8th January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
In 2011 a friend of mine, and a fellow at Oxford University, told me what he thought the future held for university education. At the time he was based at Christchurch College, one of the richest colleges in Oxford, and yet could see them struggling to maintain the standards of which they have been so proud for so many years. The money had gone out of higher education, or, maybe more accurately, the pot was now being shared among many more universities and many more students than ever before.
The government had recently announced that, from September 2012, students would have to pay for tuition fees themselves, and it had become clear that many UK universities were planning to charge the maximum allowable for tuition fees, £9,000. My friend said that he felt the natural conclusion would be more demanding students; 18 year olds who expected much more bang for their buck. His prediction was that we would see the advent of private universities, which could offer online courses, and online tuition for a fraction of the price one would have to pay to sit in a lecture hall for 5 hours a week, and meet their tutor 4 times a term.
Fast forward 2 years, and it seems like an unerringly accurate prediction. The only surprising thing is that Harvard and MIT were the first universities to offer online courses, because the US hasn’t seen the kind of radical change in university funding that the UK has in the last 2 years. In any case, the recent announcement by a collection of UK universities, that they plan to run freely available courses online, shows their commitment to, and understanding of, the way that higher education is changing.
The question that remains is: for how long can universities offer the online courses as relatively insignificant contributions to the wider qualification of a degree? The contention at the moment is that it is difficult to tutor and assess students learning a course 1,000 miles away from their chosen institution, but for how long will that last? It’s easy to tutor someone online, and at a fraction of the cost of doing so face-to-face.
I think it’s simply a question of starting slowly. The universities which have taken that first leap into cyber-degrees don’t want to offer complete degrees online immediately because they have no idea what the response will be like. However, I can’t believe it will be long before the first full degree available through online study, and at a fraction of the tuition fees that we see now. When that happens, other institutions will have to offer the same thing if they hope to compete.