San Francisco university bets on a hybrid online-learning model

Offering a twist on the learn-from-anywhere convenience of Internet classes, a new university is asking freshmen to take a large leap of faith.
Minerva Schools of KGI, a radically experimental university in San Francisco, is sifting through applications for its first class, starting this fall. The school is an alliance between Minerva Project, a venture-backed for-profit company, and Keck Graduate Institute, one of California’s Claremont colleges.
The school launches just as studies are questioning the efficacy of Web teaching. In California, a high-profile program run by San Jose State University and startup Udacity was suspended after officials found that failure rates for online students were much higher than for traditional learners.
Last month, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education released a study showing that only about 4 percent of those who register for an online course at Penn complete it. The courses are free.
The field nevertheless remains one of the hottest for startups. Minerva has raised $25 million from Benchmark, a leading venture-capital firm. Others with VC backing include Coursera, Udacity and 2U, which have raised $85 million, $20 million and $101 million, respectively. Harvard, MIT and other leading universities offer their own courses online gratis in an initiative called EdX.
Minerva says what it plans to do is different.
“Technology can be used in a much more effective way in higher education than has previously been the case,” said Stephen Kosslyn, Minerva’s founding dean and the former dean of social sciences at Harvard.
Even though all classes will be held online, first-year students must live in a residence hall in San Francisco and take classes together in real time, deviating from the “anywhere, anytime” model prevalent in online education.
“We are entirely focused on active learning,” said Kosslyn. Before each class, students must complete assignments that will require vigorous participation during the online session, such as engaging in a debate, presenting their own work, or critiquing that of others, he said.
Courses will be recorded, in part so faculty can track and measure growth in rhetoric and other skills. Final grades for those first-year classes will not come until just before graduation, so the grades will reflect progress in those skills over the years.
For serving as guinea pigs, the first class of students will be rewarded with free tuition for all four years, although they will have to pay $19,000 annually for room and board. That compares to a price tag upwards of $50,000 a year at many other top US universities, the group Minerva already compares itself to. Some financial assistance will be available for students, according to the school, but the university will not participate in the federal financial aid program.
The university has been developing its curriculum since hiring Kosslyn in March last year. Minerva’s chairman, former Snapfish president Ben Nelson, believes the systematic development of skills such as critical thinking will do more to create leaders and innovators than the haphazard approach he believes characterizes traditional universities.