This month, Houston’s Rice University started offering a free online Advanced Placement biology class for anyone who has access to the Internet. That means high school students from Indiana to Indonesia could all be learning the fundamentals of homeostasis at the same time in the same virtual classroom this fall.
The course, which is being co-taught by a Rice professor and a Texas high school teacher, could be the beginning of a new endeavor for many universities in the world of online education.
Rice is the first university to offer free AP classes online, and AP biology is just the starting point. The Texas university is planning on rolling out eight other free online AP classes throughout the year, said Caroline Levander, vice president for strategic initiatives and digital education at Rice.
And while Rice is spearheading the campaign to provide high school students with free access to AP courses, the University of California can play a role in the project as well, and potentially reap significant benefits from doing so. If the UC provides students with increased opportunities to fulfill college general education requirements through online UC-run AP courses before coming to one of its campuses, the University can decrease the number of overcrowded classrooms for introductory general education courses. Fixing the issue of overcrowding can in turn lead to more students graduating in four years.
The courses also give students an opportunity to take classes that their high schools may not offer. Without access to AP courses, students from underserved communities often start out behind their classmates when they get to university, needing to complete requirements their classmates may have already fulfilled with AP credits. At UCLA, a lack of AP credit also affects enrollment times, meaning those with less credit get worse enrollment periods and less of a competitive edge in getting into some of the most popular introductory classes.
UC Berkeley is currently working on developing some of these AP courses in partnership with edX, a nonprofit online platform that aims to make online education more accessible. The UC at large should tackle the initiative, so as not to put the weight of the venture solely on the shoulders of one campus.
Already, the UC has demonstrated a clear commitment to decreasing large class sizes and increasing four-year graduation rates by starting in 2013 the Innovative Learning Technology Initiative, which allows students to take online classes through other UC campuses. Many of the classes included in the initiative can fulfill general education requirements with large enrollment sizes, such as Introduction to Psychology or Introduction to Computer Science. This program not only demonstrates the UC’s commitment, but also points to an awareness of the struggle students face to get into classes they need to graduate on time.
And though the initiative is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t allow students to pursue online alternatives to packed lecture halls until they arrive on campus. Turning some of the introductory courses the initiative offers into AP courses that students can use to fulfill general education requirements furthers the initiative’s mission.
The only catch of the courses, given the bevy of potential benefits, seems to be the price tag of the foray.
“Even though universities like Berkeley are committed to offering these free courses, it’s a costly development,” said Diana Wu, dean of extension and executive director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education, about the online courses Berkeley currently offers. She said that a general online course can cost the university anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 or higher. And considering students are getting the material free of charge, this can be a hard sell.
“We would love to continue to develop and offer these courses, but budgets hit us in the face. We need to fund this not to make money but to pay for our costs,” she said.
But the UC needs to look at the AP courses as an investment: If enough students enroll in the online classes and then proceed to get AP credit for the classes, fewer introductory courses will be necessary.
The project has the ability to help many high school students gain credit otherwise inaccessible to them. In turn, the UC benefits by decreasing the number of packed classrooms.
It’s a win-win, so using cost as a way to put the endeavor off entirely would not only hurt students coming to the UC, but it would hurt the UC as well.