the loss of the student-teacher relationship in in-person lectures. Critics outside the University have previously raised concerns about Courseras system of peer-grading and about the platforms retention rate in many courses, fewer than half the students who sign up actually complete the class.

The Universitys decision to try out Coursera via a pilot program offers Brown the flexibility of investigating different methods of instruction, Bergeron told The Herald.

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Online class program draws mixed reactions

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September 17th, 2012 at 6:15 am

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