Harvard Professor Michael Sandel teaches ethics.
Thanks to the internet, everyone can now get a free education at the world's top tertiary institutions. Does this mean the end for higher learning or a new beginning?
Imagine, says Harvard professor Michael Sandel, that you are a shipwrecked sailor, adrift in a lifeboat without food or water.
Is it morally permissible to kill and eat the cabin boy to ensure your own survival?
Sandel poses the philosophical question to about 1,000 students packed into Harvard's Sanders Theatre, a magnificent, three-tiered lecture room that oozes history through every wooden panel. But these days he is also talking to a much bigger audience - the 4.6 million people who have watched this televised lecture on YouTube and the tens of thousands who go on to follow his free and massively popular Justice course on the web. Students around the globe have voted on the fate of Parker the cabin boy, who was murdered by two English sailors in 1884, but judged a necessary sacrifice by 40 per cent of Sandel's online audience.
Courses like this are known as Moocs (Massive open online courses). These days anyone with a good broadband connection can use them to learn direct from the world's most prestigious professors and universities, usually without paying a cent. Most offer online discussion between students and use a computer programme or fellow students to award marks, as each course averages about 33,000 students. New Zealand dipped its toe in the water this week with the launch of a computer studies course from Waikato University, following years of anxious speculation that this could be a replay of the late 1990s dotcom bubble. There has certainly been a lot of hype - Time magazine declared 2012 "the year of the Mooc" and British author Michael Barber, a former educational adviser to Tony Blair, described online tertiary education as an avalanche that would fundamentally alter the landscape for universities.
But nagging questions persist. Why would any serious student do a peer-graded Mooc instead of a real university course? Will the quality of education be up to scratch? And how will anyone involved make money when the product is free?
The questions have not disappeared but the search for answers has become more urgent, especially in the United States where politicians have decided Moocs could be a lifesaver for a tertiary education system drowning in student debt. In California, where 450,000 students are shut out of basic courses, the state will offer grants for online versions with full academic credit. Florida and New York are considering similar legislation. Last month President Barack Obama announced the Federal Government would give more money to universities that cut costs by using online courses. Suddenly the fad has become a serious business proposition after all.
The term "Mooc" was coined in 2008 but took off in 2011 when two Stanford University professors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, put their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course online, free of charge. Unlike Sandel's slickly produced video, this was a home-made geeky affair, consisting of a whiteboard, a voiceover and lots of quick quizzes. It got 160,000 students from day one.
Thrun and Norvig promptly left Stanford to set up Udacity, a company which teaches mainly computer science and maths to about 400,000 students and promises to fix America's "broken" higher education system. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology responded with the not-for-profit edX, which boasts more than one million students and some of the world's top-ranked universities. Both are dwarfed by the global leader Coursera, which has enjoyed phenomenal growth to more than 4.7 million students taking 442 free courses with 87 university partners worldwide.
Other countries are trying to catch up. Britain's Open University has formed an online provider called FutureLearn, due to go live this month with 21 university partners and six of Australia's leading eight universities are now offering free online education. This week Waikato University offered New Zealand's first Mooc, a homegrown course in data mining using Weka, a programme created by its computer science department. Massey is due to launch next month in partnership with Australian provider Open2Study, concentrating on sustainable agriculture, emergency management and indigenous cultures.
The head of Massey's teaching and learning centre, Professor Mark Brown, says the university has carefully chosen the courses to showcase what Massey is good at. "It might be the very reason why they go on to complete a masters degree with more specialisation, as a result of one free course."
He has a simple answer to other universities still worrying about whether to join in or hold back on free online courses.
"We've taken the view that if we're not exploring and innovating within the Mooc playpen, then we're really not in a position to understand what the opportunities are. Sitting on the sidelines can take you only so far."
Reaction to the Mooc phenomenon among many university academics has ranged from scepticism to horror, with Sandel and the ethics of cannibalism centre-stage. In April, San Jose State University announced it would include his EdX Justice course as part of its teaching programme, prompting a revolt by philosophy professors who refused to use it. The course is now being taught through the English department.
Associate philosophy professor Karin Brown told the Harvard university newspaper The Crimson that this confirmed their worst fears. "Eventually, you will only have facilitators for those courses ... It's a very cheap way to solve the budget problem of public universities, but you are creating a university without professors."
Otago University's vice-chancellor Harlene Hayne summed up local scepticism in an editorial in the university's magazine in January. She argued that education was more than a knowledge transfer from teacher to student - it was the development of skills such as communication critical thinking which relied on human contact. Hands-on experience, such as laboratory experiments for science students, was essential. Hayne also noted that more than 90 per cent of students who signed up for free online courses never completed them, probably, she suggested, because they got bored.
After exhaustive research she had concluded that "the concept of the Mooc will not displace the traditional university experience and the business case for the future of Moocs actually hangs by a thread".
Waikato University professor Michael Peters, who specialises in the politics of education, shares Hayne's reservations but disagrees with her conclusion. He predicts online tertiary education will be unstoppable because, as the US experience shows, the financial incentives to extend it are so strong.
"You look at student loans in America. It's just passed the US$1 trillion ($1.23 trillion) mark. It's supposed to blow out by another US$1.4 trillion in 10 years. That's the largest form of debt apart from housing mortgage."
Peters believes the Mooc movement has been taken over by governments with an agenda to cut costs in tertiary education and introduce privatisation. He makes a distinction between most of the early courses, which grew out of an idealistic open education movement, and the profit-driven "industrial broadcast model".
The first type is more interactive and uses extensive social media. Students partly determine what they learn, which can mean the course changes each time. The second is similar to a television broadcast, often featuring a celebrity speaker who imparts information to tens or even hundreds of thousands of students simultaneously.
To Peters and other educationalists, this echoes the attempts of last century to beam in TV and radio lessons to underdeveloped countries. He contrasts this one-way teaching method with the traditional Oxford-Cambridge university model, which relies on skilled tutors working with small groups of students.
Brown says Massey is well aware of these pitfalls and will avoid the old-fashioned video dump.
"A lot of effort has gone into how to create videos that are truly interactive," he says. "One of the criticisms of Moocs that Massey was very mindful of was taking 1960s-style teaching and putting it on 21st century networks and claiming this is somehow new and revolutionary."
He says testing will involve written answers, not just multi-choice questions, marked by real people. Science students will carry out experiments in a simulated lab. Open2Study has also rethought some of the much-touted advantages of early Moocs, including learning at your own pace, which has been linked to the high drop-out rate. Tutors will check students' progress to make sure they don't fall away.
As for Hayne's comments, Brown says face-to-face contact is important "but I think we need to be careful that we don't put a gold standard on traditional ways of teaching. I don't really think that in the type of world we live in today sitting in a lecture theatre with 400 or 500 students is what we would see as an effective model of learning."
For US-born Massey business lecturer and digital learning enthusiast Dennis Viehland, Moocs represent an opportunity to revolutionise not just online education but university teaching in general. He says some lecturers are already "flipping the classroom" by giving their students Mooc-style video lectures to watch at home, so they can discuss the issues in class time.
He lists several online teaching innovations including:
• replacing the traditional 50-minute lecture with a 12-15 minute interactive video;
• tutorials in the form of online discussion forums, using social media techniques (so the most "liked" student answer goes to the top);
• instant feedback on computer-marked answers - highly appealing for the video game generation;
• students marking each other, which some academics hate but Viehland says is supported by research showing their grades closely match the teachers'.
Moocs also allow providers to crunch huge amounts of data to see how students really learn, then adapt course materials and teaching methods accordingly. Coursera, which raised US$43 million from venture capital investors in July, is using this technological advantage to market its courses to universities trying to develop their own online offerings. Like many entertainment and news providers, it is also developing an optional paid subscription to bring in some much-needed revenue.
"But the big question nobody's been able to answer is, how are universities going to make money out of this?" says Viehland. "Why should we give away something for free for which we have traditionally charged? That's the way the music business and the newspaper business have gone, to their detriment."
The answer may lie at Georgia Technical Institute, which will next year offer an online masters degree in computer science for US$6,600 ($8,120) - a fraction of the usual US$45,000. Other universities have tried and failed to charge for online courses before but Georgia Tech's computer science department is among the best in America, so the experiment has the potential to change the way tertiary education is delivered. Students can choose to do the course as a free Mooc or pay for tutoring, student support and the chance to sit online exams for a recognised qualification.
"It could be epoch-making," Obama's science and technology adviser S. James Gates jnr told the New York Times. "If it really works, it could begin the process of lowering the cost of education."
For many academics this is code for lower pay and lost jobs but Viehland thinks these fears are misplaced, as most joiners so far have been students in undeveloped countries and professionals looking to add to their skills. "Moocs have the opportunity to grow the pie, not just slice it differently," he argues. "So they won't replace university-based education."
Meanwhile, he's looking forward to next month's The Kennedy Half Century , the Mooc world's most spectacular offering to date. It has stunning video with Hollywood production values, a superstar presenter in US political commentator Professor Larry J. Sabato and a tie-in to Sabato's book and TV series on the same subject.
Viehland's picking the due date for the final assignment could even be the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. History purists should probably look away now.
My first Mooc - a student's guide
Scott Wilson reckons he hit gold on his first Mooc. The Unitec performing arts lecturer was on a Fulbright scholarship in Washington DC when he signed up with 22,000 others to Aboriginal Worldviews and Education, a free four-week online course run by the University of Toronto through Coursera, the world's biggest Mooc provider.
He thoroughly enjoyed the course but was struck by the amount of work involved.
"In a single week, you'd have about five hours of viewing to do which is more than an undergraduate course, where you'd have two lectures and a tutorial. Plus you had readings, you had exercises. So all in all, you had between eight and 10 hours a week for a single course."
Wilson says the instructor combined personal guidance chats from a webcam in his office with video of him teaching in class, plus other video from sources such as YouTube.
Each essay was marked by at least five fellow students, whose scores were aggregated by a computer and returned to him with selected comments. He had to mark five essays himself to pass the course.
He is keen to trial the online teaching methods for about 200 students in his film studies course next year but is still in two minds about Moocs.
He worries that several problems have been overlooked, starting with the assumption that everyone can study online.
"Even in Unitec, a large number of our student body don't have internet at home or don't have broadband or don't have access to the kind of technologies that would make the streaming of a 30-minute video possible."
He predicts intellectual property could also become a headache, especially in commercially sensitive subjects such as film studies or art history.
"I think everyone is looking the other way and whistling in the hope that no one raises this."
Wilson says you need to be good at working on your own to do a Mooc. Online interaction with other students doesn't spark ideas in the same way as classroom discussion, although he did get into a lively transpacific discussion about Maoritanga with other Kiwis from Gisborne to Whangarei.
Assessment by fellow students is potentially a great idea, he thinks, but should come with training.
"When students peer-assess they're much harder on each other than the person at the front of the class would be. They can be quite ruthless."
He emerged with a certificate of proficiency with honours from the University of Toronto but has no idea whether it's worth anything.
"It's the Wild West of education."
Moocs 101
Mooc stands for:
• Massive: The average course has 33,000 students and the biggest 300,000.
• Open: Most courses are free, although some charge for certificates.
• Online: Students study on the internet and discuss their work with other students or tutors in online chat forums.
• Course: Until recently most have not counted towards a recognised university qualification but this may soon change.
The main players:
United States
• Coursera: By far the biggest with 4.7 million students worldwide and growing. Founded by former Stanford University professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.
• Udacity: Also started by ex-Stanford professors, it specialises in computer science and maths. Promises to make university learning more relevant for the workplace.
• edX: A not-for-profit company started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Has more than one million users, including 500,000 at Harvard alone.
UK
• FutureLearn: A spin-off from the Open University, in partnership with 21 universities (but not Oxford or Cambridge). Due to start this month.
Australia
• Open2Study: A homegrown response to Coursera, the US giant which has teamed up with three of Australia's big universities.
New Zealand
• Massey University starts courses with Open2Study next month.
• Waikato has begun its own course.
Much of the South Island is set to plunge below 0C tonight and tomorrow.