A couple of weeks ago, Arizona State University and EdX announced an institutional tie-up, which received a fair bit of publicity.  Basically, the deal was that EdX – a well-known MOOC platform, owned jointly by Harvard and MIT – would help ASU put an undisclosed (but judging by the rollout, somewhere between 15 and 20) number of its big first-year courses online.  There were two startling things about this announcement:

1)      The MOOCs are not time-delimited, requiring students to start and move ahead synchronously.  It is much more an on-demand learning system;

2)      Arizona state is prepared to offer actual credit – up to one year’s worth – to students who complete the courses, provided they pay a fee to do so.

The value proposition here is simple: give higher education a try at no, or minimal, cost; if you do well, pay the fee, get the credit, and use the credit at ASU, or transfer it to anywhere in the world (ASU is promising not to indicate whether the credits were delivered in person or online, since “they are identical”).  ASU is calling this the Global Freshman Academy, with the implication being that people from around the world will tryout higher education in this way.

Some MOOC-skeptics like Johnathan Rees are going bananas, calling this the apocalypse, because now MOOCs are actually going to be for credit.  I’m not sold on this.  The price-per-credit on these courses isn’t cheap, isn’t covered by student aid, and it’s not entirely clear to me why you’d want to go after 30 credits in this way, when there’s no guarantee any other institution is going to accept them.  In short, I’m not sure the demand for this is actually there.  Similar projects – albeit with distinctly less-slick marketing – have already failed spectacularly at the University of California and the University of Illinois.

But there’s another project out there that, despite receiving less publicity, is probably more important, and that’s the tie-up between Harvard and Amherst.  Amherst is a liberal Arts college, and like arts colleges (and for that matter, Arts faculties everywhere), it sees the value in helping students get some Business education at the same time.  But rather than develop its own business capabilities, it has decided to outsource the whole thing to Harvard (via, again, EdX).  The Cambridge institution supplies the content, but students who finish the courses receive Amherst credit.

This full-on outsourcing of the production of internal credits is fascinating for a couple of reasons, and not just because Amherst famously called a time-out on MOOCs two years ago.  It’s fascinating from a management viewpoint simply because it opens up possibilities for institutions to extend programming in certain fields, without necessarily incurring the permanent cost increases that would be entailed in hiring tenured staff.

It’s also fascinating from a branding/reputation point of view.  For a deal like this to work, you need to have an institution of lesser prestige decide that it has more to gain by outsourcing part of its work to a more prestigious institution.  And you have to have a more-prestigious institution that is prepared to gamble its own reputation by associating itself with a lesser-prestige institution.  Harvard is unlikely to do this kind of deal with Southwestern North Carolina State, for instance, but it could easily do it with any Tier 1 Liberal Arts School.

In Canada, you can imagine where this kind of thing might be headed.  UBC, McGill, and U of T (all of which are charter members of EdX) are all in a position to offer these kind of deals to comprehensive universities (and some of the more selective undergraduate schools, like Mount Allison).  One can also see how this kind of association might be useful from the smaller institution’s perspective:  Acadia finds it hard to hold on to students in the face of competition from Dalhousie, which can simply out-compete them on breadth of offerings?  Why not do a deal with McGill to increase its own breadth of courses?

More radically, this could be a way to continue to offer classes in fields of study where numbers at any single institution aren’t very large, and hence are quite expensive to offer?  Why not let UBC offer zoology at institutions across the country?  What’s to stop Alberta and Toronto being near-monopolistic providers of Slavic Language courses to the whole country?

It’s not all going to happen tomorrow, of course: higher education is, after all, the single most conservative industry in the world.  But this kind of alliance has the potential to produce far-ranging effects, especially in the ways institutions choose to specialize and focus their own offerings.  Harvard says it has several more Amherst-like deals in the pipeline.  Watch this space.