Bigger Audiences

Top universities with courses like Professor Duneier’s stand to gain, both in prestige and in their ability to refine their pedagogy; few seem worried about diluting their brand-name appeal. The risks are greater for lesser colleges, which may be tempted to drop some of their own introductory courses — and some professors who teach them — and substitute cheaper online instruction from big-name professors.

“We’ve reached the tipping point where every major university is thinking about what they will do online,” said Peter McPherson, the president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “In a way, the most important thing about these MOOCs from the top universities is that they provide cover, so other universities don’t need to apologize about putting courses online.”

In the rush to keep up, elite universities are lining up to join forces with a MOOC provider. Coursera, which began with Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and the University of Michigan in April, currently leads the field with 33 university partners. But edX, too, is expanding rapidly — the University of California, Berkeley, has joined, and the University of Texas announced that it would use edX courses for credit. Already, students in one Udacity class can get credit through the Global Campus of Colorado State University. Most MOOC providers are making plans to offer credit — and charge fees for certificates and proctored exams.

This crowd-sourced version of college is seeping into every corner of academia. While the earliest MOOCs were concentrated in computer science and engineering — subjects suited to computer grading — Professor Duneier is one of the pioneers offering humanities courses, in which the whole grading process, from essays to exams, is handled by the students using grading criteria designed by the professor.

There are courses on modern American poetry (Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, is a student), health care policy and the Affordable Care Act (taught by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to the Office of Management and Budget) and Introduction to Improvisation.

Professors delight in reaching more students in one course than they could otherwise teach in a lifetime. Dr. Ezekiel shows off a postcard from a student in Sri Lanka. Al Filreis, the poetry professor, tells of an 81-year-old Greek shut-in who got 180 responses to his essay on Emily Dickinson. There are stories of elderly students doing homework together at their assisted-living facility and Capitol Hill staff members taking the health policy course.