Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates called Semester Online. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out.

Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. And, according to Inside Higher Ed, Vanderbilt and University of Rochester have also pulled out as of Friday, with Wake Forest sitting on the fence.

“Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson told GigaOM, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools.

At Duke, faculty concerns over the lack of administrator transparency related to the 2U deal, as well as unease with awarding school credit to students not admitted to the college, apparently led to the withdrawal.

Other issues led Vanderbilt and University of Rochester to back away from the 2U consortium. While several schools work with different online learning companies, University of Rochester reportedly chose Coursera over 2U because of the MOOC provider’s ability to reach a larger audience. Vanderbilt raised the issue of cost; while efforts like the MOOCs try to provide educational experiences at a lower price, 2U’s program costs the same as an on-campus for-credit program. Vanderbilt, as well as Duke, still maintain partnerships with Coursera for non-credit-granting courses.

The decisions to back away from 2U come after faculty resistance to online learning programs at other institutions. Earlier this month, San Jose State University professors refused to teach an edX course on justice developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to the country’s university system.  And in April, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the effects of MOOCs on U.S. universities.

2U’s model, which focuses on small class sizes, live instruction and real teacher-student interaction, exists in stark contrast to the mega-sized virtual classrooms created by the MOOC providers. But it’s still bringing a new and different instructional approach to slow-moving academia. Even though one could argue that 2U’s flavor of online education isn’t as disruptive as MOOCs — like traditional college courses, it promotes teacher-student relationships, live classes and paid courses — it’s still causing some faculty to wonder about its long-term impact on their institutions and employment prospects. For example, the New York Times reported that some Duke professors were concerned that it might eventually cause the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors.

Ultimately, these on-campus debates emphasize that transitioning to online learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Faculty and administrators raising concerns aren’t rejecting online learning wholesale, they’re trying to determine the approaches that work best for their students, missions and economic needs. As MOOC providers and other online learning companies make bigger headway, we’ll inevitably see more of these tussles — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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In the past year, the university has welcomed MOOC providers like edX and Udacity with open arms — in addition to launching a first-of-its kind program with Udacity to award college credit for courses taken on its platform. The school has a growing partnership with edX and plans to create a dedicated resource center for California State University faculty statewide who are interested in online content.

But discord seems to brewing among some faculty.  This week, professors in the Philosophy department said they refuse to teach an edX course on “justice” developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to their university.

In an open letter (first published by the Chronicle of Higher Education) to the Harvard professor behind the course, the San Jose State faculty members argued that while they believe that technology can be used to improve education (by enabling instructors to record lectures so students can replay them, for example), they believe MOOCs could “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Will MOOCs lead to two classes of universities?

Not only do they worry about a future in which fewer perspectives are offered by universities (“the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel,” they say), the professors argue that the MOOC model will lead to two classes of universities.

“One, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant,” the letter says.

In the past year, MOOCs have picked up considerable momentum – Coursera, for example, says more than 3 million students have enrolled in a course and 62 top universities from around the world have signed on as partners. And they’re starting to show their effectiveness in blended learning classrooms. In a pilot program at San Jose State, a professor leading an introductory course on electrical engineering incorporated content from the edX course “Circuits and Electronics,” assigning students videos and problem sets to review outside of class. According to edX and San Jose State, the pass rate in that blended class was much higher than the pass rates in conventional classes.

More faculty members show resistance

But as MOOC providers carve out a bigger presence for themselves in higher education, university faculty members are beginning to raise compelling concerns. Last month, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the long-term impacts of MOOCs on the U.S. university system. Namely, they argued that they would perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching and lead to a centralized system of higher education that weakens middle- and lower-tier schools.

The San Jose example shows that just because university administrators are willing to embrace the MOOC format, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t deep resistance from their faculty. And, given that some believe that the MOOCs’ honeymoon period is winding down, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more examples like this emerge.

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TV shows Top Chef and America’s Test Kitchen have both launched their own online cooking programs, and we’ve even see the emergence of the first online professional culinary school. Now a San Francisco startup called Feast is taking a tech startup’s approach to the cooking school.

Feast co-founder and CEO David Spinks doesn’t have a cooking background. Instead he’s online community developer that has created or managed the community portals for the LeWeb conferences, Zaarly, u30pro, BlogDash and Scribnia. He even created a meta-community for community managers called, you guessed it, TheCommunityManager. But after he did some consulting work for online learning startup Udemy, helping it develop its community strategy, Spinks got the idea for Feast.

Spinks said he wanted to apply the same online education methods underlying teaching sites like Udemy and Coursera to create a platform for cooking lessons. In addition, Spinks wanted to anchor those classes with a strong community, not only to address the inevitable questions and problems that emerge when trying to prepare a dish, but to keep students interested and engaged.

Spinks added that he didn’t want to create something dull or overly academic either – not the cooking equivalent of a coding course.

“We wanted to take the entertainment value you get on television, but create a format where you can actually learn,” Spinks said. “There is a problem with the Food Network. It’s entertaining you, but they’re not really teaching you how to cook. They’re selling you a lifestyle. We’re actually trying to get you in the kitchen.”

Last fall, Feast launched its first online cooking course, a four-week class designed to teach basic cooking techniques ranging from knife skills to braising. Led by Feast’s in-house chef Jeremy Umansky, the self-paced lessons use detailed text descriptions and photographs along with numerous videos.

It’s in the community discussions, though, that a lot of the real learning goes on, Spinks said. Not only does Umansky engage with students on the boards, but students interact with one another, often solving problems before an instructor get involves, Spinks said. That student interaction also acts a motivator, helping solve one of the key problems of online learning: retention. In self-paced learning programs such as those offered by Coursera, Spinks said, as few as 7 percent of students actually finish the curriculum from beginning to end. Feast’s inaugural class last winter attracted 75 students, and more than half participated up to the very to its conclusion.

The company’s spring semester starts up next week, offering a new kitchen basics class as well as a new course on vegetarian cooking (both $60 for four weeks). Feast has also begun offering a free mini-course on fermentation where you can learn how to make Kimchi, Korean spicy preserved cabbage.

Feast has also managed to attract the attention of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which accepted the company into its accelerator’s sixth batch of startups.

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

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The San Francisco-based company, which last year grabbed headlines with a $25 million seed round for its plans to bring an Ivy League-level education online, on Monday announced a $500,000 prize that will go to one educator per year for making advancements in higher education.

The point of the award is to help elevate the teaching profession and bring attention to people creating breakthrough learning experiences, the company said. That it will likely help the young startup build its brand certainly doesn’t hurt.

In addition to announcing the new prize, the startup said Roger Kornberg, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, would serve as the Governor of the Minerva Academy, an honorary institution that will include educational innovators from around the world.  The Academy will be responsible for selecting the winners of the new Minerva Prize.

“Respect for teaching has declined over the years. Teachers were once one of the most esteemed members of the community and, in some way, their remuneration reflected that. But today that’s much less true,” said Kornberg. “The purpose of this prize [is] to enhance the public appreciation of people who today make a great sacrifice and devote their lives to this profession.”

As student debt climbs and more question the value of a high-priced college education, startups of all kinds are emerging with different models for online education. In attempting to lure both top students and top professors who might otherwise gravitate to the country’s leading brick and mortar institutions, Minerva has an audacious vision.

But beyond raising $25 million from Benchmark Capital, Minerva, which is led by founder and CEO Ben Nelson (the former CEO of Snapfish), has attracted the support of several high-profile leaders. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is an advisor and former U.S. Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey (D-NB) leads Minerva’s Institute for Research and Scholarship.

Image by Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock.

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But this week, elite liberal arts college Amherst snubbed edX after months of courtship, highlighting concerns about how MOOCs could change higher education over the long term. The faculty wasn’t opposed to online education in general but approved a proposal for plotting its own path as opposed to joining edX, according to Inside Higher Ed.

A few of the faculty’s concerns were Amherst-specific, the news outlet said. For example, some wondered if MOOCs, which by nature include tens of thousands of students, are inherently at odds with the college’s mission of encouraging education through small residential communities.  And others wondered how edX certificates bearing Amherst’s name would ultimately affect the school’s brand.

But others had larger doubts about the future impact of MOOCs on higher education.  Citing an internal report on edX, Inside Higher Ed said the school worried MOOCs could:

• Perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching, which preferences lectures and exams over seminars and teacher-graded papers
• Take tuition dollars from middle-tier and lower-tier schools
• Lead to the centralization of higher education in the U.S.
• Exacerbate the star faculty system

Amherst’s decision follows a survey last month showing that while a majority of professors view the MOOC format favorably, less than a third of them believe students should be able to receive formal credit from their schools for successfully completing a MOOC. An earlier survey of university chief academic officers revealed a less glowing view of MOOCs – just a third of the respondents said they believe that their faculty accepts the value of online learning.

While professors and institutions are beginning to realize the benefits of experimenting with digital content and online learning formats, Amherst’s move shows that they want flexibility in determining how to do it and that institutions are willing to consider different models. That’s good news for other startups and companies in the space. The three big MOOC providers have received considerable attention recently, but colleges have plenty of options for bringing learning online, including 2U, Instructure’s Canvas Network and startup NovoEd.

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On Tuesday, the company said it had raised $7 million in a Series B round led by Kaplan Ventures and including the Social+Capital Partnership. The new cash brings the company’s total amount raised to $12.35 million.

Like competitors Codecademy, LearnStreet, lynda.com, Udemy and others, Treehouse offers online videos and lessons on web development, programming and other technical skills. With the new funding, CEO and founder Ryan Carson said the company plans to focus on product development and increase its headcount. Treehouse currently employs 55 people, 60 percent of which are involved in course development. While some rivals, including Codecademy and Udemy, build their libraries by letting anyone create lessons, Carson said a big differentiator is Treehouse’s emphasis on having in-house experts create curriculum and teach online.

Another benefit of the new round, said Carson, is the involvement of Kaplan Ventures, the early-stage investing arm of education company Kaplan Venture (which is a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company). He declined to elaborate on what their involvement could mean for Treehouse’s future, saying only that it will help with “key strategic developments.” But given that a big new focus for the company is reaching high school students, one could imagine that Kaplan’s network would come in handy.

“One of the key things we’re trying to do is to get people job-ready right out of high school,” Carson said.

Since January, the company has piloted a program with high school students at schools in three cities and is aiming to roll out to other schools this fall.  In the school where students have progressed the most, Carson estimates that 50 percent of students will be ready for technology jobs paying $30,000 to $40,000 by the end of the program.

The six-month program, which will cost schools $9 per month per student  (discounted from the $25/month it charges customers who come directly to its site), is intended to give schools a way to teach computer science even if they don’t have teachers skilled in that area. Students can watch the videos at home and then work on projects and ask questions in class.  Teachers only need to stay one lesson ahead, Carson said.

To date, the company said it has attracted 26,000 paying customers, most of which are individual customers, not enterprise customers – a key consumer segment for lynda.com and a likely target for other similar startups. But Treehouse is smart to focus on high schools, which are facing increased calls for enhanced computer science education. Startups Codecademy and CodeHS also offer (free) learn-to-code tools for schools, but there’s plenty of room for more. As non-profit Code.org points out, less than 2 percent of students study computer programming and despite the fact that programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, programming is not offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools.

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Last fall, Stanford launched its own open-source online learning platform Class2Go, which it released to the public in January. Developed by a team of Stanford engineers, the platform was designed to support the university’s online classes and research. In addition to being open, the platform was intended to be inter-operable with other services and portable (meaning that the course content isn’t tied to one platform). But as part of the new collaboration, Stanford will cease development on that platform and focus its efforts on edX.

“[We'll] fold in the key features of the Class2Go platform in the open-source edX and, together, we’ll be working on a single platform going ahead,” Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said on a call with reporters. “By putting all the wood behind one arrow, so to speak, we thought we could have a bigger impact.”

Since its launch, other schools around the world have started using Class2Go. While the platform will continue to be available to other users, John Mitchell, Stanford’s vice provost for online learning, said they’ll work with those schools to migrate to edX while it transitions its own courses.

The two organizations gave few details on how the collaboration would actually work. But they said that Class2Go’s analytics tools, which can track how long students watch a given video, which sections they repeat and other kinds of student activity on the site, are an example of the kinds of features that will be integrated with edX.

Despite Stanford’s collaboration on the edX platform, Mitchell said the university was not joining the “X University Consortium” of institutions that offer courses on the edX site — which is not entirely surprising given its affiliation with for-profit rival Coursera. The startup was launched by two Stanford professors and the university was one of its launch partners.

But even as Stanford and other top universities partner with for-profit online course providers, like Coursera and Udacity, the growing support for an open source platform shows that schools want to experiment with multiple approaches and be able to control and customize online educational courses and learning tools. The open-source approach means developers anywhere can add new tools to the platform, that professors can create online experiences that best suit their needs and that schools can learn from the innovation of others.

In addition to the Stanford partnership, edX also announced that on June 1, it will release the entire source code for the online learning platform. That development follows its announcement last month that it would release its XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting edX course content.

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Since launching in 2010, online learning startup Udemy has offered learners the opportunity to take online classes from home. On Tuesday, the company upped the convenience factor with an iOS app that lets students take classes directly from their smartphones.

With 600,000 users enrolled in the company’s paid and free classes, Udemy is attracting a strong following. But given competition from longtime online learning company lynda.com, as well as startups Skillshare and Codecademy, Udemy clearly wants another way to hook and keep students. While lynda.com does have a mobile app for users, several other Udemy rivals do not.

Dinesh Thiru, Udemy’s vice president of marketing, said the company’s students, many of whom are enrolled in classes with hopes of career advancement, are professionals with busy lives.

“They know learning is important, but they struggle to find the time,” he said. “We built the Udemy iPhone app to help them find that time… to enable them to learn whenever and wherever they find those extra fifteen minutes.”

From the new app, students can enroll in free and paid courses and access video and audio lectures, presentations, articles and other course components. It also enables students to save courses for offline viewing (for subway commutes and plane rides), as well as watch videos at accelerated speeds.

For now, the app isn’t available for Android users and doesn’t allow students to interact with peers as they can via the web, but Thiru said those developments are on the company’s roadmap.

Udemy, which is backed by investors including Insight Venture Partners, Lightbank and 500 Startups, enables anyone from individual experts to bestselling authors to offer video-based courses. It currently offers more than 6,000 courses on topics ranging from web development and entrepreneurship to literature and fitness.

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Rosetta Stone, which charges between $350 and $500 for its language courses, is largely known for offering CD-ROM-based courses in its signature yellow boxes. More recently, it has moved online and to mobile. But as companies across all kinds of industries embrace the cloud and more people look for educational content on digital platforms, it makes sense that the company wants to update its products with new technology.

Livemocha, which has 16 million users globally, will remain in Seattle. But Rosetta Stone said its technology will form the foundation of the next wave of the company’s products. Launched in 2007, Livemocha offers free online lessons, as well as premium access to live classes and tutors.

The news comes as competition in the language learning space seems to be heating up. Last month, Berlin-based language learning service Babbel acquired PlaySay, a small Silicon Valley language-learning app, and raised $10 million for international expansion. Other emerging rivals include community-based language site Busuu and Duolingo, a free online service that helps people learn languages while also translating real-world content from the web.

While Rosetta Stone already has a strong presence in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, the company said Livemocha’s users in China, Russia and South America, as well as its several offices in the US, will complement its global footprint.

To date, Livemocha had raised $14 million from August Capital and Maveron.

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As momentum builds behind bringing computer science to younger students, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard said his company wants to do its part for the cause. And, on Monday, the Salt Lake City-based company released a couple of free online courses teaching elementary, middle and high school kids how to code.

“We feel that the world needs to raise awareness of the importance of being more technical with computer science at an earlier age,” he said.

As a star-studded video released last month by Code.org emphasized, the country needs more technical talent. Less than two percent of students study computer programming — and 90 percent of U.S. schools don’t offer programming. Meanwhile, programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, according to the non-profit.

In addition to sites like Codecademy and Treehouse, which could be for professionals and students, more startups, including Kuato Studios, Tynker and Hopscotch are beginning to take on this problem directly with games and kid-friendly programs that teach the basics of coding.

But for Pluralsight, which is a subscription-based business, the new kids’ courses represent more of a goodwill- and loyalty-building effort than a new revenue source, Skonnard said. Its first courses focus on MIT’s programming learning environment Scratch and the programming language C#, but Skonnard said it plans to grow its library of kids’ courses, and expand outreach to schools, over time.

Pluralsight partnered with the non-profit Teaching Kids Programming, led by developers Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco, to create the C# course and Skonnard said both new courses were designed to be more interactive and attention-based.

The company, which launched in 2004, claims more than 200,000 subscribers and, earlier this year, raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners.

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