Universities team up to offer online courses for alumni

Princeton, together with Stanford, Yale and Oxford, is preparing to offer online distance learning courses for alumni. The joint project, to which each school has pledged $3 million, is called the University Alliance for Life Long Learning.

It will tap faculty at participating schools to create special courses which will be delivered over the Internet.

Associate Provost Georgia Nugent '73 explained that a typical course might include the audio recording of a professor's lecture, which would play over a user's web browser. During the lecture, the browser would display related visual content. The University's administration will work with each professor to develop supplemental visual content.

Typically, the online version of a class will cover less material than the class offered to undergraduates. A course which might normally involve 12 lectures, for example, could be condensed to three or four in order to keep the target audience — alumni — interested in the material.

The alliance is poised to move forward early next month by unveiling a study of alumni interests and needs, according to Nugent. The study, conducted by McKinsey & Co., will help the alliance decide what subjects to cover and how much to charge users for access to the material.

The University has already begun to create online course material independent of the alliance. These features, for which there is no charge, are based on courses currently offered to undergraduates. One of which is professor James Gould's popular class EEB 311: Animal Behavior.

Gould explained the online course as a condensed version of the lectures he gives to undergraduates. With the project "we're doing highlights, focusing less on testable material and more on intrinsically interesting material," he said.

Gould's online course has four lectures, which are accompanied by interactive online content. He explained that the online format is unique.

"It's different from taking my course. In a lecture hall, there's a lot of peer pressure to stay in your seat," Gould said. Online, he explained, "something has to move on the screen about every 15 seconds" to keep people from losing interest.

Gould said the interactive features of the lectures allow users to model animal behaviors —such as a spider constructing its web — by playing with the variables and watching the results on their screens. These online offerings provide a glimpse into the type of content which the alliance will create.

Nugent explained that because the project's primary focus is educating alumni, its impact on undergraduates will likely be indirect. She said the online courses are prepared during the summer, so their creation is unlikely to take resources away from the faculty's undergraduate teaching.

One benefit, she explained, is that the interactive materials that are created to go along with the online lectures can be used in undergraduate classes.