Pandemic helps make taking online courses more attractive
Sandeep Gupta, a technology manager in California, sees the economic storm caused by the coronavirus as a time “to try to future-proof your working life.” So he is taking an online course in artificial intelligence.
Dr. Robert Davidson, an emergency room physician in Michigan, says the pandemic has cast “a glaring light on the shortcomings of our public health infrastructure.” So he is pursuing an online master’s degree in public health.
Children and college students aren’t the only ones turning to online education during the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of adults have signed up for online classes in the past two months, too — a jolt that could signal a renaissance for big online learning networks that had struggled for years.
Coursera, in which Gupta and Davidson enrolled, added 10 million new users from mid-March to mid-May, seven times the pace of new sign-ups in the previous year. Enrollments at edX and Udacity, two smaller education sites, have jumped by similar multiples.
“Crises lead to accelerations, and this is best chance ever for online learning,” said Sebastian Thrun, a co-founder and chairman of Udacity.
Coursera, Udacity and edX sprang up nearly a decade ago as high-profile university experiments known as MOOCs, for massive open online courses. They were portrayed as tech-fueled insurgents destined to disrupt the antiquated ways of traditional higher education.
But few people completed courses, grappling with the same challenges now facing students forced into distance learning because of the pandemic.
Screen fatigue sets in, and attention strays.
The sites even became a punchline among academics: “Remember the MOOCs?”
But the online ventures adapted through trial and error, gathering lessons that could provide a road map for school districts and universities pushed online. The instructional ingredients of success, the sites found, include short videos of six minutes or less, interspersed with interactive drills and tests; online forums where students share problems and suggestions; and online mentoring and tutoring.
“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder and chief executive of edX. “And you have to understand that teaching online and learning online are skills of their own.”
A few top-tier universities, such as the University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology, offer some full degree programs through the online platforms. Davidson is taking Michigan’s public health course.
While those academic programs are available, the online schools have tilted, either cautiously or wholeheartedly, toward skills-focused courses that match student demand and hiring trends.
“Our main goal is to solve learning, not the skills problem,” Agarwal said. “Though frankly, that’s where the money is.”
Udacity has made the most drastic transformation toward a skills factory. It has developed dozens of courses on its own and with corporate collaborators including Google, Amazon and Mercedes. Its course offerings are largely in digital skills like programming, data science and artificial intelligence, fields where companies say they need workers.
Today, with 320 employees and 1,300 part-time project reviewers and mentors, Udacity’s fortunes have improved. It is tightly focused on its training business, for both individual students and for corporations that pay Udacity to upgrade the skills of their employees and to advise them on redeploying workers in digital operations.
The Udacity courses, which it calls nanodegrees, take most students four to six months to complete, if they put in 10 hours a week. The average cost is $1,200. The learning is based on projects, rapid feedback — including project reviews in two hours — and online mentoring.