Higher Education Not Out of Reach with Free Online Courses

It may be hard to believe, but Harvard, Stanford and many other elite universities are currently offering their most popular courses online for no charge.

That’s right – anyone can access these websites and learn from some of the top professors in the world, for free.

Web-based courses are nothing new, but the most elite universities were hesitant to join in. That seems to have changed now, though, as last month a dozen major research universities announced their plans to join Coursera, an host-site for online courses.

Most colleges’ interests are threefold: to improve learning online in general, lower teaching costs and ultimately expand access to higher education.

For example, a 24-year old engineer named Ashwith Rego is currently taking a class at MIT (News - Alert) from India.

“I never imagined that I would be taught by professors from MIT, let alone for free,” said Rego.

The benefits are seemingly unlimited, and the hope is that this new shift in higher education will fuel technological innovation, leading to much-needed economic growth for the United States.

Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, believes strongly in Coursera and this new move toward digital learning for top-tier schools.

“It holds the potential for serving many, many hundreds of thousands of students in a way we simply cannot today,” she said. And Broad is not alone.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau believes offering free online courses “will ultimately revolutionize education.”

“Our goal is to reinvent education,” agreed Anant Agarwal, head of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “It will dramatically improve the quality, efficiency and scale of learning worldwide on our campuses.”

Agarwal is the president of edX, another site offering online courses from the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT, among others.

The catch is that students do not receive college credit for taking the online courses. Still, both potential students and colleges are showing growing interest. Many of the participating students online are older workers who want to upgrade their current skills and knowledge related to their jobs. They receive the benefits of knowledge for free, regardless of any lack of resources or way to attend classes on a campus.

The idea isn’t aimed to work for everyone, but it has shown success for many so far, with some schools even offering college credit for courses taken on Coursera, including the University of Washington.

If this new trend continues, more students will ultimately be able to attend college as well as accelerate graduation, and professors will be allowed more free time for research or office hours to help give students more personal attention.

One of the founders of Coursera, Andrew Ng, said it best: “If a poor kid in India cannot take the class, I think that would just be a tragedy. If a place like Princeton could teach millions of students, I think the world would be a better place.”

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