For the first time, state legislators in the United States may require their public universities to grant students credit for online courses given by outside providers.

A bill introduced in the California Senate would extend this concession only when a required class is full and not offered online at the college. The legislation, which is expected to be adopted in some form, has been hailed nationally as a leap for massive open online courses MOOCs, for short.

Advocates pitch MOOCs as classes for the masses, enabling a resident of, say, the Gobi Desert to study nuclear physics. Those who oppose the spread of such an idealistic movement are dismissed as Luddites who wish to restrict higher education to a privileged few. But if altruism is the driver, why were two major purveyors of MOOCs, Coursera Inc. and Udacity Inc., established as for-profit companies? (A third new venture, edX, is a not-for-profit consortium.)

One cant blame public officials for looking for cheaper modes of instruction. The ventures can also generate revenue for colleges that market their content to the online vendors.

But the U.S. university system is a national crown jewel, one of few remaining advantages we have over our economic competitors. We should carefully consider the quality of the MOOCs before eviscerating this sector for some shortsighted gain. Rather than giving more young Americans a quicker path to a college degree, we might end up dumbing down the value of that piece of paper.

Even a cursory look at typical Web-based courses shows them to be just that cursory. They tend to teach mere outlines of the subject, lacking the thought-provoking nature of a curriculum delivered in person. In exams, MOOCs often replace probing essays or mathematical analysis with simple multiple-choice questions.

In fairness, the MOOC companies offer a number of interesting specialty courses, valuable for nonstudents wishing to acquire an overview of the subject matter. Yet caution is required as MOOC leaders seek full university credit for many of their courses.

Consider the University of Pennsylvania calculus course offered through Coursera, one of the first MOOCs approved for college credit by the American Council on Education. The material is attractively presented, but there is a total of only 15 hours of lecture for the entire course compared with about 45 hours for the regular Penn calculus course. Are the MOOC advocates really claiming the same quality is achieved? And though the homework problems are good, there are far fewer of them than in a traditional class.

Also disturbing are the grade distributions in the Penn MOOC calculus exams: Instead of the usual bell-shaped curve, the grades are skewed far to the right, with the most common scores being perfect or almost so. Although Coursera might interpret this as validating the effectiveness of the MOOC approach, the more likely explanation is that it reflects the lighter demands placed on the students.

Some proponents of online instruction have claimed that it could act as a leveler for the poor, whose high schools have few or no Advanced Placement courses. This may ease liberal guilt, but its a cruel hoax. Lacking the academic street smarts of the more privileged students, disadvantaged young people need the face-to-face educational experience even more. For this population, the chances of passing the Advanced Placement calculus exam based on a MOOC are probably very slim.

The rest is here:
Online education : college lite by the byte