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The Man Who Made Online College WorkYears before Covid, Zvi Galil launched Georgia Tech’s successful online master’s in computer science. Is Zoom U. the future?
By Tunku Varadarajan
April 2, 2021 / Weekend Wall Street Journal / The Weekend Interview
Covid has pummeled universities, robbing them of a mode of teaching in use for centuries. Almost every class at almost every institution migrated online, giving rise to fears that students are being taught significantly less well than they should be, even as they’re denied the social and cultural benefits of campus life. Some worry—or hope—that campuses will never fully recover from the pandemic. Underlying this forecast is the expectation that online teaching may become the norm even after the novel coronavirus has been vanquished.Zvi Galil disputes the premises that we should be afraid of online instruction and that teaching in person is necessarily superior.
As professors everywhere take stock of their first full year teaching at Zoom U, Mr. Galil, 73, basks in his role as a pioneer. An online degree program he introduced at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing—where he was dean from 2010 to 2019—is now in its eighth year. In January 2014, the Tel Aviv-born Mr. Galil kicked off the Online Master of Science in Computer Science, the first-ever college degree program taught entirely online. To hear him tell it, many students’ learning is remote even when the professor is in the room.“Online begins in the third row,” Mr. Galil says via Zoom from his New York apartment, describing a typically cavernous pre-Covid college lecture-theater in which 300 students are arrayed before a miked-up professor.
He doesn’t mean only that many in the class have cellphones out in the nether rows or are surfing social media on laptops. He’s describing the “disconnect” between teacher and students that begins at a distance of only a few feet from the lectern. If a large classroom allows for no serious emotional bond, why should online learning be any more detached or less intimate?
“If you have a class of 30,” he acknowledges, “face-to-face is better, even with social distancing. They have discussions, conversations, a few questions, more flexibility. But universities can’t survive on classes of 30. The most sought-after courses attract hundreds.” Starting around 2008, massive open online courses, or MOOCs, began to filter into higher education. They were free, novel and potentially subversive. In 2011, 170,000 students world-wide enrolled for a Stanford MOOC on artificial intelligence.
“But MOOCs had a huge attrition rate of 93% or so,” Mr. Galil says. “People started them and didn’t finish, because the major thing that was missing was a credential at the end.” Mr. Galil conceived of a MOOC-based master’s: “The degree gave students an incentive to persist.” Georgia Tech’s MOOC-based degree “was something unheard of,” he says proudly. He calls it “a fundamental, revolutionary shift away from the prevailing paradigm of higher education.”
It was born after a conversation he had in 2012 with Sebastian Thrun, a co-founder of Udacity, an educational company that was at the forefront of the MOOC movement.Using Udacity as its platform, and with a gift of $4 million from [URL]https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/T[/URL]]AT&T[/url],Mr. Galil set about building the structure for his online master’s degree. Mr. Thrun had wanted to price it at a mere $1,000, but the College of Computing—more in tune with the real costs involved in imparting a college education—set the fee at $6,600 for both in- and out-of-state students. Georgia Tech charges $25,000 to in-state students and $40,000 to out-of-staters for an on-campus master’s, and the fees at private universities for comparable degrees reach as high as $70,000. “We caused an earthquake with our price tag,” he says, “and that drew everybody’s attention.
The price has edged up to $7,000 for Georgia Tech’s online M.S. in computer science, which comprises 10 courses, to be taken over a flexible period at the student’s own pace. Students pay by the course. It attracts a different student body. The average age at which students start the degree is 32, compared with 22 for their on-campus M.S. counterparts. Since most online students have full-time jobs as data analysts and the like, they tend to take 30 to 36 months to finish the degree, compared with 18 to 24 months on campus. Some 50 of the online graduates—more than 1 in 100—have gone on to earn doctorates.
The online M.S. has made Georgia Tech $13 million in revenue in the 2020-21 academic year. Mr. Galil is a distinguished computer scientist, renowned for a concept called “stringology,” a term he coined in the 1980s. He defines it in layman’s terms: “If we look for the word ‘abracadabra’ in the Bible, we search through the book to find all the places where it appears.” He’s making a joke—“abracadabra” is likelier to appear in a Harry Potter book than a holy one—but it is an example of a “word string”; and stringology describes the “very fast string algorithms” that find and process such sequences.He is also an accomplished salesman, and he rattles off arresting figures.
Every year, he says, graduates from the online degree “increase the number of computer scientists with new master’s degrees in the U.S. by at least 10%.” The computer-scientist market, he says “is hot, very hot. They’re needed everywhere.” He asserts that computing is the only field in which job openings outnumber “the total of B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.D.s awarded every year.” Georgia Tech started with 380 online-degree students in January 2014.
Today, it has “a standing army of 11,084 students enrolled”—from 124 countries. The 5,000th graduate is expected to receive a degree in May. A 2017 Harvard [URL]https://www.nber.org/papers/w22754[/URL]]study[/url] found that almost all of Georgia Tech’s online master’s students would not have embarked on a master’s degree in computer science had they not been able to take it online. The program is training Americans for high-tech jobs. Some 62% of the online master’s students are American, Mr. Galil says. Among on-campus master’s students in computer science at Georgia Tech, 55% are foreign nationals.
Mr. Galil explains the difference: “On-campus study gets you a foot in the door in the United States. You don’t get a visa for an online degree.”The admissions policy for the online master’s “also caused a tremor in the college world,” Mr. Galil says. Applicants aren’t required to take the GRE, the standardized test for master’s students (though foreign students must pass an English test), and the admissions rate is 74%. “We have no space limitations, so we accept everybody that we believe is capable and satisfies certain requisites, such as a B.A. and familiarity with computer science.”
By contrast, the campus-based master’s at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing accepts only 10% of applicants. Ivy League colleges are even more stringent. “Harvard is 4-point-something percent,” Mr. Galil says with an indignant snort, “and Stanford 3-point-something. Thirty, 40, 50 percent of those they reject are actually quite brilliant. And they use quite random criteria to differentiate between these wonderful young people.”
These universities, he says, “are proud that they accept 4%. It gives them the brand. It’s ridiculous, but they go around and boast about it. And we—we boast about the fact that we’re doing the opposite.” Mr. Galil kvells that Georgia Tech’s is not only “the largest online master’s program in computer science in the U.S.” but the world’s largest online master’s program in any discipline. That’s not for lack of competition: Georgia Tech’s degree has spawned about 30 emulators at other universities, the vast majority in the sciences, although the first copycat was the online master’s in business administration at the University of Illinois, which launched in 2016.
“The dean of the business school came to us and learned everything from us,” Mr. Galil says. “He called us ‘big brother’ and we called him ‘little brother.’ ” Most “heartwarming” of all, Mr. Galil says, 40% of the Georgia Tech online program’s teaching assistants are graduates of the program: “They are people with families, with jobs, and they get paid peanuts, but they want to be TAs to give back.”Given the radical nature of his original conception, it’s not surprising that Mr. Galil faced faculty resistance. “Universities are conservative institutions,” he says, “second only to the Catholic church.”
Professors, especially tenured ones, “usually object to any change.” Mr. Galil laughs as he says that his “biggest achievement” wasn’t setting up the new degree; “it was to get the faculty to agree to do it.” They were afraid of lowering standards and devaluing the Georgia Tech brand. Mr. Galil made it clear that the online degree would follow the same courses as the on-campus master’s. A task force he set up to study his proposal—which he says he packed, slyly, with professors who favored online teaching—endorsed the new idea. The faculty voted 75% to 25% in favor of instating the degree, but Mr. Galil says he “can’t find anyone today who confesses to having voted against. They’ve disappeared!
”The wholesale switch to online teaching brought on by the pandemic has put programs like his under the spotlight. He says almost sheepishly, as if stating the obvious, that college teaching in the future will have to incorporate larger online components: “Higher education shutdowns have made the advantage of online teaching more evident and more urgent.” He prefers MOOCs to Zoom, saying the best online teaching is “asynchronous,” meaning that students listen to taped lectures they stream online.
He acknowledges that much of the past year’s online teaching has been haphazard—ad hoc efforts undertaken, by necessity, with little if any preparation.He disagrees, however, with those who think that the pandemic will lead to a collapse of higher education as we know it. Writing [URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-u-s-higher-education-a-few-stars-many-satellites-11616358910?mod[/URL]=article_inline]in these pages[/url] last month, Daniel Pipes predicted that “a few star universities will flourish while the rest starve and die,” their campuses becoming satellites of the 50 or so shining stars.Mr. Galil counters that universities have “survived since Bologna was founded in the year 1088, and they will survive Covid.”
He forecasts more-modest changes: “Can they raise tuition even more now—year after year after year, as they used to? They can’t. The ascent has been stopped. Some of them will have to cut tuition, or even close.”What the Georgia Tech “experiment” has taught us, Mr. Galil says, is that there is “a very high, maybe even huge unmet demand for higher education right now” from people who haven’t been part of the traditional pool for campus recruitment.
“These are working people, often without the ability to pay high fees, living sometimes a long way from any college.” Universities will find ways to address their needs, mostly through online instruction.But Mr. Galil believes there will always be a place for campus-based colleges: “Many young adults finish high school and want to continue with a little freer life before they go on the job market. It’s not for the content that they want to go, or, necessarily, for the study.” They like the networking and the socializing—and you can’t get that online, living at home with your parents.
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
By Tunku Varadarajan
April 2, 2021 / Weekend Wall Street Journal / The Weekend Interview
Covid has pummeled universities, robbing them of a mode of teaching in use for centuries. Almost every class at almost every institution migrated online, giving rise to fears that students are being taught significantly less well than they should be, even as they’re denied the social and cultural benefits of campus life. Some worry—or hope—that campuses will never fully recover from the pandemic. Underlying this forecast is the expectation that online teaching may become the norm even after the novel coronavirus has been vanquished.Zvi Galil disputes the premises that we should be afraid of online instruction and that teaching in person is necessarily superior.
As professors everywhere take stock of their first full year teaching at Zoom U, Mr. Galil, 73, basks in his role as a pioneer. An online degree program he introduced at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing—where he was dean from 2010 to 2019—is now in its eighth year. In January 2014, the Tel Aviv-born Mr. Galil kicked off the Online Master of Science in Computer Science, the first-ever college degree program taught entirely online. To hear him tell it, many students’ learning is remote even when the professor is in the room.“Online begins in the third row,” Mr. Galil says via Zoom from his New York apartment, describing a typically cavernous pre-Covid college lecture-theater in which 300 students are arrayed before a miked-up professor.
He doesn’t mean only that many in the class have cellphones out in the nether rows or are surfing social media on laptops. He’s describing the “disconnect” between teacher and students that begins at a distance of only a few feet from the lectern. If a large classroom allows for no serious emotional bond, why should online learning be any more detached or less intimate?
“If you have a class of 30,” he acknowledges, “face-to-face is better, even with social distancing. They have discussions, conversations, a few questions, more flexibility. But universities can’t survive on classes of 30. The most sought-after courses attract hundreds.” Starting around 2008, massive open online courses, or MOOCs, began to filter into higher education. They were free, novel and potentially subversive. In 2011, 170,000 students world-wide enrolled for a Stanford MOOC on artificial intelligence.
“But MOOCs had a huge attrition rate of 93% or so,” Mr. Galil says. “People started them and didn’t finish, because the major thing that was missing was a credential at the end.” Mr. Galil conceived of a MOOC-based master’s: “The degree gave students an incentive to persist.” Georgia Tech’s MOOC-based degree “was something unheard of,” he says proudly. He calls it “a fundamental, revolutionary shift away from the prevailing paradigm of higher education.”
It was born after a conversation he had in 2012 with Sebastian Thrun, a co-founder of Udacity, an educational company that was at the forefront of the MOOC movement.Using Udacity as its platform, and with a gift of $4 million from [URL]https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/T[/URL]]AT&T[/url],Mr. Galil set about building the structure for his online master’s degree. Mr. Thrun had wanted to price it at a mere $1,000, but the College of Computing—more in tune with the real costs involved in imparting a college education—set the fee at $6,600 for both in- and out-of-state students. Georgia Tech charges $25,000 to in-state students and $40,000 to out-of-staters for an on-campus master’s, and the fees at private universities for comparable degrees reach as high as $70,000. “We caused an earthquake with our price tag,” he says, “and that drew everybody’s attention.
The price has edged up to $7,000 for Georgia Tech’s online M.S. in computer science, which comprises 10 courses, to be taken over a flexible period at the student’s own pace. Students pay by the course. It attracts a different student body. The average age at which students start the degree is 32, compared with 22 for their on-campus M.S. counterparts. Since most online students have full-time jobs as data analysts and the like, they tend to take 30 to 36 months to finish the degree, compared with 18 to 24 months on campus. Some 50 of the online graduates—more than 1 in 100—have gone on to earn doctorates.
The online M.S. has made Georgia Tech $13 million in revenue in the 2020-21 academic year. Mr. Galil is a distinguished computer scientist, renowned for a concept called “stringology,” a term he coined in the 1980s. He defines it in layman’s terms: “If we look for the word ‘abracadabra’ in the Bible, we search through the book to find all the places where it appears.” He’s making a joke—“abracadabra” is likelier to appear in a Harry Potter book than a holy one—but it is an example of a “word string”; and stringology describes the “very fast string algorithms” that find and process such sequences.He is also an accomplished salesman, and he rattles off arresting figures.
Every year, he says, graduates from the online degree “increase the number of computer scientists with new master’s degrees in the U.S. by at least 10%.” The computer-scientist market, he says “is hot, very hot. They’re needed everywhere.” He asserts that computing is the only field in which job openings outnumber “the total of B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.D.s awarded every year.” Georgia Tech started with 380 online-degree students in January 2014.
Today, it has “a standing army of 11,084 students enrolled”—from 124 countries. The 5,000th graduate is expected to receive a degree in May. A 2017 Harvard [URL]https://www.nber.org/papers/w22754[/URL]]study[/url] found that almost all of Georgia Tech’s online master’s students would not have embarked on a master’s degree in computer science had they not been able to take it online. The program is training Americans for high-tech jobs. Some 62% of the online master’s students are American, Mr. Galil says. Among on-campus master’s students in computer science at Georgia Tech, 55% are foreign nationals.
Mr. Galil explains the difference: “On-campus study gets you a foot in the door in the United States. You don’t get a visa for an online degree.”The admissions policy for the online master’s “also caused a tremor in the college world,” Mr. Galil says. Applicants aren’t required to take the GRE, the standardized test for master’s students (though foreign students must pass an English test), and the admissions rate is 74%. “We have no space limitations, so we accept everybody that we believe is capable and satisfies certain requisites, such as a B.A. and familiarity with computer science.”
By contrast, the campus-based master’s at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing accepts only 10% of applicants. Ivy League colleges are even more stringent. “Harvard is 4-point-something percent,” Mr. Galil says with an indignant snort, “and Stanford 3-point-something. Thirty, 40, 50 percent of those they reject are actually quite brilliant. And they use quite random criteria to differentiate between these wonderful young people.”
These universities, he says, “are proud that they accept 4%. It gives them the brand. It’s ridiculous, but they go around and boast about it. And we—we boast about the fact that we’re doing the opposite.” Mr. Galil kvells that Georgia Tech’s is not only “the largest online master’s program in computer science in the U.S.” but the world’s largest online master’s program in any discipline. That’s not for lack of competition: Georgia Tech’s degree has spawned about 30 emulators at other universities, the vast majority in the sciences, although the first copycat was the online master’s in business administration at the University of Illinois, which launched in 2016.
“The dean of the business school came to us and learned everything from us,” Mr. Galil says. “He called us ‘big brother’ and we called him ‘little brother.’ ” Most “heartwarming” of all, Mr. Galil says, 40% of the Georgia Tech online program’s teaching assistants are graduates of the program: “They are people with families, with jobs, and they get paid peanuts, but they want to be TAs to give back.”Given the radical nature of his original conception, it’s not surprising that Mr. Galil faced faculty resistance. “Universities are conservative institutions,” he says, “second only to the Catholic church.”
Professors, especially tenured ones, “usually object to any change.” Mr. Galil laughs as he says that his “biggest achievement” wasn’t setting up the new degree; “it was to get the faculty to agree to do it.” They were afraid of lowering standards and devaluing the Georgia Tech brand. Mr. Galil made it clear that the online degree would follow the same courses as the on-campus master’s. A task force he set up to study his proposal—which he says he packed, slyly, with professors who favored online teaching—endorsed the new idea. The faculty voted 75% to 25% in favor of instating the degree, but Mr. Galil says he “can’t find anyone today who confesses to having voted against. They’ve disappeared!
”The wholesale switch to online teaching brought on by the pandemic has put programs like his under the spotlight. He says almost sheepishly, as if stating the obvious, that college teaching in the future will have to incorporate larger online components: “Higher education shutdowns have made the advantage of online teaching more evident and more urgent.” He prefers MOOCs to Zoom, saying the best online teaching is “asynchronous,” meaning that students listen to taped lectures they stream online.
He acknowledges that much of the past year’s online teaching has been haphazard—ad hoc efforts undertaken, by necessity, with little if any preparation.He disagrees, however, with those who think that the pandemic will lead to a collapse of higher education as we know it. Writing [URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-u-s-higher-education-a-few-stars-many-satellites-11616358910?mod[/URL]=article_inline]in these pages[/url] last month, Daniel Pipes predicted that “a few star universities will flourish while the rest starve and die,” their campuses becoming satellites of the 50 or so shining stars.Mr. Galil counters that universities have “survived since Bologna was founded in the year 1088, and they will survive Covid.”
He forecasts more-modest changes: “Can they raise tuition even more now—year after year after year, as they used to? They can’t. The ascent has been stopped. Some of them will have to cut tuition, or even close.”What the Georgia Tech “experiment” has taught us, Mr. Galil says, is that there is “a very high, maybe even huge unmet demand for higher education right now” from people who haven’t been part of the traditional pool for campus recruitment.
“These are working people, often without the ability to pay high fees, living sometimes a long way from any college.” Universities will find ways to address their needs, mostly through online instruction.But Mr. Galil believes there will always be a place for campus-based colleges: “Many young adults finish high school and want to continue with a little freer life before they go on the job market. It’s not for the content that they want to go, or, necessarily, for the study.” They like the networking and the socializing—and you can’t get that online, living at home with your parents.
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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