Udacity, San Jose State University offer online classes for credit

The times...they are a changin' FAST!

Udacity, San Jose State University offer online classes for credit | Internet & Media - CNET News

 

There are limits on who can enroll:
The courses are limited to veterans and students in high school at community colleges or at San Jose State. The fee for each class is $150.
The 250,000 students seems amazing - I wonder if it is a correct number.

 

It could be. MIT reported that over 150,000 people signed up for the first MITx class.

The huge numbers are a bit misleading though -- since these are free courses, anyone with the slightest degree of interest can easily sign up. But they can just as easily drop out -- as the linked news story says: "Dropout rates are high". At MITx, 7,157 people -- or about 5% of those who enrolled -- actually completed the course and earned a passing grade.

To put it another way, 95% of the students who enrolled in MITx either dropped out or failed. This doesn't happen at regular MIT.

 

Even though this is not a very large fee, it will probably have significant effects on enrollments and dropout rates.
They will both be much lower than if the class was completely free. At least that's my prediction.

 

Still, that's 7,157 people who passed the course. I doubt that MIT has 150,000 people sign up for its regular courses with over 7,000 passing it! Seems like a good way to conduct these courses and if they charged a small fee (like the $150 Udacity/SJSU are doing) that helps defray the costs as well as probably makes an easy profit for them.

 

It's very exciting to think about online courses drawing hundreds of thousands of students. However, the current reality for the "San Jose State Plus" program is maybe a bit less thrilling:

The "MOOC" buzzword stands for "Massive Open Online Course". What San Jose State and Udacity are doing isn't "Massive" (because it is currently limited to 100 students per course) and it isn't "Open" (because enrollment is capped, certain groups get priority over others, and those who do get in have to pay $150).

So what is left? Once you remove "Massive" and "Open", it leaves "Online Course". OK, so SJSU/Udacity are offering online courses for college credit. That's fine, but is it really new and different? No, except that $150 is relatively low tuition for a 3-unit course.

Now this is just a pilot -- maybe in the future there will be tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of students taking low-cost SJSU courses online for credit. That would be different. But that's not what SJSU and Udacity are doing today.