<p>Stanford is clearly piloting the concept of ‘on-line courses,’ as are several other schools with ‘brand names’ that could potentially command dollars for this. Apparently they had 150,000 students world-wide who registered for the three classes (all tech, as I recall). Of that number, 30,000 actually completed the courses, which were free at this time. The courses consisted of lectures, with self-administered quizzes and tests, and the use of a social network (forgot which one) for Q&A after the lectures. Etchemendy compared it to selling textbooks - anyone can buy a prof’s textbook and use it in their course, so why not the lecture, tests and quizzes? He made a point of observing that this also meant that the prof who was teaching the course to actual, paying Stanford students could spend class time discussing the material in more detail, answering questions and working through examples - teaching, instead of lecturing. The three course pilot is apparently sufficiently successful for them to expand to 10 free on-line courses this year. </p>
<p>I’m interested to see if they eventually offer students course credit for completing the courses (including pass the tests) for a fee. On-line testing in a controlled environment is certainly feasible, as it’s already being done for other exams. Its possible too that if someone completed a series of on-line courses, they could actually receive a Stanford degree - although Etchemendy didn’t say that was where they were going. But, it’s an interesting business model to think about…</p>
<p>Etchemendy didn’t explicitly talk about the organizations created by current Stanford profs to continue and expand this activity, so I don’t know if the pilot he discussed was in partnership, or affiliated with one of these organizations.</p>