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UVa announces new online courses venture
[July 17, 2012]

UVa announces new online courses venture


Jul 17, 2012 (The Daily Progress - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- University of Virginia officials have announced a new partnership with a company specializing in offering massive open online courses.

The deal, which will offer non-credit classes, was in the works for several months, according to school officials. That means that it was being worked on even as President Teresa A. Sullivan was ousted, then put back into her job as president.



Documents released under Freedom of Information Act requests show Rector Helen E. Dragas and then-Vice Rector Mark J. Kington were watching other schools' online ventures with interest. During the crisis, Dragas expressed worries about the university's progress on several key challenges, including online education.

The deal with a California-based company called Coursera officially launches today.


"I am pleased to have the University partner with Coursera because we have a shared understanding of the importance of strong teaching and of learning outcomes. Our faculty will also learn from this new teaching experience," said UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan in a news release. "These courses have the potential to open new opportunities for students around the globe, while also being likely to benefit our courses on Grounds. We also gain the opportunity to share the expertise of our faculty -- both in the classroom and the research labs.

"These classes will expand the university's role in global education while reinforcing our core mission of teaching, research, and public service," Sullivan said. "They will in no way diminish the value of a UVa degree, but rather enhance our brand and allow others to experience the learning environment of Jefferson's Academical Village." Founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, both computer science professors at Stanford, Coursera allows universities to offer their courses free over the Internet. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can enroll.

The University of Michigan, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University already use the platform.

Other schools entering new partnerships with Coursera are: California Institute of Technology, Duke University, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, UC San Francisco, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Toronto and the University of Washington.

Coursera has already reached 680,000 students from 190 countries, according to the company's figures.

Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng emphasized that Coursera allows thousands of distant students to access material, but also allows professors to improve on courses that they teach in person.

"If the registrar schedules only three hours of classroom time, then the professor has to use that time, as a content conveyor, to deliver the lecture," Ng said, describing the old model of teaching.

Under the new model, students could watch a lecture online before class, then use class time to engage in more interactive learning, he said. The value in going to a university such as UVa isn't just in the content, but in the interactions with professors and other top students, Ng said.

"We're trying to raise the level of a student's ability to work with information," J. Milton Adams, UVa vice provost for academic programs, said in the news release. "It's not just about memorizing facts. It's about understanding, analyzing and applying the knowledge." Working with Coursera will also let the university ask questions about and experiment with new ways of using technology to teach undergraduates on campus, Adams said in an interview Monday.

The UVa partnership with Coursera will start out offering five courses. From the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences will come a philosophy course, a history course and a physics course. From the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration will come a pair of courses on the challenges faced by private businesses trying to expand from the startup phase to larger operations, according to UVa.

"The chief investment is an upfront investment by faculty in taking a course that they probably already are teaching or were planning to teach and making it fit with this technology," Adams said.

Most of the professors teaching on the online platform will need their laptop, some software, a webcam and tablet to write (electronically) on to put their class online, Ng said.

"These initial courses are good foundations," said Meredith Jung-En Woo, Dean of the College, in the news release. "We also welcome this chance to join in a massive research and development effort that we believe will enrich the in-class experience of our students on Grounds." Darden Dean Robert Bruner said great universities have always adapted to technological advances.

"From printed books, to calculators, computers and social media, great teaching requires us to learn to educate and enrich our students using the best available tools," Bruner said in the release. "Coursera offers a cutting-edge platform and partnership with leading universities taking appropriate steps to develop new ways of reaching and teaching students." There's no exchange of funds between the company and the university. The company provides the platform; the university provides the content, to which it retains the rights. If Coursera does eventually manage to extract revenue from the courses, it will be split between the university and the company, Ng said.

He's not worried about that being a problem.

"I'm most excited about really changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of students," he said. "And I think when you're changing millions of people's lives, we'll see over and over that there will be plenty of ways to bring in revenue to keep this sustainable." Adams emphasized that for UVa, the venture is about sharing knowledge, not making money. He compared it to professors writing books.

"This is a new-technology way to do the same thing and make our knowledge available globally through Coursera's technology," he said.

Ng said the ins and outs of the new system are still being worked out. As an example, he points to peer grading. Researchers recently discovered that students have a hard time grading one another on a one-to-30 scale. But assigning 10 grades on a scale of one-to-three proved much easier.

"Online education is a new medium, and we've been thinking through basic," Ng said.

Also under scrutiny: How often should the course video show the instructor's face? And the high-ranked universities taking part in the program are able to share with one another what they learn about teaching, Ng said.

"There are still many unknowns for us to study concerning the long-term impact of this form of online teaching, but it's critical for UVa to be in on the ground floor so that we can learn along with our peers what the future holds," Sullivan said in the news release.

Coursera also announced that it now has more than $22 million in investment capital, including a combined $3.7 million from Caltech and Penn.

___ (c)2012 The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.) Visit The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.) at www2.dailyprogress.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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