Several online education platforms that provide free course content from a host of partner universities, including Stanford, Harvard and Princeton, have exploded in global popularity over the past year. Even with its own long-established programs, Yale has refrained thus far from joining those new ventures.

Now, administrators plan to reexamine how the University approaches online course offerings. On Friday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller announced the formation of a committee on online education in an email to faculty members. Committee members will consider the future of Yales online courses by analyzing national trends and collecting feedback on the Universitys current offerings: Open Yale Courses and Yale Summer Session Online.

Given what is happening around the country, I hope that the committee can explore whether there are ways to continue to expand the number of students around the country and the world who could benefit from the outstanding teaching of Yale faculty without diminishing the experience for our matriculated Yale College students or diverting the efforts of the faculty, Miller wrote in the Friday email.

Psychology professor and committee co-chair Paul Bloom said he hopes its members, who met for the first time on Friday afternoon, can submit recommendations to Miller by the end of 2012. Music professor Craig Wright, Blooms fellow co-chair, said the committee will discuss a variety of new options for digital education at Yale, including partnerships with existing online education platforms and an expansion of online for-credit courses to the academic year.

Outgoing University President Richard Levin told the News in August that online education policy will be one of the biggest challenges faced by his successor. In advance of that transition, the new committee will attempt to determine what direction Yale will take moving forward.

Online teaching is getting very big and important, Bloom said. [The future of online education at Yale] is a hard problem and the answer is not obvious. We are considering everything we can consider.

NEW PLATFORMS EMERGE

One online education hub that has garnered significant media attention is Coursera, an interactive online education platform that offers free massive online open courses (MOOCs) from many universities and reached 1.3 million globally since launching six months ago. Coursera, which was named one of Time Magazines Best 50 Websites in 2012, announced last Wednesday an expansion from 16 international partner institutions to 33, including Brown, Columbia, Penn and Princeton.

Daphne Koller, Coursera co-founder and a computer science professor at Stanford, said the increasing demand for higher education worldwide and the sites ability to share technology among universities will help the start-up to keep growing. She said Courseras model provides benefits not possible through Yales individual school format, including the opportunity to collaborate with other universities about course content and technological advances in digital education.

We are at a point where the technology is really right and mature enough that we can provide a high quality education through an electronic medium, Koller explained. Universities gain a tremendous amount from the ability to interact with peer institutions in a changing [online space].

Read the rest here:
Yale reexamines role in online education