Foreign Perspectives

With university education fees soaring in England, it’s fortunate that a number of alternatives are appearing on the scene.

For a number of years now, major universities (mainly American) have offered a range of free courses through various means. For example, Yale’s Open Yale offering includes a few dozen courses from a range of faculties in the form of videos of the courses along with book lists, exam papers, etc. You could follow the courses completely pretty much as though you were there, albeit without the feedback from the professor and the interaction with the students. That’s typical of first-generation online offerings: you’re pretty much on your own. Also, without any kind of assessment, working through them isn’t going to count for anything on, for example a CV. That does not mean that they’re useless because they can be very useful indeed eg to give you a taster of a subject or to provide more background.

One step up from that is OpenLearn from the Open University. That’s also been running for a number of years but is quite different from the Yale offering. This is from a distance learning university and offers extracts from a wide range of their courses. You can either do these on your own or register to access forums relating to the course segments on offer. Again there are videos, texts, etc. but the downside is that these are course segments rather than complete courses; typically you’ll get a chapter from a short course or a couple of chapters from a longer one. Again, the lack of assessment brings with it the same problems as the first-generation of these courses.

Seriously upping the ante are EdX and Coursera. These offer a range of free short courses, with assessment and even certificates of achievement at the end from a range of major league universities. Sounds perfect, but the certificates don’t count towards a university qualification. That said, these are far from worthless if the comments are anything to go by and it’s likely that there would be some recognition of the work undertaken where it was applicable.

At present, none of the free alternatives discussed here offers a full-scale university education accompanied by the formal recognition of that, but that time can’t be overly far off. The main issue at present is that the courses on offer are almost entirely first year courses with little or no pre-requisites. That’s good in that you can dive straight into, say, a history of the American revolution but it’s bad in that they’re nearly all introductory. Having said that, it’s early days with all of these and with the number of students involved in EdX it seems quite likely that second and third year courses will eventually emerge.

Who knows, perhaps four or five years from now, someone, somewhere will have amassed the equivalent of a full-scale university degree with all the certificates to prove it along the way. Their only problem then might be that it would be a degree with units from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, London, etc. and not enough courses from any one of those to justify them graduating that first student to do it, which wouldn’t seem quite right