Oxford - £9,000; Harvard - $35,000; or learn anything, anytime, anywhere - for free?

Author: Stephanie Kovalchik

How much should you pay for university tuition? £9,000 to go to Oxford, $35,000 to attend Harvard – or would you rather get tuition from either for free?  It is perfectly possible – and more and more students are doing so. They don’t need scholarships either.

University fees are a contentious topic in Britain just now. Just before Christmas Parliament voted to allow universities in England and Wales to charge tuition fees of up to £9000 pa. Oxford and Cambridge are just two of the growing list that will charge that top rate; last week the much-less-prestigious Surrey University announced that it, too will be charging this maximum.   

Parliament’s decision caused splits and rebellions in the Lib.Dem component of the coalition government, which has traditionally favoured free education for all; and brought student protests with demonstrations in Westminster in which windows of the Treasury smashed.  University tuition has until recent years been free in England and Wales, and still is free in Scotland. In America universities have always charged. Harvard College’s undergraduate tuition fees this year are $35,000, with board and lodging on top.  Despite such costs, the desire for university-level education is undimished. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ‘Trends on educational attainment’ show  that since 2000 the percentage of world college graduates has had a steady annual increase of 1 to 2%.

 But it is possible to get university-level tuition from these and other top universities for free. Read on. Students can follow full lecture courses from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or many other top institutions. What this new cohort of pay-nothing students will not receive is a diploma at the end of their course.  This"graduating class" is purely metaphorical. These are the students of iTunes U.

Launched by Apple Computer on May 30, 2007, iTunes U is a virtual university with a revolutionary approach to higher education, an approach that departs from tradition in some stark ways--iTunes U has no admissions boards, no tuition fees, no degrees. Using the same distribution system as Apple's online music store, iTunes U lets interested students download videocasts, mp3s, or lecture notes from a catalog of 350,000 courses from over 800 of the world's universities. Because the material is free, a university-level education is a click away for any Mac user with an internet connection and intellectual curiosity. More than an innovation, iTunes U is a daring experiment to see whether an iPod can be made to teach as well as it can sing.

Schools of all grade levels are embracing the system. Rather than a competitor, the educators of these institutions are looking at iTunes U as a partner. The goal of the partnership is to make academia open, which, if achieved, could transform the paradigm of campus-based education.

Many of the most prestigious universities are involved. The elite from the UK: Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. Top institutions in the states: Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But there are also notable holdouts. Dartmouth is the one Ivy that has not signed on. And, among the ten highest ranked world colleges of Times Higher Education, Caltech, at number 2, is the only institution that has not joined the iTunes U movement. This discovery was a personal shock. Not only is Caltech is my undergrad alma mater but my introduction to Tech came as a high school physics student watching videos of David Goodstein as he taught freshmen techers of the 1980s the principles of classical mechanisms. In wanting to inspire all young minds to wonder, to question and to discover, The Mechanical Universe series was a forerunner in spirit to the iTunes U project, which makes it all the more puzzling why the institute has, at least for the present, not followed its own precedent. Academic Media Technologies at Caltech states that its entrance into iTunes U is "on the horizon".

While much is known about iTunes U's academic collaborators, its student body is a mystery. Not even the count of enrollees has been disclosed. Numbers have been reported about the total downloads of course materials-- roughly 310 million as of this month--but its unclear how many individual users are accessing this content. One frustrating aspect about Apple's education program is how little public data has been made available to track and try to understand the who, why and how of iTunes U. Administrators of institutional sites are provided weekly logs with statistics on usage of their site's content which leaves it in the hands of individual institutions to decide whether and how they will share these figures.

Some inferences about iTunes U students can be drawn from the popularity of their course offerings. We can take Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley and Yale--four of the first institutions to participate in the program--as a case study. To date, they offer a combined total of 245 videocast courses. MIT, with 90 videocasts (36.7%), has the greatest share, which should not be a surprise since MIT has been a pioneer in online education with the OpenCourseWare program for over ten years.

Figure 1 shows the breakdown of the courses by subject area. Each shade of grey corresponds to the
subject area labeled to the left. The total area for each color reflects its proportionate representation. The vertical height within each institution indicates the within-school representation. Sciences dominate the offerings. Physics, Biology/Chemistry, Social Sciences and Engineering have similar numbers ranging from 8 to 12% of the total courses. Computer science classes have the greatest overall representation, constituting 18% of the total curriculum. But looking by institution, it can be seen that this percentage is largely driven by Stanford, where computer science makes up 39% of the videocasts, with a crew from Apple development stuffing the ballot box.

The spread of courses might be less indicative of student interest and more a reflection of a selection bias, as instructors in the sciences might be more likely to have the technical expertise to carry out the content creation for the videocasts. Whatever is driving the skewed representation, the sparsity of selection in Law, Education and other Language Arts only makes it seem to too early  to say that students can "learn anything" on iTunes U. In its present form, the online school is ideal for the student looking for a comprehensive education in STEM or for the enterprising programmer wanting to create the next Tap Tap Revenge.

To get a better idea about what students are actually watching we can look to the popularity rankings within each institution according to the order reported on the iTunes store. Table 1 shows the top ten courses for each school by subject area, Table 2 (below) gives the list with specific course names. If 40 courses were randomly sampled from the pooled offerings, computer science would be expected to have 7 courses in the most popular pool. There are actually 10, which suggests that students are showing some preference for this subject area. The popularity of History is the greater surprise. If selection were random, only 2 courses in History would be expected in the set of top 10, but we find 7 in this group. Three cheers for statistics, which had two more courses in the top ten rankings than random selection would predict. Extra kudos for Deborah Nolan whose introduction to statistics is the most popular course at iTunes U Berkeley.