The online education platform Coursera announced today that 12 more universities had signed on as partners, joining the 4 that were part of the startup’s launch in April. Joining the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, University of Michigan and Stanford are Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, EPFL – Lausanne (Switzerland), Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), UCSF, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia.

That last university is a particularly interesting one, considering the role that MOOCs played in the ouster of UVA president Teresa Sullivan by its Board of Visitors. The decision-making at UVA is the focus of much of Inside Higher Ed’s Steve Kolowich’s article on today’s news. Kolowich chronicles the negotiations among UVA deans, faculty members and Coursera, noting the irony that these discussions were ongoing as the BOV fired Sullivan for failing to have an adequate response to their questions about the university’s plans to respond to the Stanford-model MOOCs. The plans are clear now: join the Coursera platform.

The rapid expansion of Coursera’s partners, along with the equity investment made by two of them, certainly suggests that many institutions are preparing to face what the New York Times’ David Brooks called the “;campus tsunami.” Initially, Coursera had to woo schools and professors; now schools and professors are approaching Coursera, which offers universities its technology and expertise in teaching and grading “;at scale.” And while this might demonstrate what Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng told me -; that “;MOOCs are not a passing fad” -; it’s not clear yet how MOOCs will evolve as they expand to new disciplines and new universities and/or how these MOOCs will change higher education in turn.

It’s the latter that seems to elicit the most excitement and concern. Georgia Tech computer science professor Mark Guzdial has shared the email that faculty received there announcing its partnership with Coursera. In it, Provost Rafael Bras offers reassurance that “;we are not abandoning our central mission of residential undergraduate instruction. In fact, we view this as an opportunity to remain true to our pledge to define the technological research university of the 21st century by exploring new modes of instruction and operation. What we learn from the Coursera and other similar experiments will above all benefit our own students and strengthen our existing programs.”

That echoes how Ng and his co-founder Daphne Koller describe Coursera as creating a “;better education for everyone.” When I spoke to the duo when Coursera launched, Koller said that the creation of these online courses will make for robust and active learning experiences on campus. There is a “;growing amount of content out there on the Web,” she said, and “;the value proposition for the university isn’t getting the content out there but rather the personal interaction between faculty and students and students and students.”

That is part of the value proposition of the residential campus experience, I’d argue. When I asked Ng about the impetus behind these universities’ signing up for Coursera, he said that both faculty and administration were pushing for it. But students at these universities, not so much. That’s not to say that students in general aren’t interested in the free online classes -; Coursera boasts 1.5 million course enrollments by over 680,000 students. But these students aren’t necessarily that same population served by a residential campus. (According to demographics from Ng’s Machine Learning class offered last fall, only about 11% were in undergraduate degree programs.) In The New York Times today, University of Michigan (and Coursera) professor Scott Page says, “;There’s talk about how online education’s going to wipe out universities, but a lot of what we do on campus is help people transition from 18 to 22, and that is a complicated thing,.” He adds that MOOCs would be most helpful to “;people 22 to 102, international students and smart retired people.”

Who’s being “;helped” here is a crucial consideration -; for institutions, for faculty (both research and instructional faculty), for enrolled students and for learners everywhere.

A few lingering questions:

• How will the University of Washington’s plans to offer credit for its Coursera classes work? (And related: how will concerns about online cheating be addressed? Udacity partnered with Pearson for this.)
• How will a partnership with Coursera change universities’ other online course offerings? (These universities and other universities, pre-existing and planned programs, and particularly for-credit ones)
• How will the peer grading work? (History professor Jonathan Rees raises questions about how well students will be able to evaluate one another’s assignments.)
• With all these online lecture-based course options, whither the offline lecture-based course offerings? And how will funding models have to change for universities if students opt to learn “;elsewhere” for these credits?

Recently, I was talking to a friend of the family.  A middle-aged woman with a PhD, she's fluent in three languages and has spent a reasonable portion of her life in Europe.

One question that came up was why, in certain countries, people might be disallowed from spending their own money to buy health care that the relevant national health care system might deem to be unnecessary or of low priority.

The basic premise underlying that question, of course, is that people who have sufficient money should be able to spend it on anything they choose.  It's a pretty common premise, particularly in this country.  But it's not completely true.

When some function is seen as critical to the functioning of society, the application of money to advantage one individual over another is no longer seen as consumer choice, it's seen as corruption.  People shouldn't be able to spend money to get better treatment from the justice system.  They shouldn't be able to spend money (at least, not directly) to influence people when they're in the voting booth.  And they shouldn't be able to buy legislation (again, at least not directly). 

Physical security and equal treatment before the law is something a just society provides.  Universal education is something a just (and wise, and capable) society provides.  And, for the citizens of most developed countries, health care is something their society (just) provides.  Some of those countries have decided that allowing private money (and private providers) to enter the health care market is as corrupting as allowing bribery of police or judges or legislators.  As Hannah Arendt said, "Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance."  Health care would seem to qualify.

My concern is not that this woman (a US citizen) doesn't have universally-available health insurance.  (Her husband is a federal retiree; health insurance isn't a problem for them.)  Nor do I worry that, in spite of having traveled and lived extensively in countries with universal health care she still doesn't understand how it works or how it affects social dynamics.  My concern is that she seems typical of so many Americans who appear unable to imagine any situation other than the one in which they currently find themselves.  No health care finance system other than the one we have (except, perhaps, the one we had before the Affordable Care Act was passed).  No education system other than the one we have.  No legislative system other than the one we have.  No military other than the one we have.  No economic system other than the one we have.

Have we created a generation or three with no real sense of possibility?  And if we (society) have, how much of the damage has been done by those of us in education?

This past Friday was the 5th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone. Over at the NYTimes Bits blog Brian Chen, author of Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In, has some observations about how the iPhone changed phone and software industries. 

The way to think about the iPhone in relation to higher ed is less as a single product but a new product category. This category, which includes Android/Google and maybe eventually the Windows 8 phones, equals smart phone plus an app ecosystem.  The carriers (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T etc.) remain a critical (as they own the cellular network), but annoying component of this ecosystem. Annoying because their voice/data pricing plans are only getting more expensive, restrictive and confusing as the hardware and software on smartphones improves exponentially each year. Any impact that the iPhone and its cousins achieve in higher ed will be in spite of, rather than because, the big cellular companies that we all must endure.

How has the iPhone changed higher ed?

1. A Glimpse Into A Mobile Learning Future: The iPhone has allowed us to clearly peer in our learning future, and that future is mobile. The only limitation will be that processing power, storage and software will improve faster than our ability to re-engineer learning tools around the mobile form factor. What would an LMS (learning management system) designed from scratch for Apple's iOS and Google's Android look like? Can we imagine virtual synchronous classroom/meeting tools such as Adobe Connect and Blackboard Collaborate look like with a native mobile design?). The iPhone screen seems plenty big enough, the rate-limiting step of the iPhone as a learning platform seems to be the keyboard. Mobile devices are great for content consumption, not so wonderful for creation (and education depends on creation). Despite the challenges, it seems clear that the ubiquitousness nature (always with us, always connected) of the iPhone type device will make mobile the primary platform for 21st century learning. We are evolving to a place where our mobiles are extensions of ourselves, our outboard brains and always at hand communications and entertainment devices. Where gaming and social media and communication go, education will soon follow.

2. The Apps vs. Browser Debate: To a great and growing extent education is already mediated through technology. We interact with our fellow students, professors, and course content via software. This software is moving from our computers to our smart phones (and tablets). The question is, how what form will this software take? Will it be delivered through the browser or an app? Perhaps the browser/app debate will soon fade, as native apps become web apps – simple shells around browser based content and data exchange. The desire to avoid the expense and complication of coding separate apps for each platform (iOS, Android) and for the Web is understandable. I'm unconvinced, however, that this approach will provide us with high quality mobile (and mobile educational) experiences. The gold standard for apps in my experience is the NYTimes and Amazon Kindle iPhone app. These apps are easy to navigate, sync automatically, and work offline. Reading a book with the Kindle app or news through the NYTimes app causes the device to recede into the background. I don't know of any education app that performs as well as these two examples, and I have a hard time believing that when that app comes it will not be a native mobile app.   

3. The Mobile Services Imperative: Every college and university feels the pressure to mobilize our web content. All the work we have done in the past 20 or so years to get our higher ed content and services to the web seems inadequate if this same content and services are not available for smart phones. Where we are going to get the resources to bring everything we do on the web to the mobile screen is a reasonable question. The web work will not go away (it will expand), and the pull to mobile will only get stronger. Will web sites designed with RWD (responsive web design) techniques be robust enough to perform on iPhones at the level that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, potential students expect? Can we avoid coding around native apps, and instead go with a write-once display everywhere web app strategy, allow us to move rapidly and cost-effectively enough into our mobile campus future?

4. Device Proliferation and Support Challenges: Campus technology services and campus applications now need to work with both computers and mobile devices. Do you have an easy way that your students, faculty and staff can get their iPhones on your secure wireless network, your printing and application authentication systems? What devices will you support in your student help desk? How far will you go to help your professors troubleshoot their mobile devices? What training, advice, and support will you offer instructors on incorporating mobile phones into teaching?    

5. A BRIC Education Growth Roadmap: The BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India and China – they are the fast growing emerging economies with huge populations and a rapidly increasing role in global trade, manufacturing, services and consumption. We could (and should) spend lots of time thinking about the opportunity to export US higher education to the BRICS, and to grow the footprint of our educational technology and educational publishing companies in these countries.   As the action in higher education moves from the already wealthy to the growth economies (the BRICs and beyond … such as South Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, and Nigeria), the mediating technology will be the mobile device. The BRICS largely skipped over landline technology, jumping directly to cellular phones. The demand for educational services at every level will be way larger than traditional place based (campus based) institutions could ever provide.  Education will be mobile. Campuses will still be built, but the great volume of educational interactions will take place on the mobile phone.

6. The Disappointment of Unrealized Mobile Education Potential: The final way that the iPhone has changed higher ed over the past 5 years is the degree to which the iPhone has not changed higher ed. The mobile education hype has outpaced the mobile education reality. Smart phone education applications and service continue to be an appendage to those designed for the web.  We lag behind in delivering our students the course, library, and campus services and content that they want on their mobile devices.  We have very little understanding of how we can incorporate these handheld mobile computers into our teaching. And from what I can tell, Apple, Google or Microsoft have not made education a core part of their long-term mobile strategies.    

What would you add to this list of how the iPhone changed higher  ed?

Myra Ann Houser is a doctoral candidate in African History at Howard University in Washington, DC. She blogs about the dissertation-writing process, current events, life in Washington, DC, and related issues at myraramblings.wordpress.com and tweets as @myramt.

In the spring of 2008 I stood on the lawn in front of the president’s house at the College of William and Mary with a group of undergraduates, fellow graduate students, and faculty singing the alma mater and wondering if anybody was hearing the students’ voices swell. That candlelight vigil took place within days of former President Gene Nichol’s announcement that the College’s Board of Visitors had not renewed his contract. The reasons for this remain as murky now as they did four years ago but have often been chalked up to personality clashes, a lack of fund-raising, or simply an inability to get along with Old Virginia.

Memories of Nichol have, of course, arisen during the two weeks following University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan’s forced resignation by the Board of Visitors. Like Sullivan, Nichol had been extremely popular with students, faculty and alumni, made efforts to advance scholarship even in subjects that were not profitable to the university, and worked to increase student and faculty diversity at a school that often, how shall we say, completely lacked it. Like UVA Rector Helen Dragas’s comments, those from W&M Rector Michael Powell (yes, the one from the FCC, and yes, the one who is Colin Powell’s son) seemed inadequate to those seeking any explanation for the Board’s decision. 

I attended a Board forum then with professors and students, and Powell’s statements seemed, like Dragas’s, bizarre. When fielding a question about why the Board had not immediately issued a statement (Nichol waited until two days after the notification of his effective termination to go public, citing a desire for the Board to let students, faculty, and alumni know themselves), Powell stumbled over an answer that, in essence, said, “;We needed to consult some lawyers to find the right language.” The Rector, along with two-thirds of that Board, was a lawyer.  His explanation of the decision through invocation of rhetoric about “;tough decisions you may understand when you’re older” seemed to the undergraduates I spoke to like a “;When you grow up, you’ll understand how the big kids operate” statement, not the detailed explanation young adults at an elite university wanted to hear.  Like UVA’s controversy will, William and Mary’s eventually blew over, with the installation of an interim-cum-full time internal president and a return to some semblance of normalcy. Nichol now serves as a named-full professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

So why drone on about this memory in a GradHacker post?

Because, as Marie Griffith pointed out in her excellent Religion and Politics piece, this story is not about the University of Virginia or the College of William and Mary. It’s about institutional cultures and academic politics.

As first-year graduate students, my peers and I reacted mostly with cynicism to the Nichol debacle. What was the point, we wondered, of studying to be historians if the humanities were worthless when compared with business interests? What would happen to us (and our stipends!)  if we joined our tenured faculty members in striking and refusing to teach class until a resolution occurred? What would happen if we didn’t?  Should we give an answer to the undergraduates who demand that we show our commitment to the university by continuing to teach despite the circumstances — or the ones who demand that we vacate our posts as a sign of that commitment? What was happening to the university system that we’d recently dedicated our lives to joining?

Four years later, we’re still engaged in many of those conversations. University structures are constantly changing. What will they look like in the two years until we look for professions within them, never mind the decades it could take to become entrenched? 

We don’t, of course, have the luxury of waiting to ponder those questions and begin thinking about our responses and strategies for political situations beyond our control. That the era of the absent-minded professor is giving way to the clued-in and world-savvy one is not necessarily tragic. It’s important to think about giving students and parents something of tangible value for the financial investments they make.  It’s important, too, to recognize that many humanities fields may hold intrinsic value and improve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills even when their factual basis seems detached from reality.  It is often difficult to explain this to business or outcome-oriented individuals—the types of folks who mostly populate university boards — but it’s important to have those explanations prepared.

My friends and I decided to go about our normal business, wearing Nichol support pins and attending rallies and meetings when we could. Some professors' graduate students cancelled classes; others (particularly assistants and recent associates) and forged ahead after sending their classes e-mail notifications that attendance would not count and conscientious objection was applauded (leading, of course, to benefits for those who conscientiously objected to sitting in an indoor classroom during a beautiful spring day).

Ultimately, I think many of us wound up glad that we’d received a certificate in University Politics 101 so early during our careers. We benefitted from watching our department scramble to react and learned about the balance between academic freedom and self-preservation.

I don’t know whether UVA students will say the same in a few years, but I’d love to hear the thoughts of any current students out there. Has anyone experienced this at other schools, and what did you learn? What does this say about the current state of universities and their political structures? What should we as potential university employees do to prepare for our careers? In the spirit of higher education, perhaps the best way to make sense of the Teresa Sullivan debacle is to seek a professional education for ourselves.