Hidden Costs for Online Courses

Developing an online course usually isn’t cheap, but one particular expense is often underestimated: updating the course down the road. Face-to-face class content also needs to be refreshed from time to time, but online courses may call for hardware or software upgrades or time-consuming reviews to ensure web resources are still accessible.

Inside Higher Education took a look at how institutions are grappling with processes and costs to keep online courses up to date. Some schools didn’t take into account the maintenance cost for online courses, which over just a few years can add up to more than the original development cost.

Schools that offer quite a few online courses tend to require faculty to conduct a formal review of the course every few years, more often in the case of rapidly evolving subjects, such as computer science or biology. At Walden University, the review includes a report on whether the course is achieving learning outcomes. Western Governors University reviews each course annually, but it also has 200 faculty who work solely on course development.

If the faculty member who originally created the course leaves, it can take much longer for someone else to review and update the material. Installing cybersecurity measures to protect online courses from hackers is also a growing cost.

“I definitely would caution any institution from thinking of online courses as a quick moneymaker, at least if you want to do it right,” said Jessie Guy-Ryan, who heads the online learning team at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

Decisions Needed Before Going Online

Online degree programs have become a strategy for growth at some colleges and universities, and for survival at others. However, it involves much more than slapping a course or program online.

“You are not simply putting a course online; you are creating an online product,” said Furqan Nazeeri, a partner at the online education platform provider ExtensionEngine. “It’s an important distinction. Your product—the program, course, certificate, or degree—has to be unique and very specific to what your market to current and prospective students want.”

With institutions developing new online programs each year, colleges and universities should be striving to create something unique and not just a replica of the course provided in the classroom. All campuses are different and schools should be looking at their online programs the same way.

“It’s time to move away from mass-produced, cookie-cutter programs that take a one-size-fits-all approach,” Nazeeri continued. “Instead, differentiate your students’ online learning experience, and thus your institution, by creating authentic, adaptive, engaging, customized programs that embrace your institution’s distinctive approach to education.”

Anyone going this route must also understand there are risks and considerable costs to online programs.

“What are the key considerations in the push to go online?” Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at the Woods College of Advanced Studies, Boston College, asked in a column for The EvoLLLution. “There are no obvious answers to any of these challenges, but each institution must consider the options in front of them and clearly define the answer best for their organization and success.”

Integrating Access to Content

Seamless integration of academic content and tools with a school’s learning management systems (LMS) really shouldn’t be an issue. However, institutions regularly face challenges in integrating digital learning materials with all the different campus systems.

“When solutions integrate well, the students and professors shouldn’t notice any differences between our platforms and the external content,” said Steve Kessinger, director of information services and technology at Bluefield College, Bluefield, VA. “Integrations should enhance the educational experience, not be a barrier.”

Integration should make access to digital content possible from the institution’s LMS interface and not in a new window from a new interface. Students shouldn’t have to log into the LMS a second time to access the material. Seamless integration can also make it possible for students to immediately access content as soon as they register for a class through their LMS accounts.

A well-integrated system allows students’ quiz and homework grades to go directly to the LMS gradebook for review by the instructor. It should also be easy for instructors to edit and share content with students, while administrators should be able to see analytics and student performance measurements.

To make it all happen, colleges and universities, along with instructors, need to be working with LMS providers on universal standards.

“When vendors adhere to sets of standards as opposed to proprietary approaches, it becomes far easier for institutions to adopt their solutions,” Kessinger said. “Our application development resources are extremely limited. Developing custom integrations can be very time-consuming and costly.”

Blockchain a Potential New Publishing Model

Blockchain is best known for underpinning the bitcoin cryptocurrency, but the technology is still in its infancy and may grow to be adapted to a vast array of other applications.

Information recorded on “blocks” is linked on a shared, public, and continually reconciled database that isn’t stored in a central location that would be vulnerable to hacking. The data in any block can’t be modified without altering every subsequent block, which would require a consensus of the majority of users on the network.

“The blockchain lets people who have no particular confidence in each other collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority,” observed The Economist. “Simply put, it is a machine for creating trust.”

In a post updating a 2016 prediction on his Personanondata blog, business strategy consultant Michael Cairns noted that one area where blockchain could be applied is publishing, where it might be employed to identify copyright information and form a new method for buying, selling, and licensing intellectual content.

“Once a transaction occurs,” he wrote, “the user is supplied with a unique key for accessing the content. If the user subsequently wants to sell or lend the item, they pass their unique key to the next person for their use. This process eliminates the ‘residual’ copy issue which arises when someone tries to sell a secondhand e-file.”

He went on to list a host of companies and organizations that are already developing solutions for applying blockchain to publishing, peer review, licensing, royalty accounting, and micro-transaction payments. One of these is Publica, a platform that uses blockchain and cryptocurrency tech to facilitate direct transactions between authors and readers and enable any author, publisher, store, institution, or business to use digital keys to buy, sell, trade, or lend digital books or print on demand locally.

Such a solution could certainly be used for academic course materials, including obvious intersections with the open educational resources movement.

Study Tracks When Students Zone Out

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a way to detect when students using personalized learning software start to daydream. By using machine-learning algorithms on recordings of student eye movement, the researchers were able to figure out which eye patterns were associated with the mind wandering.

The study found that when students’ eyes matched “zoning out” patterns, they were less focused on the work than those students who showed “not zoning out” patterns. It also noted that when students were paying attention, their eyes bounced around the screen more.

“When you’re zoning out, you’re just fixating,” explained Sidney D’Mello, leader of the University of Colorado research team. “You’re not moving on.”

The study could lead to instructional software that monitors mind wandering in real time. That troubles Jill Barshay, a contributing editor for The Hechinger Report who writes about education research and data.

“Do we really want to curb mind wandering?” she asked. “It’s associated with creativity, and perhaps a bit of mind wandering is needed to come up with big thoughts.”

Barshay suggested the result might be used better to point out the places where the computerized learning bores students, instead of creating prompts to keep them on track.

“But what I find fascinating about this research is how data scientists have come to a conclusion that contradicts human intuition,” she wrote. “You often hear teachers say that they don’t need data to tell them what their students know. Well, this research points out that it’s hard for teachers to know when students are really absorbing something just by looking at their faces.”

Keeping the Google Book Project Alive

Google’s grand project to digitize every single book ran into a snag when authors and publishers objected and sued. Google prevailed in court, but the project stalled and left a digital database of 25 million books that “nobody is allowed to read,” according to author and programmer James Somer.

But he’s not entirely correct.

Libraries that partnered with Google for the project kept digital copies of their scanned work, which now make up about 95% of the content in the HathiTrust Digital Library, based at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The database is used to conduct research without the fear of copyright infringement, while students with disabilities can access the scanned work through the use of assistive technology.

“We couldn’t have done it without Google,” Mary Sue Coleman, current president of the Association of American Universities, said of HathiTrust. “The fact that Google did it made things happen much more rapidly, I believe, than it would have happened if universities had been doing it without a central driving force.”

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) makes computational analysis of public-domain and copyrighted works from the collection possible. Work on copyrighted materials is done on Data Capsules, a service created by HTRC that allows for “nonconsumptive” research without violating copyright restrictions.

“I’m not a fan of everything Google, by any means,” said Paul Courant, interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and the University of Michigan. “But I think this was an amazing effort that has had lasting consequences, most of them positive.”

New Tools Foil Fraud on Online Exams

When a college student takes an online exam for an online course, who’s really sitting in the test-taker’s seat—the student who enrolled or someone else?

Potential cheating has always been a concern for online college courses. New analytical tools, according to a report in EdTech magazine, are helping institutions ensure that the person who gets credit for the course actually does the work.

By analyzing how thousands of honest students fill out an examination form, researchers can determine if a dishonest student is trying to cheat or obtained access to test questions in advance.

Other schools are attempting to prevent cheating with online proctoring services. Students must take the exam from a computer with a webcam that keeps an eye on their work during the test. In case a student is tempted to substitute an impersonator, figuring the school won’t know the difference, some services verify the person’s identity with scanned photos.

On the positive side, proctoring services also enable “the university to offer students more flexible test times, an important factor for some nontraditional students,” said the report.

Concerns about Personalized Learning

Many have jumped on the personalized-learning bandwagon because of its potential to tailor instruction to each student’s strengths and weaknesses. While the promise—and substantial funding from groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—is there, the results aren’t quite livingup to the hype.

A recent RAND Corp. study of 40 K-12 schools found that customized instruction does produce gains in test scores in math and reading, but those gains were just 3% better than average scores in a more traditional school setting. The study also noted students in personalized-learning schools who started the year academically behind did slightly better than their counterparts in traditional programs.

However, there are challenges. Finding time to develop customized lessons for each student was the most significant issue for instructors, who also had trouble finding high-quality digital resources.

“There’s a growing acknowledgement of the reality of how personalized learning actually plays out,” said Benjamin Riley, executive director of Deans for Impact, a nonprofit that focuses on teacher preparation. “Even if it were a good idea, developing a personalized-learning path for every student, in a system that has to educate tens of millions of children, might not be realistic.”

Mobile Moves Digital Educational Content

A new report on the use of digital devices and content in education predicts a big jump over the next five years, but doesn’t see print materials going away any time soon.

The report, Digital Education Publishing Market in the U.S. 2017-2021, anticipates growth of 10.68% in the U.S. across all academic sectors, including K-12, higher education, and corporate learning. All are largely fueled by the proliferation of mobile devices.

“Notebooks and desktops are being substituted by mobile devices like e-readers, smartphones, and tablets as the medium of digitized knowledge delivery in the academic sector,” according to the report’s executive summary. “They make information accessible anywhere and anytime, making the learning process more flexible, which is one of the reasons for their growing popularity.”

The report stressed that print textbooks are likely to continue for the foreseeable future despite the growth of digital content. Among the reasons, it said, is that print causes less eyestrain and readers are able to focus on a printed page better than a screen. The report also noted that the U.S. Department of Health has issued recommendations to limit the amount of time children spend utilizing electronic screens.

Most E-Book Pirates Educated, Able to Pay

Young adults aged 18-29 are responsible for swiping 41% of the $315 million in pirated e-books in the U.S. every year, according to a new Nielsen study commissioned by Digimarc. This group downloads illegal copies from torrent websites or gets them from friends.

For financial reasons—since this age cohort is often short of cash and many are still in school—you might jump to the conclusion it constitutes the largest band of e-book pirates. Actually, the study found it’s their slightly older, better-off cousins who are doing much of the stealing.

Some 47% of those downloading pirated copies are 30-44 years old and 36% earn $60,000-$99,000 annually. In fact, 29% of all digital-book pirates earn salaries of $100,000 or more and clearly could afford to pay for legitimate copies. Convenience and the allure of getting something for free were the reasons most often cited.

Almost one third of the illegal downloaders held graduate degrees.

Harvard, MIT Share Findings of MOOC Study

A study of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University researchers found registration continues to grow. The survey reported that new registrations for MOOCs average more than 1,500 people each day, while the median number of active participants for each course is nearly 8,000.

HarvardX and MITx: Four Years of Open Online Courses noted that 2.4 million unique users participated in one or more MOOCs offered by the two institutions and nearly 250,000 learner certificates were issued over the last four years. It also found that the average number of students enrolled into computer sciences courses is more than 21,000, compared to just over 7,900 for other courses, according to a report in Campus Technology.

At the same time, the study reported a significant drop in MOOC enrollment in 2016. MIT and Harvard University each had about 800,000 participants enrolled in MOOCs in 2015, but last year those numbers fell to 670,000 for MIT courses and 540,000 for HarvardX offerings.

The number of people earning certification also fell to its lowest point in the four years of the study, although the total number of certificates awarded in 2016 was higher than the number presented in the first year of the research. Researchers are concerned that the drop in participation was caused by the decision to not provide free certification for the courses.

“The typical course is smaller than it used to be, but this decrease is also steady and related to the proliferation of courses with more specialized content and smaller audiences,” Andrew Ho, a Harvard researcher who co-authored the study, told TechCrunch. “The MOOC audience continues to grow, but the number of MOOCs is growing faster. An analogy is television viewership numbers, and now we have more ‘channels’ than ever. The question now is how can audiences find the best course for them and on what merits.”

Majority of Kids Read E-Books, But Favor Print

Some studies say youngsters are reaching for more e-books while others say kids still prefer print books. Scholastic’s fifth edition of the Kids and Family Reading Report shows both.

Digital reading is indeed on the rise with children of all ages, the study found. In 2010, just 25% of kids had read an e-book. That jumped to 61% in 2016. However, of those who had read an e-book, 77% conceded most of the books they read are still on paper.

Even more, it appears kids don’t expect print books to go away any time soon as 65% agreed they will “always want to read books in print even though there are e-books available,” according to the report.

Nevertheless, some companies think device-happy youngsters are ripe for digital reading material. Amazon just released a new mobile app, dubbed Rapids, that enables kids to read age-appropriate short stories on their mobile devices, including an option to read the dialogue as text messages between characters.

Intended for children aged 7-12, Rapids includes an audio component so they can read along while listening to the story. Rapids’ stories are available as a paid monthly subscription (not included with Prime membership).

Readers Still Prefer Printed Books

Digital content continues to lag behind a good, old-fashioned printed book in readers’ preference, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. The study found that 65% of Americans said they read a print book over the last 12 months, while just 28% read an e-book and 14% listened to an audiobook.

More than 70% of Americans reported reading a book in the last year, a number that has remained consistent since 2012. Almost 35% said they read an e-book or listened to an audiobook in the last year, but just 6% said they only read digital content.

E-book readership did increase by 11 percentage points between 2011-2014, but numbers have not changed since. The survey, conducted last March, also found that 19% of Americans under the age of 50 have used a cellphone to read a book and just 8% said they used a dedicated e-reader.

“While print remains at the center of the book-reading landscape as a whole, there has been a distinct shift in the e-book landscape over the last five years,” wrote the authors of the report. “Americans increasingly turn to multipurpose devices such as smartphones and tablet computers—rather than dedicated e-readers—when they engage with e-book content. The share of e-book readers on tablets has more than tripled since 2011 and the number of readers on phones has more than doubled over that time, when the share reading on e-book reading devices has not changed.”

Students Go to Court over Online Program

The number of academic leaders who view online learning as on par with face-to-face instruction fell from 71% in 2014 to 63% in 2015, according to the Online Report Card—Tracking Online Education in the United States. Just 29% of the administrators surveyed said faculty members accepted the value of online education, the lowest percentage since 2004.

A group of students is challenging the idea of online education in court, suing George Washington University for the quality of its online master’s degree program in security and safety leadership. The students allege the program failed to provide the same level of instruction and interaction as the traditional classroom version of the program. The suit claims instructors were unresponsive and barely involved in facilitating the student-center coursework.

The suit also refers to a May 2013 letter to the university president signed by 11 students complaining about the quality of the program. The university issued an apology at the time, but has done nothing more about the online course, according to a report from Inside Higher Education.

“The misrepresentations are designed to present the program as something that is not: a credible, longstanding program, with courses and content specifically designed for the online learning environment,” the complaint reads. “In reality, at the time the plaintiffs applied for the online program, there were not graduates to the program and the ‘content’ mostly consisted of scanned-in PDFs of textbooks (with blurry pages and sentences cut off) and PowerPoint slides taken from in-class courses, without any narration or explication.”

Most Schools Now Use Digital Content

Some college store professionals believe digital content will only become a dominant format when students begin using it in grade school. That day has gotten much closer.

Digital Content Goes to School: Trends in K-12 Classroom e-Learning found that 80% of school and district leaders who responded to the survey said they are using digital content in some way. Of more than 2,000 respondents, 73% had a digital-device strategy and 64% are using digital content with that strategy.

The survey, released by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and content distributor OverDrive Inc., also reported that most educators use digital content for English and language arts (74%), science (62%), math (61%), and social studies (56%), according to a report in eSchool News. Respondents added that use of digital content will continue to grow as long as teachers receive professional development.

Equity concerns and lack of Internet access top the list of issues educators have with going digital. Teachers also listed not being comfortable with digital learning, not enough devices in the classroom, lack of funding, and content that doesn’t work on every device as other concerns.

“We believe the paradigm of instruction needs to change,” Kahle Charles, executive director of curriculum, St. Vrain Valley School, Longmont, CO, said in response to the survey. “Devices bring more knowledge to students’ fingertips than the teacher can give, so the traditional lecture model is no longer applicable. We want content that will engage students and the ability to introduce flipped classrooms with content that students can access at any time, at any place.”

Ohio Defunds Education Clearinghouse

Ohio has funded an online repository of free educational resources since 2007. Next year, teachers will have to find the content themselves after the state legislature elected to stop funding the Distance Learning Clearinghouse.

Funding was cut in half, to $500,000, last year. The Ohio State University, Columbus, which operated the clearinghouse, has taken no position on the elimination of funding, but did prepare a report which estimated that 82% of the schools in the state had used the resource in some way. The clearinghouse has more than 12,000 lessons in key subject areas, more than 950 reviews of online courses, and more than 1,000 professional-development lessons for teachers, according to a report from The Columbus Dispatch that appeared in eSchool News.

“They’ll have to go to Google and try to do their own reviews,” Janet Herrelko, a math-education professor at the University of Dayton, said of instructors who previously used the clearinghouse as a resource. “It will take a lot longer for them to understand it. If you try to skim this material, you could miss problems with it.”

State politics may also be involved since a liberal advocacy group has charged the administration of Gov. John Kasich used the program to steer contracts toward a major Republican donor. One of the contracts provided an online interface that critics said didn’t work and that most users bypassed.

Pindex Launched as 'Pinterest for Education'

A new social media site launched in February allows users to collect educational materials on pinboards. If the concept sounds familiar, Pindex bills itself as a “Pinterest for education.”

“I started Pindex out of frustration with the dull, dry material my 10-year-old daughter would bring home from school,” John Leaver, one of the co-founders of the startup, told British newspaper The Telegraph. “Making every topic engaging is a huge task—too much for any one person. Pindex enables teachers and professors to share their best materials. Working together like this is the only way to solve the problem.”

On the site, a bookmark button captures content from the web and adds it to the users’ “boards.” Instructors can post quizzes on the boards and visitors can earn grades on the tests, according to a report from Campus Technology. One of the co-founders of Pindex is British actor and writer Stephen Fry, who narrates videos for the site.

Topics already on the site range from Fry’s video on the Large Hadron Collider to drones, robots, and colonizing Mars. As the site grows, the founders expect the Pindex library to collect more content from educators and researchers.

“At a time when it is easy to lose faith in an online world that seems to center around trolling, bullying, hating, trivializing, and belittling, it is worth remembering the incredible power of the Internet to inform and educate, lucidly and entertainingly,” Fry said.

Production Trumps Consumption

One conundrum in the digital education world is consumption vs. production, according to Inside Higher Ed’s tech blogger Joshua Kim. Consuming content is more convenient on mobile devices, while producing that content is easier on a laptop or desktop computer.

“What this means for education, I think, is that we need to design our content primarily for mobile,” Kim wrote. “Anything that has to do with consumption will occur on a small touchscreen. Our text, presentations, and videos all need to be designed mobile first.”

However, don’t toss the laptop just yet. The keyboard makes the device much more important in the digital world because keyboards on mobile devices are simply too small to be useful. And, to Kim, writing remains at the heart of education.

“After having spent a few weeks with the new $169 iPad Pro Smart Keyboard (the combined case and keyboard), I can tell you that it is not something that you will want to use for any serious writing,” he wrote. “We should be suspicious of any education program that is mobile-only. Mobile-first, sure, but not mobile-only. Any good postsecondary program should stress production over consumption.”

Students Do Just as Well Using OER

Studies continue to find students saying they prefer printed textbooks over online course materials. New research, though, has found the type of course material may not matter all that much.

The study by Brigham Young University and the Michigan State Department of Education reported students who used open educational resources (OER) online did just as well or better than those assigned commercial printed textbooks. The findings compared the success rates of 5,000 students using digital OER to a control group of 11,000 students using traditional textbooks enrolled in 15 undergraduate courses.

Researchers found no significant difference between the groups when it came to completing a course. In the area of passing with a grade of C- or better, both groups passed at the same rates in nine of the courses while digital OER students did better than the control group in five other courses. In the 15th course, students using printed textbooks did better than those using digital content.

The average credit load for the OER students was 13 in the fall and 11 for the winter, while commercial textbook users averaged 11 credit hours in the fall and nine for the winter. Students using OER enrolled in more credit courses the following semester as well, according to a report in Campus Technology.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars and person-hours have been invested in improving in-class instructional designs, intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive instructional systems, and other design-related innovations intended to improve student outcomes,” the researchers wrote. “The current study demonstrates that at least one noninstructional design option exists that can effectively improve student outcomes.”

Online Learning Perception Gap Remains

The gap between what administrators and faculty members think about the quality of online education has widened, according to the 2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology. However, the groups do agree that textbooks are too expensive.

The survey, conducted by Gallup, of 2,175 faculty members and 105 administrators found that 63% of faculty members and 84% of administrators said they believe investment in educational technology is money well spent. At the same time, just 20% of faculty and 17% of administrators have seen significant gains in student outcomes.

Just 17% of responding faculty members said for-credit online courses have student outcomes at least equivalent to those taught in person, down from 26% in the 2014 survey. The numbers for administrators were much more positive, as 62% said online courses were of the same quality as in-person classes. That number rises to 88% if the course is being offered at the administrator’s institution.

When it comes to course materials, 93% of faculty and 98% of administrators said they believe they are too expensive. Open educational resources (OER) get high marks, with 92% of faculty and 97% of administrators agreeing that instructors should assign such content more often. However, Inside Higher Ed has also conducted research that found many faculty members have never heard of OER, and those who have don’t know where to find such materials.

“These new data from Gallup make it clear that faculty understand the problems with textbooks and other commercial course materials and are very positive of OER,” said David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning. “Both moves significantly decrease students’ cost to graduate while increasing faculty’s pedagogical flexibility.”