Rice expands e-learning initiatives

By Dixita Viswanath     8/30/12 7:00pm

 

Students at Rice University often have to apply through a rigorous process; now Rice is participating in a series of endeavors to make college education available to the general public. 

Rice launched OpenStax College, which provides free e-textbooks for college courses to the general public, and became one of 12 new partners with Coursera, a platform for universities to host courses online, this summer.

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OpenStax College is a nonprofit agency started at Rice and led by professor of electrical and computer engineering Richard Baraniuk, according to Vice President Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiative Caroline Levander said. 

Levander said she expects textbooks in biology and anatomy to go live in early 2013. 

"The textbooks are professionally developed and are peer-reviewed by educators across the globe to ensure that they are accurate and meet the scope of requirements of modern college courses." Levander said. 

Duncan College senior Melissa Moleres said the available free textbooks will help students. 

"The addition of such free textbooks is crucial to expanding education in all areas. It is a great addition to both Rice and the community at large," Moleres said.

Coursera is a platform for top universities to provide online courses to the general public. According to Coursera's site, 16 universities currently provide courses via the platform, including Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Duke University.

These web-based courses will include video lectures with frequent quizzes to reinforce and test student understanding, Levander said. Rice's pilot course offerings include courses in general chemistry, software programing, electrical engineering, analytical chemistry and nanotechnologies. Levander said she expects the first Rice Coursera course to begin on Oct. 15 and will span eight weeks. 

Levander said that professors who chose to teach a Coursera course had to complete evaluations and course instruction information by early fall. Levander said she expects that future Coursera courses will undergo an evaluation process to decide which courses and professors will be showcased in the e-learning format. 

Professors Scott Rixner and John Greiner, professors of Computer Science will jointly teach Coursera course COMP 160: An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python. 

"This course is designed to help students with very little or no computing background learn the basics of building simple interactive applications," Greiner said. "Our language of choice, Python, is an easy-to learn, high-level computer language that is used in many of the computational courses offered on Coursera. [...] The primary method for learning [will be] through designing web games."

Rixner said he sees the future of e-learning as a varied learning style. 

"In the future, classes will be changed; students can learn the lecture material through interactive videos and will come to class for a discussion on the assigned material," Rixner said.

This semester, COMP 160 is being taught using the online format. Greiner said that students are instructed to watch the videos on their own time and come to class to work on group projects applying what they learned. Class time will be focused on additional exercises to supplement learning rather than a rehash of the subject, he said. 

Will Rice College freshman Victoria Dobbie said that online learning has its pitfalls as well as benefits. 

"The use of online courses is great in theory but is hard to find accurate assessments for students," Dobbie said. "How can we know that students online are gaining an equal education? If e-learning is as effective as classroom training, why are students studying at Rice?" 

Since 1999, Rice has been a leader in e-learning initiatives since the foundation of Connexions, a dynamic digital classroom which features more than 17,000 learning modules in its archives and is used by over two million people per month, according to the Connexions website. It is currently used worldwide by universities, community colleges, K-12 schools and distance learners according to the Connexions website.

To streamline these methods of digital learning, Rice is opening a new Rice Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship (RDLS). Levander said that RDLS is more than the sum of its parts; it provides means to bring Rice students and the outside population into original collaboration with each other in a vertically integrated manner. 

President David Leebron said that e-learning initiatives are an integral part of Rice's future. 

"Rice's increased involvement in digital learning is essential to our future, both to make sure that our teaching methodologies on campus are as effective as possible, and to make available of some parts of our educational output to interested and ambitious students around the world," Leebron said.

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