From Time Magazine, Thursday, October 18, 2012. See
College Is Dead. Long Live College!
By Amanda Ripley
On Sept. 17, the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube. The
purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was
inciting protests around the world.
One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215
people in Pakistan suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online
physics course. The free college-level class, created by a Silicon
Valley start-up called Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube
videos embedded on its website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had
enrolled, including Khadijah Niazi, a pigtailed 11-year-old in Lahore.
She was on question six of the final exam when she encountered a curt
message saying "this site is unavailable."
SIDEBAR: Can Online Mega Courses Change Education?
Niazi was devastated. She'd worked hard to master this physics class
before her 12th birthday, just one week away. Now what? Niazi posted a
lament on the class discussion board: "I am very angry, but I will
In every country, education changes so slowly that it can be hard to
detect progress. But what happened next was truly different. Within an
hour, Maziar Kosarifar, a young man taking the class in Malaysia,
began posting detailed descriptions for Niazi of the test questions in
each video. Rosa Brigída, a novice physics professor taking the
class from Portugal, tried to create a workaround so Niazi could
bypass YouTube; it didn't work. From England, William, 12, promised
to help and warned Niazi not to write anything too negative about her
None of these students had met one another in person. The class
directory included people from 125 countries. But after weeks in the
class, helping one another with Newton's laws, friction and simple
harmonic motion, they'd started to feel as if they shared the same
carrel in the library. Together, they'd found a passageway into a
rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren't about to let
anyone lock it up.
By late that night, the Portuguese professor had successfully
downloaded all the videos and then uploaded them to an uncensored
photo-sharing site. It took her four hours, but it worked. The next
day, Niazi passed the final exam with the highest distinction.
"Yayyyyyyy," she wrote in a new post. (Actually, she used 43 y's,
but you get the idea.) She was the youngest girl ever to complete
Udacity's Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average
That same day, Niazi signed up for Computer Science 101 along with her
twin brother Muhammad. In England, William began downloading the
videos for them.
High-End Learning on the Cheap
The hype about online learning is older than Niazi. In the late 1990s,
Cisco CEO John Chambers predicted that "education over the Internet
is going to be so big, it is going to make e-mail usage look like a
rounding error." There was just one problem: online classes were
not, generally speaking, very good. To this day, most are dry,
uninspired affairs, consisting of a patchwork of online readings,
written Q&As and low-budget lecture videos. Many students
nevertheless pay hundreds of dollars for these classes - 3 in 10
college students report taking at least one online course, up from 1
in 10 in 2003 - but afterward, most are no better off than they
would have been at their local community college.
Now, several forces have aligned to revive the hope that the
Internet (or rather, humans using the Internet from Lahore to Palo
Alto, Calif.) may finally disrupt higher education - not by simply
replacing the distribution method but by reinventing the actual
product. New technology, from cloud computing to social media, has
dramatically lowered the costs and increased the odds of creating a
decent online education platform. In the past year alone, start-ups
like Udacity, Coursera and edX - each with an elite-university
imprimatur - have put 219 college-level courses online, free of
charge. Many traditional colleges are offering classes and even entire
degree programs online. Demand for new skills has reached an all-time
high. People on every continent have realized that to thrive in the
modern economy, they need to be able to think, reason, code and
calculate at higher levels than before.
TABLE OF FREE MOOCs -- Ivy League for the
Masses. See and scoll down
At the same time, the country that led the world in higher
education is now leading its youngest generation into a deep hole.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans owe some
$914 billion in student loans; other estimates say the total tops $1
trillion. That's more than the nation's entire credit-card debt.
On average, a college degree still pays for itself (and then some)
over the course of a career. But about 40% of students at four-year
colleges do not manage to get that degree within six years.
Regardless, student loans have to be repaid; unlike other kinds of
debt, they generally cannot be shed in bankruptcy. The government can
withhold tax refunds and garnish paychecks until it gets its money
back - stifling young people's options and their spending
For all that debt, Americans are increasingly unsure about what
they are getting. Three semesters of college education have a
"barely noticeable" impact on critical thinking, complex reasoning
and writing skills, according to research published in the 2011 book
Academically Adrift. In a new poll sponsored by TIME and the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, 80% of the 1,000 U.S. adults surveyed said
that at many colleges, the education students receive is not worth
what they pay for it. And 41% of the 540 college presidents and senior
administrators surveyed agreed with them.
SIDEBAR: MORE: TIME/Carnegie's Higher Education Poll -
Arriving at this perilous intersection of high demand, uneven
supply and absurd prices are massive open online courses (endowed with
the unfortunate acronym MOOCs), which became respectable this year
thanks to investments from big-name brands like Harvard, Stanford and
MIT. Venture capitalists have taken a keen interest too, and the
business model is hard to resist: the physics class Niazi was taking
cost only about $2 per student to produce.
Already, the hyperventilating has outpaced reality; desperate
parents are praying that free online universities will finally pop the
tuition bubble - and nervous college officials don't want to miss
out on a potential gold rush. The signs of change are everywhere, and
so are the signs of panic. This spring, Harvard and MIT put $60
million into a nonprofit MOOC (rhymes with duke) venture called edX. A
month later, the president of the University of Virginia abruptly
stepped down - and was then quickly reinstated - after an anxious
board member read about other universities' MOOCs in the Wall
One way or another, it seems likely that more people will eventually
learn more for less money. Finally. The next question might be, Which
How the Brain Learns
This fall, to glimpse the future of higher education, I visited
classes in brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen
MOOCs. I dropped most of the latter because they were not very good.
Or rather, they would have been fine in person, nestled in a 19th
century hall at Princeton University, but online, they could not
compete with the other distractions on my computer.
I stuck with the one class that held my attention, the physics class
offered by Udacity. I don't particularly like physics, which is why
I'd managed to avoid studying it for the previous 38 years. What
surprised me was the way the class was taught. It was designed
according to how the brain actually learns. In other words, it had
almost nothing in common with most classes I'd taken before.
Minute 1: Physics 100 began with a whirling video montage
of Italy, slow-motion fountains and boys playing soccer on the beach.
It felt a little odd, like Rick Steves' Physics, but it was a huge
improvement over many other online classes I sampled, which started
with a poorly lit professor staring creepily into a camera.
When the Udacity professor appeared, he looked as if he were about 12;
in fact, he was all of 25. "I'm Andy Brown, the instructor for
this course, and here we are, on location in Siracusa, Italy!" He
had a crew cut and an undergraduate degree from MIT; he did not have a
Ph.D. or tenure, which would turn out to be to his advantage.
"This course is really designed for anyone In Unit 1,
we're going to begin with a question that fascinated the Greeks: How
big is our planet?" To answer this question, Brown had gone to the
birthplace of Archimedes, a mathematician who had tried to answer the
same question over 2,000 years ago.
Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. "What did
the Greeks know?" The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to
choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought.
This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to
check my e-mail or otherwise disengage - even for a minute.
"You got it right!" The satisfaction of correctly answering
these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it
"gold-star methadone.") The questions weren't easy, either. I got
many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the
SIDEBAR: GRAPHIC: Degrees of Difficulty - Tuition
keeps rising, but so does the need for more graduates -- See
Humans like immediate feedback, which is one reason we like
games. Researchers know a lot about how the brain learns, and it's
shocking how rarely that knowledge influences our education system.
Studies of physics classes in particular have shown that after
completing a traditional class, students can recite Newton's laws
and maybe even do some calculations, but they cannot apply the laws to
problems they haven't seen before. They've memorized the
information, but they haven't learned it - much to their teachers'
In a study published in the journal Science in 2011, a group of
researchers conducted an experiment on a large undergraduate physics
class at the University of British Columbia. For a week, one section
of the class received its normal lecture from a veteran, highly rated
professor; another section was taught by inexperienced graduate
students using strategies developed from research into human
cognition. Those strategies mirrored those in Udacity's class. The
students worked in small groups to solve problems with occasional
guidance from the instructor. They got frequent feedback. In the
experimental group with novice instructors, attendance increased 20%
and students did twice as well on an end-of-week test.
Minute 8: Professor Brown explained that Plato had also
tried (and failed) to estimate the earth's circumference. Brown did
this by jotting notes on a simple white screen. Like all the other
videos in the course, this clip lasted only a few minutes. This too
reflects how the brain learns. Studies of college students have shown
that they can focus for only 10 to 18 minutes before their minds begin
to drift; that's when their brains need to do something with new
information - make a connection or use it to solve a problem.
At this point in the Udacity class, three video clips into the
experience, about 15,000 students were still paying attention,
according to the company's metrics. But that's actually high for a
MOOC. (Since it requires little effort and no cost to enroll, lots of
people dip in and out of these classes out of curiosity. Only 1 in 10
of those enrolled in a Udacity class typically makes it all the way to
a course's last video.) Like most other online classes, it was
asynchronous, so I could rewind or leave and come back whenever I
wanted. This also accords with how the brain works: humans like
autonomy. If they learn best late at night, they like to learn at
night, on their own terms.
Minute 57: After 47 fast-paced videos spliced with pop
quizzes, I did actually know how big the earth was. Brown had reviewed
geometry and trigonometry with examples from actual life. And when it
came time to put it all together, I got to see him measure a shadow
that formed a right triangle, setting up a mathematical proportion to
calculate the circumference of the earth, just like an ancient
"Congratulations!" he said. "This is really incredible, what you
can do now." Then he asked the class to send in videos of themselves
measuring shadows. I was skeptical. Would people actually do this?
Yes, they would. The first video was from a young woman in Tampere,
Finland - a drummer who wanted to change her career. There she was,
with yellow dreadlocks, measuring a shadow in a parking lot. Another
woman submitted photos of herself completing the experiment in Texas,
plus a poem. A poem! "We solve for C, and long at last/ stalk a
route into our own past."
The Finn cheered. "Super artistic!" Brown showed the poem around
the Udacity office. One student did the experiment at 0 degrees
latitude in Ecuador. Many more people posted questions; within
minutes, they got detailed, helpful answers from other students. It
was as if a whole pop-up learning community had materialized
overnight, and it was strangely alive.
Turning Down Professors
When he was a tenured professor at Stanford, Sebastian Thrun, the CEO
and co-founder of Udacity, did not teach according to how the brain
learns. He is not proud of this fact. "I followed established
wisdom," he says. His students, who were used to traditional
lectures, gave him high marks on his course evaluations. They didn't
know what they were missing.
In 2011 Thrun and fellow professor Peter Norvig decided to put
their Artificial Intelligence class online. But when they sampled
other online courses, they realized that most of them were mediocre.
To captivate students from afar, they would need to do something
different. So they started planning lessons that would put the student
at the center of everything. They created a series of problems for
students to solve so that they had to learn by doing, not by
By last fall, 160,000 people had enrolled. But the class was not
particularly inspiring - at first. One student complained that the
software allowed students to try each problem only once. "I
realized, 'Wow, I'm setting students up for failure in my
obsession to grade them,' " says Thrun. So he changed the software
to let students try and try until they got it right. He also paid
attention to the data, and he had a lot of it. When tens of thousands
of students all got the same quiz problem wrong, he realized that the
question was not clear, and he changed it. And the students themselves
transformed other parts of the class, building online playgrounds to
practice what they were learning and even translating the class into
Meanwhile, Thrun had told his Stanford students they could take
the class online if they didn't want to attend lectures. More than
three-quarters of them did so, viewing the videos from their dorms and
participating as if they were thousands of miles away. Then something
remarkable happened. On the midterm, the Stanford students scored a
full letter grade higher on average than students had in previous
years. They seemed to be learning more when they learned online. The
same bump happened after they took the final.
SIDEBAR: MORE: Reinventing College --
Still, the Stanford students were not the stars of the class. At the
end of the semester, not one of the course's 400 top performers had
a Stanford address.
The experience forced Thrun to rethink everything he knew about
teaching, and he built Udacity upon this reordering of the universe.
Unlike Coursera, another for-profit MOOC provider - which has
partnered with dozens of schools, including Stanford, Princeton and,
more recently, the University of Virginia - Udacity selects, trains
and films the professors who teach its courses. Since it launched in
January, Udacity has turned down about 500 professors who have
volunteered to teach, and it has canceled one course (a math class
that had already enrolled 20,000 students) because of subpar
Right now, most MOOC providers do not make a profit. That can't
continue forever. Udacity will probably charge for its classes one
day, Thrun says, but he claims the price will stay very low; if not,
he predicts, a competitor will come along and steal away his
Udacity does not offer a degree, since it's not an accredited
university. Students get a ceremonial certificate in the form of a
PDF. Grades are based on the final exam. Students who choose to take
the final for Udacity's computer-science course at an independent
testing center (for $89) can get transfer credits from Colorado State
University-Global Campus, an online-only school.
Getting more colleges to accept transfer credits would be nice, but in
the longer term, Udacity aims to cut out the middleman and go straight
to employers. This week, Udacity announced that six companies,
including Google and Microsoft, are sponsoring classes in skills that
are in short supply, from programming 3-D graphics to building apps
for Android phones.
Meanwhile, about 3,000 students have signed up for Udacity's
employer-connection program, allowing their CVs to be shared with 350
companies. Employers pay Udacity a fee for any hires made through this
service. So far, about 20 students have found work partly through
Udacity's help, Thrun says. Tamir Duberstein, 24, who studied
mechanical engineering in Ontario, recently got two job offers after
completing six Udacity courses. He took one of the offers and now
works at a software company in San Francisco.
Still, it will be a long time before companies besides high-tech
start-ups trust anything other than a traditional degree. That's why
hundreds of thousands of people a year enroll in the University of
Phoenix, which most students attend online. Says University of Phoenix
spokesman Ryan Rauzon: "They need a degree, and that isn't going
to change anytime soon."
MOOCs vs. the College Campus
To compare my online experience with a traditional class, I
dropped into a physics course at Georgetown University, the opposite
of a MOOC. Georgetown admitted only 17% of applicants last fall and,
with annual tuition of $42,360, charges the equivalent of about $4,200
The university's large lecture course for introductory physics
accommodates 150 to 200 students, who receive a relatively traditional
classroom experience - which is to say, one not designed according
to how the brain learns. The professor, who is new to the course,
declined to let me visit.
But Georgetown did allow me to observe Physics 151, an
introductory class for science majors, and I soon understood why. This
class was impressively nontraditional. Three times a week, the
professor delivered a lecture, but she paused every 15 minutes to ask
a question, which her 34 students contemplated, discussed and then
answered using handheld clickers that let her assess their
understanding. There was a weekly lab - an important component
missing from the Udacity class. The students also met once a week with
a teaching assistant who gave them problems designed to trip them up
and had them work in small groups to grapple with the concepts.
The class felt like a luxury car: exquisitely wrought and
expensive. Fittingly, it met in a brand-new, state-of-the-art $100
million science center that included 12 teaching labs, six student
lounges and a café. It was like going to a science spa.
Elite universities like Georgetown are unlikely to go away in the near
future, as even Udacity's co-founder (and Stanford alum) David
Stavens concedes. "I think the top 50 schools are probably safe,"
he says. "There's a magic that goes on inside a university campus
that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is
Where does that leave the rest of the country's 4,400
degree-granting colleges? After all, only a fifth of freshmen actually
live on a residential campus. Nearly half attend community colleges.
Many never experience dorm life, let alone science spas. To return to
reality, I visited the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) -
a school that, like many other colleges, is not ranked by U.S. News &
When I arrived at the UDC life-sciences building, I met Professor
Daryao Khatri, who has been teaching for 37 years and yet seemed
genuinely excited to get to his first day of class in a new
"They hate physics," he said about his students, smiling. "You
will see. They are terrified." He led me to his classroom, a lab
with fluorescent lights and a dull yellow linoleum floor. His 20
students were mostly young adults with day jobs, which is why they
were going to school at night. Many hoped to go to medical school one
day, and they needed to take physics to get there.
Khatri started the class by asking the students to introduce
themselves. "I took physics in high school," said one woman, a
biology major, "and it was the hardest class I ever had."
"I'm about to change that!" Khatri shouted. Another young woman
said, "I took calculus online, and it was just awful." It felt
more like a support group than a college course. Then Khatri detailed
his rules for the class. "Please turn the cell phones off," he
said in a friendly voice. "Not on vibrate. I will know. I will take
it away. Cell phones are a big disaster for the science
Khatri had less than one-half of 1% of the students that Professor
Brown had on Udacity, but he was helping them with many skills beyond
physics. He was cultivating discipline and focus, rebuilding
confidence and nurturing motivation. "Please complain if you
aren't learning," he said more than once.
After a full hour of introductions and expectations, Khatri
started reviewing geometry and trigonometry so that the students would
have enough basic math to begin. He did this in far more detail than
Brown had on Udacity, and it was clear from their questions that many
of the students needed this help. As with most other Americans, their
math and science background was spotty, with big holes in important
places. For the next hour, Khatri called on every student to answer
questions and solve problems; just as on Udacity, they couldn't zone
out for long.
Three weeks later, I returned to Khatri's class. He was about a
week behind the Udacity pace, and his quizzes were easier. But not a
single student had dropped his class. And when I asked a group of
students if they would ever take this class online, they answered in
unison: "No way."
At this stage, most MOOCs work well for students who are
self-motivated and already fairly well educated. Worldwide, the
poorest students still don't have the background (or the Internet
bandwidth) to participate in a major way. Thrun and his MOOC
competitors may be setting out to democratize education, but it
isn't going to happen tomorrow.
What is going to happen tomorrow? It seems likely that very selective
- and very unselective - colleges will continue to thrive. At
their best (and I was only allowed to witness their best, it's worth
noting), Georgetown and UDC serve a purpose in a way that cannot
easily be replicated online. The colleges in the middle, though -
especially the for-profit ones that are expensive but not particularly
prestigious - will need to work harder to justify their costs.
Ideally, Udacity and other MOOC providers will help strip away all the
distractions of higher education - the brand, the price and the
facilities - and remind all of us that education is about learning.
In addition to putting downward pressure on student costs, it would be
nice if MOOCs put upward pressure on teaching quality.
By mid-October, YouTube remained dark in Pakistan, and the power
blinked out for about four hours a day at Niazi's home in Lahore.
But she had made it halfway through Computer Science 101 anyway, with
help from her classmates.
Niazi loved MOOCs more than her own school, and she wished she could
spend all day learning from Andy Brown. But when I asked her if she
would get her degree from Udacity University, if such a thing were
possible, she demurred. She had a dream, and it was made of bricks.
"I would still want to go to Oxford or Stanford," she said. "I
would love to really meet my teachers in person and learn with the
whole class and make friends-instead of being there in
Ripley, a TIME contributing writer, is an Emerson
Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she is writing a book
about education around the world
Jerry P. Becker
Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
625 Wham Drive
Mail Code 4610
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610
Phone: (618) 453-4241 [O]
(618) 457-8903 [H]
Fax: (618) 453-4244