From The Washington Post
After gaining legitimacy, can online higher education replace traditional college?
By Jeffrey J. Selingo
For much of their modern existance, distance-education courses have suffered from an image problem....
But then the negative headwinds facing online education began to shift, and quickly. The big reason? Name-brand and elite universities suddenly became interested in digital learning.
In 2012, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT all announced bold efforts to offer online courses to the masses for free with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from new technology start-ups, Coursera and edX. Several top-tier schools, including the University of North Carolina, Georgetown University, and Berkeley, put several of their graduate programs online through 2U, an education technology company....
“The elites realized that if they didn’t go online, someone else would and win in this space,” said Chip Paucek, co-founder and CEO of 2U, which is based in Landover, Md. “A sleeping giant is awakening online in the form of elite colleges.”...
“We focused on the student experience, on the teaching, so the outcomes for graduates are excellent, which is where the for-profits failed,” Paucek said.... Nearly half of the graduates from Berkeley’s data science program report they were promoted in their jobs after completing the program....