(FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 10/30/13)

By Douglas Belkin

In the past three weeks, Georgia Tech received nearly twice as many applications for a new low-cost online master's program as its comparable residential program receives in a year. The degree -- which uses Massive Open Online Course technology -- is the first of its kind, and its popularity suggests a growing demand for online learning.

The Georgia Tech program is the first master's degree from a top-ranked university based on the technology that drives MOOCs. The only difference is it is not 'open,' or free, as a MOOC is traditionally defined. Students have applied from 50 states and 80 foreign countries, according to the school. To graduate, they will never have to step foot on campus and will pay about $6,600, compared with about $44,000 for residential students.

The application period for the computer-science master's program, which ended on Sunday, marks another inflection point in the growth of MOOCs, as corporations, schools and online providers team up to create more such credentialed programs.

Millions of people have taken individual online courses, but most MOOCs don't lead toward degrees, and critics argue they don't help students land jobs.

Now, a handful of schools have started to offer credits for MOOCs. And last month Udacity, a Silicon Valley company specializing in MOOCs, announced the Open Education Alliance, which allows students to earn a free certificate based on a series of online courses developed with input from Google and AT&T, among several other companies.

'I think this is symptomatic of a lot of what we're going to be seeing in the future,' said Ronald Ehrenberg, the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

Also notable among the batch of applications for the Georgia Tech program, which starts in January, is the 14-fold increase in U.S. residents. Zvi Galil, the dean of its College of Computing, said 1,854, or 79%, of the 2,359 applicants were U.S. citizens. For the residential class that began this fall, just 9% of the 1,371 applicants were U.S citizens.

Graduate engineering programs have been dominated by foreign nationals for decades. Nearly two-thirds of all computer-science graduate students and over 70% of all electrical-engineering graduate students in the U.S. are from other countries, according to Stuart Anderson, author of a recent report on the subject for the National Foundation for American Policy.