Massive open online courses (MOOCs), already controversial in higher education, have been thrown into California?s political arena. A state senator who believes that online courses, even if taught by ?providers outside the state's higher-education system,? should be given credit by several universities in California:
Democratic senator Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, California has introduced Senate Bill 520, which is designed to augment two other bills he offered in 2012 that intends to establish a statewide system designed to implement the availability of lower level courses and student access to high-quality, digital textbooks for first and second year courses credited by the University of California, the California Community Colleges and California State University. Senator Steinberg is especially interested in advancing the viability of online higher education as a whole due to ongoing research that shows online courses can significantly lower failure rates of students enrolled in entry-level courses as well as prevent ?bottleneck? conditions that may inhibit the ability of students to take certain classes that are necessary for obtaining a degree.
Here are a few key points from the proposed bill:
- Provide a list of lower-division classes that are considered oversubscribed and difficult to access.
- Allow students to enroll online in these courses when such courses are unavailable from a traditional college or university.
- Offer students access to a state-level pool of approved courses that would provide full academic credit at CCC, UC or CSU.
Read Online Higher Education Receives Support from Senate Bill 520 from the San Francisco Chronicle.
This bill raises some questions. For starters, what is the process for certifying these classes, and should colleges have to accept credits for online classes? As Lee Gardner and Jeffrey R. Young wrote in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education, the devil could be in the details. Here are a few more questions they want answered:
- Who will approve the courses?
- What role will faculty members really have?
- Will student financial aid apply to paid online courses?
- How will the revenue collected by the companies benefit the colleges? The students?
These issues will have to be answered if MOOCs are to move beyond free, online platforms and into traditional colleges.
Let us know what you think of Senate Bill 520.
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