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This year, Princeton University became one of the latest colleges to delve into the brave new world of MOOCs through the online educational platform, Coursera.

MOOCs, or massive open online courses, have gained massive popularity in recent years. The term was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander, but it wasn’t until a few years later that MOOCs really gained publicity. In the fall of 2011, nearly 160,000 students worldwide signed up for Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun’s online course on artificial intelligence. The popularity of the AI course led to Thrun starting a spinoff company, Udacity. This in turn led to the creation of several other MOOC start-ups. In 2012, Harvard and MIT partnered together to create edX.  Also in 2012, Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera, a platform currently being used by Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. All university participants are working together to develop Web-based courses that can be shared online.

Unlike traditional university classes, MOOC courses are online, usually free, and open to anyone with an Internet connection. MOOCs are fundamentally changing not only the way that students learn, but how time is spent in the physical classroom. Most professors use MOOCs to “flip the classroom”:  lectures are typically recorded for the students to view on their own time, while actual classroom time is reserved for teacher-student discussion and interaction.

There are obvious limitations that the format imposes: opening up the courses to virtually anyone with an Internet connection means that the class size can end up in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, making it impossible for teachers to respond to individual students. On the other hand, many Princeton teachers who have taught Coursera courses have found the experience invaluable, not only in opening their eyes to different teaching formats, but also in providing feedback on their course content and instruction. Mitchell Duneier, a professor of sociology at Princeton, noted, “Within three weeks, I received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching.” Over 40,000 students attended Duneier’s Coursera course for “Introduction to Sociology.”

The MOOC phenomenon has also raised important questions on how free access to college instruction will affect the value of university education – in particular, the value of an elite university education. Many of the universities that have jumped on the MOOC bandwagon are schools of the highest caliber, where admission and access to instruction was once available to only the select few. With the advent of MOOC, now millions can attend. Will the value of an Ivy League education be diminished when access is no longer exclusive?

Granted, most MOOC courses are not available for credit, so students hoping to get an actual Ivy League degree will still have to do so the old fashioned way – by getting admitted into the school and paying tuition fees. A recent New York Times article predicted that lower-tier colleges would suffer the most from MOOC technology, as students already balking at higher tuitions start to question the cost of an education they can get for free from a more prestigious university – or at least, the courses offered online.

While Princeton’s experimentation with a MOOC platform is still preliminary, university staff acknowledge that Coursera has provided valuable feedback on how online learning can augment learning for not only Princeton’s students, but a global community of scholars.

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