New partnership offers more MOOCs for credit


Thomas Edison State College has partnered with the Saylor Foundation to create flexible pathways for adult learners through MOOCs.

As massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to garner mass appeal and enable college access to thousands across the world, colleges are beginning to search for options to gain returns on their investments. Thomas Edison State College (TESC) in Trenton, N.J., might have an answer.

TESC is designed exclusively for self-directed adults and provides flexible learning opportunities for them wherever they live or work.

The college recently teamed with the Saylor Foundation, a nonprofit organization that hires professors to locate and organize open educational resources (OERs) and mold them into structured course formats. As of press time, Saylor has built more than 270 free, self-paced online courses.

As part of the agreement, Saylor will identify its most popular courses in which students have expressed a strong desire to earn credit, and TESC will create exams and assessments for those courses so that students might be eligible for credit.

Marc Singer, vice provost of the college’s Center for the Assessment of Learning, said the school is looking forward to the opportunity as traditional higher-education models evolve.

“We are in the midst of the latest paradigm shift in higher education and look forward to leveraging our expertise in assessment to help our students to take advantage of it,” he said.

(Next page: Courses that will be assessed for credit—and next steps in the partnership)

In December, TESC announced a $100,000 investment in developing competency-based degree programs that leverage MOOCs to create new pathways to degree completion for adult students.

“We are grateful for the foundation’s support and excited to create new options for adult learners that combine our expertise in assessment and the rapid increase of open, online learning opportunities,” said Singer.

The college plans to focus first on creating assessments for six Saylor courses: Introduction to Comparative Politics; World History in the Early Modern and Modern Eras (1600-Present); Management Information Systems; Negotiations and Conflict Management; Introduction to Mechanical Engineering; and Thermodynamics.

“We’re enormously pleased to see more of our courses take shape as pathways to affordable college credit and equally pleased to see TESC embracing the OERs as a basis for a credentialed education,” said Devon Ritter, special projects administrator for the Saylor Foundation. “We’re grateful to be able to translate cooperation into meaningful opportunity for our students.”

Looking forward, TESC plans to map Saylor’s open courses to its degree programs.

“We will provide students who complete these open courses the opportunity to earn credit and apply that credit to our degree programs,” said Singer. “This creates new pathways that enable students to demonstrate the learning they acquired in open courses while our expertise in assessing learning that occurs outside a college setting enables the college to [maintain] its standards of academic excellence.”

More colleges are partnering with nonprofits and for-profits to produce business models for MOOCs and generate ideas about how to best monetize MOOCs. Last month, nine universities announced plans to pilot MOOC2Degree, a program that offers students free access to MOOCs for credit in hopes of increasing college enrollment and accessibility.

Follow Assistant Editor Sarah Langmead on Twitter at @eCN_Sarah.

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