Will ‘Moocs’ bring down price of the Ivy League?

Will the rise of higher education in the US and elsewhere be curtailed by the expansion of Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) that allow people to study digitally rather than attend lectures and classes? Some surprising people think so.

One of them is Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told a panel in Davos organised by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, that he didn’t think institutions such as MIT could keep charging $40,000 a year for tuition in the digital world.

Mr Reif said the costs of undergraduate education split into board and lodging, lectures and seminars, and project and laboratory work. The lectures might be replaced in future by online education.

“Once classes are replaced by online courses, will they still be able to charge £40k for projects and labs. The answer is I don’t think so,” he told the panel.

The panel included a 12-year old Pakistani girl, Khadija Niazi, who had taken an astrophysics course, offered online by Udacity, a start-up founded by Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford university and former Google executive.

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard and a former US Treasury secretary, said that Moocs could be “profoundly transformative”. It was “insane for calculus to be taught 10,000 times in 10,000 different classes. We are on the way to it being taught by fewer people better”.

But Bill Gates, whose foundation funds some Mooc courses, was more sceptical. He said participation rates were still very low, despite them being offered free and the knowledge they offered had always been available through textbooks.

Back to the list