The Largest Online Course Ever? A Surprising Answer And Timely Example.

Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) have dominated media attention about large, scalable online learning, not even the biggest courses on the biggest platforms are even close to claiming the prize of the largest course on the Internet. A hot topic like machine learning sits atop the Coursera rankings at 2.7 million total students. Yale’s famous course on wellbeing and happiness? Currently about 2.5 million students. The largest online course ever is four times larger than these examples having just passed the 10 million student mark. The topic? Alcohol abuse prevention. And, no, that’s not a typo.

EVERFI’s ‘AlcoholEdu for College’ course, which first debuted in 2000, has been taken by more than 10 million students, including more than 1/3 of all college first-year students who now take it each fall as a requirement for matriculation. How on earth did a course on alcohol abuse prevention become the largest course on the World Wide Web, you might ask? The answer is a very timely lesson about how to ensure online education is engaging and effective in the age of Covid-19. 

I have a unique and unfettered perspective on the history of AlcoholEdu as the founder of the company that launched it (Outside The Classroom) and which was later acquired by EVERFI in 2011. I recently caught up with leaders from EVERFI who provided updates on AlcoholEdu’s progress and total student completion numbers. I have absolutely no financial stake in the organization and haven’t for years. Having left in March of 2012, I have been removed for the better part of a decade. It’s time to tell the brief story of AlcoholEdu, the largest online course ever.

In 2000, when the course first debuted, it was among the earliest pioneers in utilizing streaming video. Something that is now commonplace was at that time an incredibly challenging ‘new’ technology with significant last-mile bandwidth hurdles, myriad user-driven errors and issues across browsers and devices. But in that moment, it was cutting-edge in enabling teachers to appear as they would in the classroom and deliver a short lecture. It was also replete with several highly engaging interactive tools – like a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) calculator that would show students examples of how high their BAC might go under differing scenarios with variables such as the number of drinks, time duration of that drinking and factors such as sex and weight.

From the very beginning there was a huge emphasis on measuring efficacy with built-in pre-, post- and 1-month follow-up surveys – including a final exam developed in conjunction with ETS that utilized a bank of validated test items to randomize questions for each student’s exam so that no student got the same final exam in an effort to prevent cheating. The surveys measured attitudes, perceptions and behaviors while the exam measured knowledge mastery. These data were used to continually improve the program as well as to provide important insights to health promotion and prevention leaders on campuses about the aggregate population of students they were serving. The data collected from AlcoholEdu surveys is the largest dataset on college students’ attitudes, perceptions and behaviors around alcohol and has served as the basis for countless publications and a full research center at Duke University called the Consortium for the Study of the American College Student.

AlcoholEdu was also the first example of an online course that was designed to be a preventive public health intervention and included many evidence-based prevention strategies such as providing normative feedback, brief motivational interviewing, and even incorporating personalized versions of the course based on students’ previous behaviors (ranging from non-drinkers to heavy drinkers) and their willingness to change, using what’s known as the stages of change model. At the time I left the company there were thousands of potential pathways a student might take through the course based on all these variables and student-driven choices in the course. It was a real pioneer in adaptive, personalized online learning.

The ingredients for AlcoholEdu’s success are many. But none more so than the insistence – over years of effort – that it be used appropriately and effectively. From the beginning, it was meant to be a population-level, primary prevention strategy; in other words, it was meant to be an educational tool for ALL students to prevent dangerous outcomes from excessive drinking as opposed to being a punitive requirement for a handful of trouble-makers. Much like the world is talking about herd immunity in the context of Covid-19, the same concept applies to public health interventions. If you educate enough people in a population, who on average make small changes in their behaviors, you can make significant reductions in the number of negative consequences suffered.

In the early days, colleges and universities were most interested in adopting AlcoholEdu as a requirement for students who got busted for alcohol violations on campus. It took well over a year (with the company running on fumes) before a university adopted the program for the purpose it was designed for: as a population-level educational program for all incoming students. Had it not been for the insistence that the program be utilized that way, AlcoholEdu would have never made it out of the basement offices of judicial affairs. Instead, it’s now been taken by 10 million students and has been shown to make measurable reductions in high-risk drinking and related harms.

Many ed tech companies develop online products without carefully thinking about their intended use cases, who they are most effective for and why, and how schools or universities adopting their products ensure they implement them with fidelity. Rigorously measuring efficacy is also usually an afterthought at best. Being specific about how a product should be used, insisting on program fidelity and living or dying by demonstrated efficacy is neither an attractive marketing plan nor an easy process to implement and support. It requires laboring that goes beyond the slick promises of scalable software solutions and promises of ‘one size fits all.’ And it’s not just a lesson for the ed tech world; in-person and online education run by universities can often suffer from a lack of clear design principles and measurable outcomes too.

Over time, EVERFI has codified a rigorous set of standards for what quality looks like with respect to both an online public health intervention and online education in general. They will be releasing a new best practice framework at their Campus Prevention Network Summit on June 4. And although the framework was developed through the lens of online prevention programs, relying on decades of public health research, it is also quite instructive for the world right now as nearly every school, university and employer is grappling with how to make online education the best it can be. The lessons learned by AlcoholEdu are ones that provide important – and largely untold – insights that are broadly applicable. Here is what they include:

·          Theory driven – courses have demonstrable efficacy based on proven learning or prevention theory

·          Socio-culturally relevant – courses include customizable content and campus-specific resources

·          Audience-specific and appropriately timed – in AlcoholEdu’s example, deploying courses pre-matriculation before first-year students arrive on campus

·          Reach and Dosage – population-level implementation of developmentally appropriate content

·          Outcomes evaluated and local data used – course surveys measure pre-post impact and campus or organizational climate

·          Comprehensive – courses address full spectrum of linked health and safety issues

·          Well-trained staff – course instructors or implementers receive training and professional development

Big hype, popular topics and free course content is certainly one formula for driving large enrollments in online courses. But, so far at least, the crown for the largest online course goes to one that has had little fanfare and is based on potentially the least popular topic among college students. It got there by being clear in its purpose, true to an important mission and built to last through rigorous and constant refinement. In some ways, it’s the story of the tortoise and the hare. The race is not always to the swift. In online education, the winners will be those who take the time to carefully get it right. It is sage wisdom for every educational institution that strives to move from the emergency deployment of Zoom-enabled distance education to online education worthy of their brands.