Should College Go Online?

An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has a story about the slow pace of technological innovation in higher education, highlighting the reluctance of many universities to take parts of their curriculum online. '[L]ack of funding isn't the only reason that the traditional universities and colleges aren't responding with their own strategic acquisitions. In all industries it's hard to convince successful incumbents that innovations at the low end of the market really matter. That was true even for Sony's Akio Morita, whose top executives didn't like his Walkman, which had no recording capability; it seemed smarter to focus on more-sophisticated products for the high end of the consumer electronics market. Regard for tradition and academic freedom make it particularly hard to undertake apparently low-quality innovations in higher education. But that's true to varying degrees in all industries. Whether the business is computers chips or steel, successful incumbents have difficulty responding to disruptive technologies, often until it's too late.'"

Comments

We have some of this--kids hate it

[Anonymous Coward]

We have online quizzes and homework for some of our low level math classes at my Big Ten university. Kids hate it. We have a few online courses. Kids largely do poorly in them and are nit prepared for the followup courses. So why do we want to push for online? The quality of education will suffer and it won't be popular.

It's Already Online Many Places

[cosm]

I've been around the community college and university circuit, and I can say that many community colleges are becoming highly reliant on the likes of Moodle/Blackboard for delivering quizes/test/material/exercises. Also, many classes at universities now require continuously larger amounts of online coursework and thus the curriculum. At community college, I took all my foo-foo fuzzy classes purely online for full credit. I'm a STEM major, so pre-reqs like Art History and Intro To College (yes that is a required course some places) were a blast to take online, i.e. a breeze and at my own leisure), giving me more focus on classes I actually cared about.

At the big-U's, of course there will be a latent aversion to prof's lecturing to a camera and reusing said lecture every semester. If I am just watching a video of a prof or reading his lecture notes online, it will be more difficult for the universities to justify the ever-more exorbitant admission cost if it's just delivered online (although most classes seem to be more of teaching yourself than the lecturer teaching you, but that's what college is about anyways, learning how to learn). College has been going online for awhile, but the question of 'should it be' is a reasonable one; will it save students money, or just dilute the college process into even more of a degree-mill spectacle than it already is? Or just create more busywork? I say it depends mostly on the context, subjectivity, and type of degree program.

I bet in 100 years our descendants will be asking what it was like to sit in a classroom with people and how weird it must have been to learn in a group.

Re:College is more than listening to a lecture.

[cervesaebraciator]

I couldn't agree more--and one of the courses I teach is online so I'm not speaking in the abstract here. You can take something as simple as helping a student learn to write a better argument during office hours. Such a thing cannot occur online and online chat is no substitute. I can tell so much more about where and how students needs help when I talk with them in person. Most importantly, I am a human being to them and they are human beings to me. I am someone who cares about them, inspires them, pisses them off, or bores them. They encourage me, irritate me, depress me, or make me more optimistic about the future. Human contact is a prerequisite to the very human growth that accompanies these experiences.

My Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I did my undergrad at a traditional public university. A good one. A public ivy. Most of my degree was on-campus, but I took about a quarter of my classes online or in other off-campus formats. The quality of the classes I took had little relationship to the format of the course - instead, what mattered was the subject and the instructor. Keeping classes on campus - or taking them off - doesn't solve the problem of a poorly taught class. For whatever reason, the board of trustees decided that the number of courses I took online was excessive and redeveloped the curriculum requirements so that what I did is no longer possible.

Now, four years after graduation, I'm in a graduate program (professional masters) that I could finish completely online, and which was intentionally designed this way. But I commute an extra hour twice a week to take at least one class each semester on campus even though I don't have to. Why? Because I'm paying too much for my education not to get all of the benefits that should come with it: teaching assistantship and other job opportunities, guest lectures, being able to easily bounce ideas off of classmates and instructors, retaining some good recommendations from my professors, etc. Online classes are great, and I won't argue that the right person can't get an equivalent education from them. But for a five digit investment in my education, I expect to get a return on investment that at least pays for the time spent. That requires that my job coming out is better than my job was going in, and the classes I take alone will not ensure that.

No, it is not a good idea

[Required Snark]

Not all the information is in the books, or the lab notes. Even with recorded lectures and interactive material, a lot is learned by interacting with others. IRC cannot replace personal interactions.

So where is the chem lab and the bio lab in this scheme? Are we not going to train doctors or chemists or physicists any more? I don't see a lot of homes with lab benches these days.

Working in groups is enhanced by physical proximity. Look at all the big tech firms. What do they call their big central facilities? The Campus These is a good practical reason for that.There is telecommuting, but that is in addition to, not a replacement of, the academic environment.

Online teaching is wide open to abuse. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. Who is going to be taking that test and doing the homework, exactly? It's already a problem in traditional schools settings, and this lowers the barrier dramatically for bad behavior.

The current system works. It has known problems, but the higher level educational environment has evolved (at least in the West) since the middle ages. Yes, undergraduates can be treated as cattle, but graduate education is based on the master/apprentice model of learning a craft. Why do you think it's called a "Master's" degree? This is truly one of those "it it ain't broke don't fix it" situations.

This could so easily turn education into a meaningless and worthless way of extracting money from people with false promises with nothing to show at the end but a big debt. In fact, when it comes to many of the for profit national schools, it already has.

You want to waste a bunch of time and money? Just enroll in a for profit school that claims it will turn you into one of those well paid game developers or CGI artists. The actual post graduation success rate is near zero. The classes are too simple to do much good, because the goal is to keep getting that tuition, not to impart useful knowledge. I had a friend who worked in the film industry, and then tried teaching. He got in trouble with both the school management and the students for showing them how to type on the command line. It was "too technical", "too hard", and it made the students "uncomfortable".

So no, it is not a good idea.

Online college is awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a bachelor's degree in Physics from Cal Poly, SLO. I hated every minute of that experience, and hated the professors.

Last semester, I took Perl, Java, and Javascript online, and loved it immensely. The online discussion boards meant that I could think before asking, or answering, questions, and I didn't have to get out of bed at the crack of dawn. It also made life INFINITELY easier to not have to squeeze in three classes with a full time job. The professors answered my messages quickly, and the students were active in the discussion boards.

This semester, I'm taking PHP online, and Android dev in a classroom (from the same professor no less). The classroom experience is largely a waste of time. I'm tired, stressed, and just want to go home and sleep. Then over the weekend I review the course videos and participate more actively in the discussions. All this comes at a TINY fraction of the cost of Cal Poly.

I realize some things are not taught well online; my physics labs would have been difficult to do in a browser to say the least, but for CS I hardly see why you need to be in class.

Of course, this will also mean that it will be increasingly difficult to be a professor, and at least at the school I went to they weren't particularly well-paid anyway. The administrators, however, including our ineffectual "president", made hundreds of thousands per year. They can go to hell.

Online-courses are NOT a good idea

[gweihir]

I know this crops up all the time as "modern". People seem to mistake "modern" for "better". But the problem is it is not better, but far worse. Lectures need the personal, physical presence to work of both the teacher and the student. There are aspects of attention, respect, a formal setting, that all are essential for teaching success.

There is one approach that works well, but requires a lot more effort than traditional lectures: Self-study material on paper. This requires that you have local groups of students and access to a TA by phone if you get stuck. It requires larger meetings periodically. It has been done for decades by distance-universities (Germany has one for example, the Fernuniversitaet Hagen). It requires highly motivated students. This is not easier. It does not save time. It does not even save that much money. But it does work.

Now, putting this stuff online has been tried, it does _not_ work. (A friend of mine worked several years at Hagen after his PhD in Mathematics.) Paper material is still vastly superior to online representation.

This does of course ignore those students that can learn a subject by themselves using a book. I did that for some subjects during my university attendance and also after. But this only forks for some students and for some subjects, which are individually different. It is not a general solution.

Re:Online-courses are NOT a good idea

[DanAnderson26]

So, you're a professor I take it?

As a former student, both online and traditional:
1. You don't get a useful physical or personal presence in a traditional college. You get the foreign guy, who seems brilliant and passionate, but you can't understand a word he says. Or you get the grad student, teaching something she barely understands because the professor can't be bothered to actually come to class and teach. Or you get the tiny speck, 30 rows down from you, who you can't hear and who can't apparently bother to buy new whiteboard markers. Or you get the "Flubber" guy who might be great, but he can't seem to organize his thoughts, notes, slides, etc., so you pray for the grad student to replace him. Or you get the professor who is a wanna-be political pundit so, instead of the topic of the class - which might be useful for you and your future - you get her preaching on Reaganomics, GWB, Palestine, race-relations, inter- and intra-departmental BS, death of honey bees, peak oil, etc. Ultimately, this nonsense leads even b&m classes to be more or less online - any learning you do beyond the books is through e-mails and texts/IMs with other students as you try to figure out what that last lecture was supposed to be about.
2. You don't get a useful physical or personal presence online either. But you do actually tend to get the information you need so you're prepared to do something when you graduate - so on the whole, it's a better deal unless you are only in college for the beer. The major problem with online is, not surprisingly, that the professors can't be bothered to answer questions or interact with you. Pray there's a grad student around - they might answer your e-mails about administrivia. For topical questions - better try google.

Now, surely, there are some schools that are clearly the sort of place that you should attend in person. Similarly, there are also some degrees that can't possibly be taught online. But these, in both cases, are, in my opinion, the rare exceptions. And I'm certainly not recommending "schools" like Phoenix, but if I can avoid it - I will never throw the dice and take another b&m class.

Re:College is more than listening to a lecture.

[CodeBuster]

Sometimes the professors--depending on how much the school emphasizes teaching as opposed to research

In my experience most of the top universities, particularly in STEM degree programs, emphasize research and the government funding that goes with that. They want Nobel Prize winners who can attract federal grants and private corporations to foot the bills and enhance their research prestige. In such cases the undergraduates are mostly an afterthought until the more promising ones manage to crawl out of the muck and become PhD candidates or useful assistants for more research. In fact, I would argue that many community colleges have lower division instructors who are at least as good as any that are likely to be found in most four year universities. Perhaps my experience was unusual, I did attend a research university after all, but surely I wasn't the only one who noticed that some professors viewed teaching less as a profession and more as a necessary chore that distracted them from their true ambition; fully funded and self directed research.