By Jeffrey R. Young

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle

Talk of MOOCs was everywhere in higher education in the past year, with a growing number of colleges experimenting with free classes online known as “massive open online courses.” But a vocal backlash also emerged, from professors concerned about the long-term implications of offering courses on the cheap.

These courses—which have been the subject of often-hyperbolic national news coverage, including breathless pieces by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—typically involve video lectures, assignments graded automatically or by peers, and discussion forums that let students answer each other’s questions, so that a single professor can teach hundreds of thousands of students at a time. Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and several Ivy League universities were the first to offer this form of MOOC, involving some of their most popular professors.

What’s not to like about free education on a mass scale? Some faculty members worry that MOOCs are the first steps to being replaced by technology.

The largest outcry has come from professors at San Jose State University, where the philosophy department refused to join an experiment that would have had an instructor on the California campus teach a course based around MOOC materials by Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor. Mr. Sandel offered his course “Justice” free online through edX, a platform founded by Harvard and MIT. The philosophy professors published an open letter to Mr. Sandel in April stating their concerns that MOOCs like his might deepen the divide between wealthy universities, which produce MOOCs, and less wealthy ones, which buy licenses to use those MOOCs.

The professors seemed upset not just with Mr. Sandel (who agreed that their concerns were legitimate and deserved serious debate), but with San Jose State’s leadership. Professors particularly bristled when the university’s president, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, cited Wal-Mart as a key inspiration for his experiments with MOOCs, arguing that colleges should learn lessons on efficiency and service from big business. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” wrote the philosophy professors in their letter, “administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.” Administrators said they had no plans for swapping videos for professors, though, and they stressed that no one was forced to participate in any of the experiments.

Plenty of professors are excited about the potential of MOOCs to expand access to knowledge, it should be noted. In a survey of more than 100 professors who have taught MOOCs, which was conducted by The Chronicle in late February, 79 percent said MOOCs were worth the hype. But the majority of the professors surveyed said they did not believe that students who succeed in their free courses deserve formal credit from their home institutions.

Corporate Partnerships

Not all colleges are giving away their online courses. A growing number of traditional colleges have set up online programs to offer entire degrees at a distance, at costs similar to those charged for on-campus programs. To mount the programs quickly, several colleges have formed partnerships with for-profit companies that share the costs of building the programs—and share the tuition revenues. In November, for instance, 10 highly selective colleges, including Wake Forest and Brandeis Universities, announced that they are working with a company called 2U to build online programs in which courses would be limited to 20 students each. The universities also formed a consortium that will allow students enrolled at any of the campuses to take online courses from other members for credit.

These unusual efforts to involve for-profit companies in online teaching at nonprofit colleges have raised some faculty concerns, as well. In April an undergraduate-faculty council at Duke University voted down a push by the provost’s office to offer small online courses for credit through 2U, citing reservations about quality.

As more colleges work to figure out how, and how much, to teach online, textbook publishers are rethinking their products to adapt to changes in technology. Major publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years buying up software companies and building new digital divisions, betting that in the future colleges and students will want a different kind of textbook. The new breed of products they’re building will be digital-only, and will serve as a kind of automated tutor to students—and automatically grade homework for professors.

“In the early days of TV, the first things you saw on TV were radio shows, and only over time did the next format evolve for that medium,” said Don Kilburn, chief executive of Pearson Learning Solutions. “I think we’re at that stage right now” with textbooks, he says.

While many students still prefer print, surveys show that more and more students are open to digital editions.

Counting Tweets

Researchers are finding new ways to share their research online—and they increasingly want professional credit for their online impact. The practice of including the number of Twitter mentions, Facebook likes, and slide downloads on CVs seems to be growing, and is known as “altmetrics” for offering an alternative metric by which to judge scholarly impact.

Meanwhile, debate heated up this year over making academic articles free online. The spark was the suicide in January of Aaron H. Swartz, an open-access activist who could have been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison if he had been found guilty of charges of computer fraud for allegedly downloading nearly five million documents from the academic database JSTOR. To memorialize the late Mr. Swartz, whose case some saw as an example of overzealous prosecution that amounted to harassment, scholars around the world posted their research online, free, and tweeted using the hashtag #PDFTribute.

For many on campuses, though, a growing concern is distraction—staying focused in the face of all the e-mails, texts, and tweets. One professor at the University of Washington, David M. Levy, is calling for a grass-roots movement for better habits of multitasking and concentration, and better awareness of information overload. “We can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be more attentive,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle this spring. “What’s crucial is education.”