It is amazing the increasing number of students enrolling for free online university courses in Kenya. Just recently, I met a group of flamboyant students at Kenyatta University studying a course offered by Johns Hopkins University on coursera (Coursera is one of the biggest free online learning platforms). One of the students told me that it’s the easiest way of getting a certificate even if you are not onsite in the collage.
Distance education is not a new concept in this era, but it’s not easy to escape its influence around the world. Since the launching of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in 2011 by two Silicon Valley start-ups to offer free online education, the traditional education structure has been turned on its head.
Soon after the launch of Coursera, over 160,000 students from every corner of the world signed up for the courses but only 23,000 got certificates of completion.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and many others have asked why one should pay thousands of dollars for degrees when they can earn the same from professors at Harvard and Oxford for free online.
Others have even argued that nothing moves fast in Higher Education than MOOCs. Coursera is barely 2 years old and yet it has over 500 courses with over 4 million students enrolling and hundreds of universities partnering.
MOOCs are not just online video lectures that one downloads at the click of a button. One has to sign up for the course, wait for some time for the course to start, and keep up with its demands on a weekly basis, along with millions of students.
A good example is where the MOOC software stops at the middle of the course and asks several questions and quizzes. For those who are very committed, the course includes tens of homework, discussions and tests. There have also been concerns of high dropout, and most people, including yours truly, enroll for fun and for the experience.
Either out of fear or to adapt, brick and mortar universities have massively put their courses online for students to sign up and study for free. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford and many elite universities are now offering their courses online for free.
Edx, which has millions of students already studying, is a collaboration project between Harvard and MIT while Coursera was started by a Stanford Professor.
Kenyan universities are yet to adapt this model of offering free courses. This, of course, begs the question, are we being left behind? Or have our universities become bottom-line oriented, seeking profit as opposed to being sources of knowledge?
A recent headline reported that it’s the end of university as we know it. The feature predicts that roughly half of 4,500 colleges in the US will close down within the next 50 years while Ivy league universities like Harvard will more than double their student population.
Until now, not so many schools are willing to give credit to MOOCs. But the big question about MOOCs is whether they will actually replace costly collage degrees.
Several universities in Austria and Germany have started offering credit for the courses studied on selected companies offering MOOCs. This kind of development is fundamentally imperative because the MOOCs will remain totally free and they will be given the same credit as a paying course at the participating universities.
MOOCs are providing an enticing alternative to students who are crushing under student debt. In the US alone, the state is owed $1 trillion in student loans while Kenyan students (current and former) owe the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) Sh8.4 billion.
Writing in the Chronicles of Higher Education in 2012, Professor David Youngberg said online education won’t replace collage education. Two years later, he accepted that “indeed online education is a revolutionary that is going to hit collages very hard and the earlier they learn the reality, the better”.
Dan Kyalo Muithi, Naftali Mengich, Benedict Makau, Abdi Dika are Kenyans that graduated from Alison with various degrees. There are thousands of Kenyans who have also earned such degrees online.
Nathan Harden, the writer of sex and Gold at Yale, says;
“There is, of course, the question of prestige, which implies selectivity. It’s the primary way elite universities have distinguished themselves in the past. The harder it is to get in, the more prestigious a university appears. But limiting admissions to a select few makes little sense in the world of online education, where enrollment is no longer bounded by the number of seats in a classroom or the number of available dorm rooms. In the online world, the only concern is having enough faculty and staff on hand to review essays, or grade the tests that aren’t automated, or to answer questions and monitor student progress online.”
MOOCs are like dating sites. When dating online started, people were skeptical about it. Years later, thousands of couples have met online and many have resulted in marriage.
This might just be the future of education. As millions of students around the world continue to enroll for these courses, universities in Africa and more so in Kenya will have to rethink their model of doing business.
From making it hard to enter such Universities by raising entry points to charging exorbitant fee, they will have to redesign this model to accommodate every willing student and offer opportunities to everyone.
But in the words of Susan Adams, a Forbes staffer, “Though the news is a major step for MOOCs, free online courses are still a long way from replacing costly degree programs. But there is no question MOOCs are gaining in popularity and that many schools are trying to figure out whether to integrate MOOCs into their curricula. At the same time, MOOCs pose a huge potential threat to traditional university programs. It’s also not clear how the MOOC start-ups will earn money. Using MOOCs as a recruiting tool is a way for the schools offering the MOOCs to profit from the free courses”.
According to the Economist, “Online education allows colleges to innovate with regard to the quality, length and cost of their offerings. It should be possible to offer shorter and cut-price degrees that are demonstrably equivalent (in terms of employability) to the degrees of today. Already there is pressure on publicly funded universities to accept online credits, and the American Council on Education says that it will evaluate MOOCs for college credit”
As more people become technologically connected around the world, so is the way we do things. From online shopping to online dating, online learning might just replace college education. We will no longer need to stay on campus to get a degree.
In terms of costs, we will all avoid the exorbitant and unreasonable fees and accommodation for us to get education. It will be available to everyone. If it’s expensive at the University of Nairobi, one will get it for free at Harvard. Within the next five years, local colleges and universities will have to adapt or perish.
By @AmbKivati