A college revolution, online

Stanford University offered Introduction to Artificial Intelligence online for free last fall, with graded assignments and statements of accomplishment on offer for non-Stanford students.

More than 160,000 people signed up.

So it’s not too much of a stretch to say technology is going to transform higher education — probably even UNC.

Traditional college education, the American way, is already under attack. It’s expensive, no matter who pays for it. It’s elitist.

And one-third of students, according to one major survey, spend more hours drinking than actually studying.

But at the same time, we couch our hopes for America’s future on college education.

We see it in government policy: According to President Obama, college is “an economic imperative that every family has to be able to afford.” It’s because that’s the way “America can out-compete countries around the world.”

(And on the other side of the aisle, Romney agrees that everyone should be able to “attend a college that best suits their needs.”)

These discussions idolize college experiences like our own here at UNC. Online or vocational options are valued, but matriculation rates to four-year institutions are what Teach for America wants to raise.

So there’s a consensus that traditional college is crucial, for individual success and for ensuring the success for the nation as a whole.

But most students don’t experience a discursive liberal arts experience. And compared with large lecture hall learning, online options need not be dismissed as inferior anymore.

Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor with 160,000 students last semester, is co-founder of Udacity, which offers free eight-week online courses matched to top university curricula.

And Udacity is just one of many high quality innovative options.

There’s Khan Academy, an educational non-profit which aims to teach students “almost anything for free.” Their videos — on subjects like differential calculus — have been watched a total of 139 million times, and are combined with “challenges” to facilitate assessments of learning. And there are others, including TED-Ed, Udemy, and Coursera.

There’s no shortage of ambition: When Wired Magazine interviewed Thrun, he said he thinks that in 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education.

You don’t have to agree with Thrun to think about how this affects — and empowers — UNC.

Given dwindling or at best stagnant state funding, the mantra for public institutions is “doing more with less.”

It’s already motivating the UNC-system Board of Governors to think about expanding online offerings to cut “bricks and mortar” costs and using technology to combine courses across campuses.

But the lesson from Udacity and Khan Academy is that this is about more than just online classrooms and message boards.

Though there’s a cost in creating a structure to effectively offer instruction, the best teaching can be scaled at an extremely low marginal cost ­— the total funding of Khan Academy is just $15 million, a fraction of UNC’s budget.

And who knows? Perhaps the majority of the benefits of UNC could truly be extended to the people of the state free of charge, as the state constitution provides.