One recent article in particular caught my eye: an essay by Dr. Christopher Newfield from UC Santa Barbara, published in Inside Higher Education.
Dr. Newfield suggests that "[t]he two entities together will spend about $3.1 million running a program for an estimated 200 students in the first semester. This comes to around $15,700 per year per enrolled student. The figure is close to what the University of California Office of the President says it spends educating all UC students averaged together."
This analysis is misleading. The bulk of the initial costs arise from course digitization costs, and they are amortized over many years and a much larger number of students. The limited enrollment of 200 in Year 1 is a precautionary step so we can debug the program and improve it before opening it up more broadly. Even with just 2,000 students taking these classes, the amortized content costs will run a factor of ten lower than projected in the budget.
The budget's up-front costs cover content digitization, not platform development, as the contract clearly states. In reference to the digitization costs, Dr. Newfield writes, "[b]ut Udacity is supposed to have already solved higher education’s 'cost disease' with its technology. We’ll note that Year 1 is not plug-and-play."
Think about what his statement entails. Should a top-notch Masters degree really be the result of throwing together and repackaging existing course content? Georgia Tech, Udacity, and AT&T are committed to the highest quality of education. Digitization of content incurs costs. This is not just about translating and putting an offline course online, but transforming existing course content such that is developed specifically for the medium and for the online learning experience.
- More Here by Sebastian
Dr. Newfield suggests that "[t]he two entities together will spend about $3.1 million running a program for an estimated 200 students in the first semester. This comes to around $15,700 per year per enrolled student. The figure is close to what the University of California Office of the President says it spends educating all UC students averaged together."
This analysis is misleading. The bulk of the initial costs arise from course digitization costs, and they are amortized over many years and a much larger number of students. The limited enrollment of 200 in Year 1 is a precautionary step so we can debug the program and improve it before opening it up more broadly. Even with just 2,000 students taking these classes, the amortized content costs will run a factor of ten lower than projected in the budget.
The budget's up-front costs cover content digitization, not platform development, as the contract clearly states. In reference to the digitization costs, Dr. Newfield writes, "[b]ut Udacity is supposed to have already solved higher education’s 'cost disease' with its technology. We’ll note that Year 1 is not plug-and-play."
Think about what his statement entails. Should a top-notch Masters degree really be the result of throwing together and repackaging existing course content? Georgia Tech, Udacity, and AT&T are committed to the highest quality of education. Digitization of content incurs costs. This is not just about translating and putting an offline course online, but transforming existing course content such that is developed specifically for the medium and for the online learning experience.
- More Here by Sebastian
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