Last year, Jane S. Shaw, President of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, wrote an essay portraying a future in which Harvard and Yale have merged in 2020 as a result of inflation, prohibitively high operating costs, and the availability of high-quality, low-cost online alternatives. As provocative as Shaw’s article may have seemed at the time, last week Harvard announced it was partnering, not with Yale, but with MIT in a platform called edX, which, similar is to the  Udacity and Coursera initiatives, plans to offer a  handful of modular, open courses in the Fall 2012. The strategic partnerships that are rapidly forming around the adoption of these alternate platforms, beg the question: is this the future of higher education?

Edx, Udacity, and Coursera all appear to take similar approaches to content delivery: lectures are broken down into 10-15 minute segments with periodic quizzes and tests to asses students’ comprehension of the concepts presented. Some courses will allow students to continually re-take the quizzes until all concepts have been mastered. The majority of the course offerings are in computer science and math and most are graded electronically. None of these classes, at present, count toward a university degree, but students who successfully finish a course will receive a certificate recognizing their achievement. These courses are offered either free, or at low-cost, relying instead on venture capital investments. Alternative business models such as collecting a referral fee from companies who successfully hire graduates of these credentialed courses, and support from affiliated universities for these ventures, are examples of the funding mechanisms being explored.

These organizations differ, however, in the ways in which they interface with traditional universities. Udacity, led by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, has completely divorced itself from its Stanford roots and currently stands as an independent entity offering classes in Robotics and Computer Science. Much of the credibility of the Udacity credential comes from the reputation of its creator-Sebastian Thrun, world-renowned robotics expert, and Vice President of Google managing Google X lab. While Thrun is an undisputed authority on the classes Udacity currently teaches, it will be interesting to see how Udacity expands into other disciplines. Udacity remains dedicated to offering its courses for free, and is actively experimenting with alternative funding models.

Coursera is an independent venture that, unlike Udacity, maintains ties with its Stanford roots. Coursera’s initial class offerings focused on Math and Computer Science, but they have since expanded to include courses in the humanities and social sciences. The nature of these courses necessitated finding alternatives to the robograding used by many of these kinds of classes in favor of peer-to-peer grading techniques for classes whose question correctness is more subjective. Coursera, similar to the MIT/Harvard partnership, has developed partnerships with other leading universities including Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of California, Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania to expand their course content offerings.

Meanwhile, MIT, one of the first institutions to offer its courses in this modular method, announced MITx four months ago, and offered the first courses this past spring. Since then, MIT announced partnership with Harvard that would combine MITx classes with Harvard’s newly-created Harvardx offerings in an umbrella organization called edX which plans to offer its first courses in the upcoming Fall. Included in the announcement of edX was an expressed interest in future collaboration with other institutions. Unlike Coursera and Udacity, however, edX maintains their university ties rather than creating separate, spin-off companies the way others have done. Moreover, MIT and Harvard have announced that in addition to offering these courses online, they will collect data and conduct research on the best practices for this method of teaching.

The growing trend toward the creation of intellectual clusters and making knowledge accessible to anyone around the world raises the question of how this will affect, not only the elite institutions who are making their content available, but also the thousands of other institutes of higher learning in the United States, or more broadly, globally. Perhaps some schools will join the existing coalitions mentioned above or create their own strategic partnerships to feature their own high-quality academic content.   What will happen to institutions that do not join these strategic partnerships? Some academics speculate that these online offerings could replace community colleges or other access institutions if four-year institutions would be willing to accept transfer credits from organizations like Udacity, Coursera and edX.  The same article also argues that there is an inherent value in professors and their students meeting face-to-face, particularly for senior capstone projects, and networking opportunities.

While the full effect that this new trend toward elite online offerings has yet to be realized, it makes Jane Shaw’s prediction that Harvard and Yale would merge much more conceivable.  Furthermore, given the speed with which these leading institutions are adopting this new model, that merger could happen long before Shaw’s estimate of 2020.