Nearly 12 million post-secondary students in the United States take some or all of their classes online right now. But this number will skyrocket to more than 22 million in the next five years, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight.
According to Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins, already some 1.25 million students in higher education programs take all of their classes online, while another 10.65 take some of their classes online. The two groups are still outnumbered by students who take all of their courses in physical classrooms, which Ambient Insight reckoned at 15.14 million as of 2009.
But this situation will change drastically by 2014, at which time, Adkins forecast, only 5.14 million students will take all of their courses in a physical classroom, while 3.55 million will take all of their classes online, and 18.65 million will take some of their classes online.
The information was presented in a Webinar that coincided with a new report from Ambient Insight focusing on the growth of the electronic learning market (in terms of dollars spent on products and services) from 2009 to 2014. Titled "US Self-paced eLearning Market," the new report highlighted some of the dominant segments in online learning. Of the individual segments spotlighted in the research, healthcare was projected to see the most growth over the next five years. But K-12 and higher education growth followed in second and third position, respectively, for a combined academic projected growth percentage greater than that of healthcare. K-12 was projected to grow about 18 percent by 2014; higher education was projected to grow more than 8 percent. Healthcare was projected to grow a little less than 20 percent over the next five years.
"The rate of growth in the academic segments," said Ambient CEO Tyson Greer, in a prepared statement, "is due in part to the success and proliferation of the for-profit online schools."
Across all segments, the market for electronic learning products and services, at present, is $16.7 billion. According to the report, this will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4 percent over the next five years to $23.8 billion in 2014.
"In the past two years, the rate of growth for online learning products has slowed," Adkins wrote in a statement. "Yet, despite the recession, and in many cases, because of it, the demand is positive in all the online learning buyer segments....."
An executive summary of Ambient Insight's report, "US Self-paced eLearning Market," can be found here. The full report runs $4,825. Ambient will also be releasing a worldwide report on electronic learning in November. We'll have more information about that when it becomes available.
If you've ever learned a foreign language, you know the vast difference between completing workbook activities and speaking with others. The latter experience can involve sounding out unfamiliar accents or guttural pronunciations and, though intimidating, is ultimately more rewarding. By immersing yourself in a language and navigating through situations, you learn how to speak and eventually think in that language.
Rosetta Stone has long used visual learning without translations by pairing words with images —one of the ways a baby learns to speak. For the past week, I've been testing its newest offering: Rosetta Stone Totale (pronounced toe-tall-A), which is the company's first fully Web-based language-learning program. It aims to immerse you in a language using three parts: online coursework that can take up to 150 hours; live sessions in which you can converse over the Web with a native-speaking coach and other students; and access to Rosetta World, a Web-based community where you can play language games by yourself or with other students to improve your skills.
Totale costs a whopping $999, so if you aren't serious about learning a language it's a tough sell. Rosetta Stone says this program is comparable to an in-country language-immersion school. The company's most expensive offering before Totale was a set of CDs (lessons one, two and three) that cost $549, included about 120 hours of course work and had no online components.
The Totale Package
Since Totale is Web-based it doesn't come loaded onto several disks in a yellow box like the company's previous products. But despite this digital transition, buyers of Totale will still receive Rosetta's familiar yellow box, now filled with a USB headset and supplemental audio discs for practicing away from the PC—mostly while in the car.
I've spent over eight hours learning French in Totale throughout the past week, and I have to say that I'm surprised by how much I feel I've already learned. I realized this when I spent a 30-minute car ride listening to one of the supplemental audio CDs. I mentally identified and translated practically every vocabulary word and phrase, and I repeated the words aloud with what I thought sounded like a pretty decent French accent. This was after just four hours of work online.
Intensive Coursework
The core of Totale is the time-intensive online coursework. But even though this takes a lot of effort, its layout is attractive and each screen has only a few things on it so it doesn't feel overwhelming. Lessons include identifying photos of objects or situations as they are described aloud, writing phrases (my least favorite part), and using deductive reasoning to construct and dictate your own sentences about a photo. Totale's headset comes in handy during exercises that require you to repeat words or sounds out loud into the microphone.
Activities in Rosetta World—including solo, two-person and group games—were addictively fun. One game plays like Bingo: I listened to someone speaking French and marked words on the board as I heard them, racing to get five words horizontally, vertically or diagonally before my opponent beat me to it. I waded into these games cautiously at first, playing alone before I got familiar enough to challenge another Totale user.
Helpful indicators show how many people are available at any given time for each type of game in Rosetta World—meaning that person is logged into Totale and studying the same language as you. I never saw more than five people in the community, and it gets a little old playing (or worse, losing) to the same person after a while. Since Totale was only recently released, this community should grow over time.
A chat window at the bottom left of the browser window reminded me of Facebook's built-in instant-messaging program, listing users against whom I competed in online games. But unlike when I'm on Facebook, I didn't feel comfortable instant messaging with these people.
No Flashcards
Rosetta Stone's methods, while natural and easy to pick up, aren't what my brain expects when learning a different language. I minored in Spanish in college, learning in traditional classroom style by studying verb conjugations on flashcards and vocabulary definitions in English. So at certain times throughout Totale's French-only lessons, a part of me wanted to know the exact definition of a phrase or the reasoning behind why something was the way it was.
The moment of truth came when I attended a real-time, 50-minute studio session online with one of the live coaches—all of whom are native speakers—and two other students (four students is the maximum allowed per class).
Rosetta Stone recommends that students complete an entire unit before joining one of these studio sessions, and the only language you are permitted to speak during the studio is the one being studied. I proudly remembered all of my new vocabulary words as our coach pointed the cursor to animals, colors and clothing, asking us questions and prompting us to ask one another questions. The coach kindly corrected us when we made mistakes, made jokes about words and used an on-screen tool to type out a few of the harder phrases.
But I fumbled around trying to remember the correct phrases and grammar to go along with my vocabulary.
I frustratingly realized that I didn't even know how to ask my coach in French, "Why is that blanc and not blanche?" Our coach eventually answered that question and some others without anyone's prompting because it was obvious that none of us knew what forms of some words were right or why; Totale's coursework doesn't include explanations. A few of the phrases our coach explained still puzzled me and I was starting to miss my flashcards from Spanish class.
Team Effort
Rosetta Stone is determined to make sure you don't feel like you're alone as you work through the Totale program. A "Customer Success Team" representative calls you within a day of your product purchase to answer any questions or concerns about how everything works. And this team keeps calling or emailing (you tell them which contact method you prefer) whenever you have passed a milestone in the program—or to encourage you to pick it up again if you haven't logged on in a while.
Even for $999, you can go back in and re-use every feature in Totale, but only for one year. You can reset your scores and completely start over, attending online studios again and playing games in Rosetta World as many times as you like. But once a year is up, you're finished with the program.
Rosetta Stone Totale works on all major Mac and Windows PC browsers, though participating in a studio session while using some browsers requires you turn off their pop-up blockers.
I still have work to do in Totale, but I'm looking forward to it—even though I find some aspects to be a bit vague. This program does a terrific job of immersing you in a language and may be the next best thing to living in a country, surrounded by native speakers. Best of all, unlike my semester abroad in Spain where college friends gave me my daily fix of the English language, Totale never lets you slip out of using the language you're studying.
—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com.
The average cost of yearly tuition at a private, four-year college in the US this year was $25,143, and for public schools, students could expect to pay $6,585 on average for the 2008-09 school year, according to the College Board. That was up 5.9% and 6.4% respectively over the previous year, which is well ahead of the national average rate of inflation. What that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero?
Of course, quality education will always have costs involved — professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can’t learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further.
The University of the People
One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas.
The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they’re ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student’s country of origin, and never exceed $100.
Right now, the University only teaches two courses, information technology and business administration, which school founder Shai Reshef says are the two most useful degrees for finding a job around the world. Of course, the school is not yet accredited and can’t yet confer degrees, but applying for proper accreditation is planned.
Each week, students log onto to the school’s web site to attend a lecture, following which they can discuss the subject matter with other students (asynchronously due to time differences), download course materials, get help from other students or volunteer professors, or take tests to advance to the next course unit. Tests will be automatically graded, or peer-reviewed by multiple other students.
“It’s not for everyone,” said Reshef at an education event earlier this year. “You need to know English, you need to have a computer… our assumption [is that the students will be from] the upper end of the lower class or the lower end of the middle class… it’s people who almost made it… who could have been at the university but missed their chance.”
The administration of US President Barack Obama is reportedly also considering the merits of establishing a free online university. According to draft discussion documents obtained by Inside Higher Ed in June, the administration has had high level discussions about creating courses aimed at community college attendees that would be delivered online for free. According to the report, the government is considering a $50 million per year budget to “pay for (and own) courses that would be free for all, as well as setting up a system to assess learning in those courses.”
“According to the draft materials from the administration, the program would support the development of 20-25 “high quality” courses a year, with a mix of high school and community college courses. Initial preference would go to “career oriented” courses. The courses would be owned by the government and would be free for anyone to take. Courses would be selected competitively, through peer review, for support. And the courses would be “modular” or “object based” such that they would be “interoperable” and could be offered with a variety of technology platforms.” — Inside Higher Ed
A College Education for Free: OpenCourseWare
In April 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed something unheard of in the pages of the New York Times. They said that they would begin putting their entire course catalog — some 2,000 courses — online, for free, over the course of an ambitious ten year initiative at the cost of up to $100 million. The following year, in October 2002, the first fifty courses went up on their OpenCourseWare site. Nearly 7 years later, MIT is nearing its goal, with about 1,900 free courses available through the OpenCourseWare program, and materials now routinely posted on other social media sites, including YouTube (), Flickr (), and iTunes U.
In fact, the OpenCourseWare initiative (or its ideas) has spread to over 200 institutions of higher education around the world, including Yale (not technically OCW, but the same idea), Nortre Dame, Tufts, and the Stanford School of Engineering (also not technically OCW).
OpenCourseWare doesn’t confer degrees, but it allows anyone to audit classes at some of the world’s most prestigious institutes of higher education for only the cost of bandwidth. However, because OpenCourseWare course materials are released under a Creative Commons license that essentially allows for the materials to be shared and remixed for non-commercial purposes with attribution, it’s easy to imagine that they could someday be used by institutions like the University of the People or Obama’s theoretical online community college as part of a degree granting program.
Of course, OpenCourseWare isn’t free — or even cheap. Stanford estimates that the cost of putting courses online runs between $10,000 and $15,000 per course — and courses with video content cost twice that. However, beyond the initial outlay to get the courses created and put online, the price of delivering them to the public is only the cost of bandwidth, which is close to free.
A Radical Idea: Free Textbooks
According to the College Board, the average cost of textbooks and supplies for a college student attending a four-year college in the US is $1,077. But what if textbooks were free? What if printed course materials were made open and available online at no charge? How would that change the game?
The Wikibooks project, which began in 2003, aims to create open source, CC-licensed textbooks written by volunteers. The site now contains over 38,000 pages of free textbooks, but unfortunately many of the books remain incomplete. Like Wikipedia (a more well-known project from the same foundation), entries are only completed as volunteers have time, and quality assurance is potentially spotty.
Perhaps a more sustainable model is Flat World Knowledge, which offers free, CC-licensed textbooks and study materials, but charges a fee for paper copies. The Flat World Knowledge books are written by expert authors that have been vetted by the company and generally have advanced degrees, are professors, or have practical experience in their field. The books are licensed under the same permissive Creative Commons license as the OpenCourseWare materials.
Flat World Knowledge books are currently in use at a number of universities, including Eastern Michigan University, the University of Rhode Island, the State University of New York system, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Sam Houston State University, and others.
Conclusion
The marginal cost of education is being driven toward zero due to social media and innovative approaches to online learning like OpenCourseWare, Flat World Knowledge, and the University of the People. That’s because the nature of information is such that it can be created once at cost and distributed and consumed over and over again for free.
“Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good,” wrote venture capitalist Brad Burnham in May. “If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.”
So in the future, the cost of education might be free, or nearly free, which could just level the playing field.
Great Decisions 2009 Spring Updates provide up-to-date news about Great Decisions 2009 articles. Download the Updates and distribute them to your discussion group participants!
The Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL) Virtual Campus is a web-based resource center and online community for the EHL education program.
The website's function is to help teachers as they introduce the basic principles of international humanitarian law to students in secondary schools. A wide range of teaching resources is available on the website, such as learning modules, workshops, training videos, a Teacher's Resources section, and an online discussion forum.
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The average cost of yearly tuition at a private, four-year college in the US this year was $25,143, and for public schools, students could expect to pay $6,585 on average for the 2008-09 school year, 
