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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.'"
Cause engineers need to learn to be even less socially inept....
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.
The best thing you get out of college, if you go to a good one, is not merely learning from the occasional great mind and a bunch of above mediocre minds.
It's that you are surrounded by brilliant people from dozens of fields. They are your community. Sometimes the professors--depending on how much the school emphasizes teaching as opposed to research--but mostly the students. The students you meet at a great college are more intelligent than almost everyone else you will meet in your lifetime.
It's great for networking, too.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
University employees are basically protecting their jobs. If you can do classes online, you won't need as many administrators, logistical personnel, and yes, even profs...
As a professor, I can tell you that the value of an online class is much less for many subjects than its in-person counter-part. There are exceptions, but for the most part, the implicit premise that online classes are valuable is exaggerated. The related questions are what should go online and whether a university should be willing to sell its brand name, rake in the extra cash, and pray that the public doesn't figure out that online classes cost far less to host, while the same tuition will be charged.
The truth is that the first 2-3 years of undergrad are generic, profs generally hate teaching them, and it's about a cash grab before the students go on to something else. Online school can eliminate that for those students most likely to continue on - in my opinion, for what that's worth.
It is not until your final years in engineering, anyway, that I felt there was real engagement from faculty. There are exceptions to this - some brilliant ones, even in my experience - but in general, universities don't want to start to compete on that lowest denominator yet.
Whoever goes first, though, will make some money.
..don't panic
It used to be that wealthy families sent their children to college so they'd have a leg up on the proletariat's children.
According to The Screwing of the Average Man, the rush to college started after WWII. All the male veterans who were trained as warriors came home to dismal job prospects... They said, "okay we fought your stupid war you politicos better take care of us". Rather than have a bunch of rebellious unemployed PTSD'd ex-military roaming the streets, Congress sent them to college with the GI Bill. College costs immediately started to spiral out of control.
While you go to high school for a grade (because you have to, and social pressures make it difficult to do the right thing, which is drop out and educate yourself), in college you get to choose what you want to learn about. That kind of choice is valuable, at least.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
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.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
When I worked for UCLA they wanted build up online classes so the could increase revenues without increasing campus expenses. They were saying they could possibly increase enrollment by up to 50%, but the sticking point then was who owned the classes. The school claimed ownership they pay teacher to create curriculum. Teachers figure they own the class materials they create for classes.
I think online is a great idea especially for general education leaving campus space for high-end and lab work.
Nobody should forget that there are many other people who work busy schedules, who aren't looking for an Engineering degree - who want to make their lives better. Going to school online presents opportunities that may be otherwise completely unavailable to them. While online classes might not be for everybody, it can make a difference to some.
I'll suggest that they bite the bullet and go to a classroom. I don't think I know anyone that would respect any ticket obtained on the Internet. I wouldn't. I'm willing to bet that most others in a position to discriminate between such things will feel the same. Consider this: we all know how easy it is to cheat in a 'supervised' classroom. Imagine how easy it is across the world on the other side of a computer monitor...
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.
About 10 years ago, I read an article that discussed how universities were planning to deliver instruction via television in the 1960's. This particular article noted that a particular university was designed around that philosophy, by incorporating television studios as well as other infrastructure to support the new wave. Alas, it all failed because students didn't want to learn through the impersonal instruction offered via televised lectures and inexperienced teaching assistants.
But hey, they declared, all of that infrastructure is a boon in the 2000's because it can be adapted to the new era of online learning. Which gave me a chuckle, because online learning is the televised learning of the 21st century.
Alas, when I told my friends about this they all scoffed at me saying that online learning is the wave of the future. Well, one friend didn't. But she lived through the tail end of the televised learning fad, so she understood that university is about a heck of a lot more than stuffing information into brains. Heck, it's even about more than learning.
The article is long on vague opinion, short on facts. Many of the facts it does give are wrong.
"Yet lack 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." Except that this isn't true. For example, I teach physics at a community college in California. We have a ton of online classes. The school is 98 years old, so it's certainly "traditional."
"Physical campuses and prestige will always matter at the top end of the higher education market, so the most elite traditional institutions will survive competitive disruption. Many of them are developing their own sophisticated online education capabilities. MIT, with its OpenCourseWare initiative, and Cornell, with its profitable e-Cornell subsidiary, are only two of the most visible examples." Except that this is grossly misleading. MIT's OpenCourseWare isn't meant to provide an online education. MIT's students still show up to class and get their education while breathing the same air as their professor and the other students.
"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum." Except that this is grossly misleading when applied to any state in the US that has a decent state university system. For example, California has UC, Cal State, and community colleges. None of these systems are worried about for-profit competition, because they're cheaper than for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix.
Some realities of online classes:
Find free books.
If Higher Education == College, then online lectures and collaboration software are already changing how students learn.
If Higher Education == Graduate level, then try waiting another 100 years. It's still an master-apprentice relationship established centuries ago, and after completion, you put on a robe and get hooded by your advisor^H^H^H^H^H slave "master".
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I teach at a large university. My university is pushing for faculty to sign up for on-line courses. My guess is that they see two economic incentives: they can appeal to a larger customer base -- students who can't attend in person -- and they can cut costs by increasing the number of students enrolled relative to the number of professors.
What's in it for me? What do I gain by agreeing to teach on-line? I lose the give-and-take relationship with my students; how can I see if my explanation of a new concept is working if I can't see the expressions of the students as I try to explain it? I contribute to putting myself and my colleagues out of a job. I implicitly support the idea that the best way to teach is to give students videos to watch.
Actually, all of my course materials ARE on-line already. See http://spiff.rit.edu/classes. Anyone who wants to use these materials to teach himself -- go for it! So I'm not lazy, and I'm not trying to keep knowledge secret. I just think that teaching college students in person is better than doing so via web pages and videos.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Some of my professors use Blackboard for various things - putting out assignments, receiving assignments, putting up Powerpoints of lectures and so forth.
The problem with all of this talk is, what are the motivations to put more things online? I work in IT and I am suspicious. All I see is the US government trying to kill off Pell Grants and student loans, schools cutting library and computer lab hours, raising tuition and the like. "Pay us the same, but now you work from home and do some lessons we drew up online" doesn't sound like anything I'm interested in. If I wanted to do that, I could have just bought all the college textbooks and read them, without going for class or going for a Bachelors.
Professors already put stuff up on Blackboard. Every semester, I'm getting about 32 hours of instruction in each course (although some classes, like science classes with lecture and lab are more hours). Topics being covered in those 32 hours are things such as : databases, theory of computation (P/NP, Turing Machines etc.), data structures and algorithms, as well as courses in languages such as C++ and Java. My data structures and algorithm professor knew his stuff cold, explained it well, and I would have loved to have had 64, or 96 hours of lecture by him. The same with the intermediate C++ professor, who did some algorithm work as well.
This is a time of austerity, budget cuts, and the like. And why is that? People talk about the economy like it's not a thing of human design but something more like the weather, an uncontrollable thing, which on the small micro level it is to an extent, but not on the large macro level - but that's another topic. I view any discussion of this type of thing extra suspicious at these times.
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.
Why is Snark Required?
it is a tad shallow, the whole matter. Who, in the first place, has 'declared' online learning to be disruptive? We've had this for decades. First, it was the radio that was supposed to bring education into the dark forests at the edge of humanity. Then, pictures were added, and Sesame Street was to revolutionize child education and bring about Einsteins by the dozens. Now the author claims lack of historic research as a new paradigm.
Been there, tried it myself (as university lecturer), failed miserably.
Nothing to be seen, move on to the next /.-story; that my advice.
To an extent I disagree, the school I got my most recent certification from offered it both online and in the classroom with the credits issued by an accredited institution. Anybody inquiring about my credentials would have no way of knowing whether the classes were online or in class without actually seeing my transcript.
That being said, be careful, not all certificates and degrees are equal and make sure that the accrediting body is going to be recognized by people that you're likely to be applying to.
Show up in person and write your exam unassisted.
Problem solved..
..don't panic
While online classes might not be for everybody, it can make a difference to some.
Yeah, and I'd bet different types of classes lend themselves better to online/pre-recorded lectures. There's also a lot to be said for 'continuing education'. Another example, if I have a hobby I want to take a class developing, well, maybe an online class is the right fit.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
not impossible, but not as straightforward as one might think. Timed tests are very problematic. If you can't get reliable metrics because of the testing inadequacies, then you're not going to do it. Blackboard is a fucking nightmare - it has all the flexibility of a fireplace poker. Right now, tech and higher ed need to sit down and re-think how this is done. The profs need to know the students are learning what they set them to learn. The students need information and learning delivery systems they can use. Tech often gets in the way - it shouldn't. Old style profs (chalk and talk) need to on the tech wagon, and Blackboard needs to be abandoned wholesale. It isn't because WebCT induces seizures.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Actually, all of my course materials ARE on-line already. See http://spiff.rit.edu/classes. Anyone who wants to use these materials to teach himself -- go for it!
This!
There are vast amounts of great course-materials freely available online, for all sorts of classes, at top-tier universities. They're a wonderful resource for somebody that wants to learn about a subject, and has motivation and some basic grounding but not the time / money to attend a formal class. You can find course lecture notes, links to papers, examples, reading lists, etc. Discussion groups etc tend to be university-private (which makes sense), but there's tons of stuff available to the world at large.
Most major universities have been "online" in this very valuable (but apparently not so fashionable) sense for ages...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The idea of a university is a medieval one. In those times printing was so expensive that few beyond the wealthy owned books. It made economic sense to send your children (usually boys) to a distant university to board and learn. Now that the cost of information distribution is practically zero, this model of education increasingly makes little sense. Combine this economic trend with two others: (1) Most college graduates owe a debilitating amount of debt; and (2) most college graduates are finding that the implicit bargain of a four-year degree for a reasonable chance at financial security. These three trends spell doom for the current model of college. Change or die.
Want social skills and the joy of direct human interaction, sports, walking to class [or bars] and having [even if occasional] sex lost to digital sensory stimulation, abscence of physical activity and a severe vitamin D deficiency?
Thanks, but me and my kids will do it the old fashioned way.
You gain the capability to reach students which would not be able or willing to attend courses in the fixed time/place which your courses are currently available.
Currently I am a student at Harvard's Extension School. I have worked in the field that I am currently studying for over 15 years, and I am unwilling to step away from my career in order to pursue a degree. Hence any program that failed to provide a considerable amount of flexibility around physical location and time of day/ day of week scheduling were simply discarded from consideration.
Now having taken a variety of distance education courses over the years, I can tell you that there are good and bad ways to run distance education courses, just as there are good and bad ways to run a traditional course. Student faculty ratio is just as important in online courses as it is with in person courses. The 'personal' touch I received sitting in a lecture hall with over two hundred students in a Biology course was just as worthless as a similar number of students watching a lecture online. It quickly becomes clear in such circumstances that the staff does have the time or availability to really interact with the students.
If a professor is willing to invest the time and effort in an online course, there are several types of tools available to connect to students to ensure their understanding of the material at hand. The dirty trick in this is that it takes time and effort, just as it does when meeting in real life. The problem comes in when a school or a teacher come to think that the Internet is a magic wand which one will wave and everything will become better. Take my current course as an example. I have exchanges several messages with the Professor (mostly email, but not exclusively), in each instance I have received very thorough and timely. The assignments are not only well though out, the feedback is detailed and comes quickly.
To do this well takes time and effort. Those schools and professors that find a way to be successful in a new medium will likely thrive. Those that opt to treat distance education as a holding bin for warmed over leftovers will suffer.
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.
I'm teaching a course at UQ that I've deployed some of my own teaching technology onto (hopefully rolling out to the masses soon... ok, maybe not 'masses' but a trickle'd be nice). Part of my theory is that "online" is not so much about pushing teaching out onto the web as it is about pulling the web into teaching. So in my course there's a fair amount of "web" interaction that happens right there in the lecture theatre (more as I add missing features), and that provides continuity that means the discussions you're having in the lecture can be continued out of the lecture, in revision, etc. Universities have never actually cared about owning content delivery -- more often than not the course textbook was not written by the lecturer. They care about delivering the teaching experience. So much so that in the course I'm teaching this semester, we decided to get the students to give about two-thirds of the talks (as tech conference talk+demo presentations) so they'd get some experience not just building tech but also explaining it and teaching their peers. Lectures aren't just about "reading out the notes", and online isn't just about "put a video on iTunes U or Lectopia.
college class times are a poor fit for working people it's one thing to do a part time job while at school but it's a other to do a full time office job and go to school at the same time and that's why university of phoenix is big and is why some jobs sign up there workers for continuing education with places like that.
Most people can't teach themselves just anything. And I'm not talking about "dumb" people here. Try, for instance, teaching yourself quantum physics.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression—I wasn't claiming that these online course materials are a replacement for taking classes. I think in-person classes are extremely valuable (and calls for moving teaching online horribly naive).
I just wanted to say how useful these materials are for those times when one does have enough knowledge to use them (a good grounding and intuition in the basic discipline, some broad knowledge of the specific topic, etc). No, they're not a replacement for personal interaction, but they're a great resource that often seems to be under-publicized.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Colleges aren't dealers of knowledge as much as they are of branding. The college pitch has always been one of a luxury good. Now days, they try to pitch that it's a required luxury, which is moronic, but none the less, the case. Colleges have spent tons of money and effort weaving their narrative of college into our culture. In fact, even earlier posts in this thread demonstrate how pervasive their advertising has gone. Like Apple fans un-knowingly regurgitating subliminal-ish advertising.
Before I get too far out in left field, my point is, for that method to work they require that knowledge be viewed as a luxury good. The Internet has the ability to make storage and dispersal of knowledge nearly free and extremely accessible. Thus, to colleges, technology is candy being offered by a man in a window-less van. The environment has been changing, and colleges will have to adapt or go extinct, but like with everything else, until their hand is forced they will continue to grasp at what has worked in the past. --Which is, throwing money at branding opportunities like research and sports instead of worrying about pesky things like quality, efficiency, or quantity of information exchange.
There are innumerable accredited universities that offer graduate degrees fully online or with partial residency requirements.
The most respected would probably be University of London Though you can't really go wrong with any traditional brick-and-mortar school which additionally offers a distance program.
No, it's not a U.S. institution, but the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on highly-raked and well-respected schools! South Africa has several well-respected institutions that offer distance programs such as University of South Africa (UNISA), University of the Western Cape (where Desmond Tutu serves as chancellor), University of Cape Town, and Rhodes University (yes, you've heard of it -- I'll bet you didn't know it was in South Africa!)
The least respected, of course, would likely be University of Phoenix -- even though they are NCA accredited (one of the regional bodies) They're also one of the most expensive, so it seems like a silly choice. Though Liberty University (SACS accredited) may have an even worse reputation due to it's history, a friend of mine who picked up some graduate credits there through their online program assured me it was both rigorous and undeniably secular.
There are zillions of others. Just make sure that any school you select is listed in the CHEA database. If a U.S. institution isn't listed listed there, it's not accredited.
You might also want to check out www.degreeinfo.com for some good feedback on any particular program your interested in.
Finally, if you're having trouble deciding between a schools, check out their ranking on 4icu.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Would you consider donating your class material and your time to CK-12? (http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/)
What is CK-12?
The CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational materials to be used both as core textbooks and as the basis for customized materials.
To learn more about our organization, visit http://www.ck12.org/about/
IT should move to a more hands on / apprenticeship systems that deals with real world stuff vs text books and theory.
But even some more hands on classes are at times useing out of date course loads. The tech schools are more up to date.
Just slightly off topic, but does anyone know of accredited universities that do graduate degrees online? A lot of people are working and can't do normal classes, but might still want to get a higher ed degree. I'm thinking both Masters and PhD here. Anyone know of respectable (mostly) online programs?
I'll vouch for Arizona State University's online graduate program. Most of the professors I had were excellent, some chatted freely and took an interest in me, or at least faked it well enough over email. They encouraged and fostered classroom chatter over the forums and message boards. Some tests were online, but I sat most tests locally with a proctor and a #2 pencil.
The classes were filmed during lectures presented to a classroom of students, so there was some student interaction there, but for the most part lectures were playback-only unless I emailed the prof a question. Turns out that is extremely convenient to someone with a full-time day job when the real-life emergencies crop up. There is no penalty for hitting "pause" in the middle of a lecture, saving up three lectures until the weekend, repeating a difficult passage to be sure it's understood, or for hitting the 2x speed button for those professors who think faster than they talk.
The only complaint I had were the extra fees I had to pay to take their courses online, which about doubled the cost of tuition. But for that price I also got an on-campus liaison who was able to take care of lots of the paperwork and stupid administrative stuff. I never had to fill out course registration forms or worry about full classrooms, and when the University sent me a notice saying I wouldn't be able to attend any more classes until I had proof of a measles vaccine (I'm 2,000 miles from campus, and viruses do not work that way!), they handled that kind of nonsense for me. It's good that they did that, but the cost was very high.
It was definitely a different experience from my on-campus undergraduate degree. And I can't really rank that difference in terms of "good" or "bad". But I don't feel cheated in any way by the experience, and I did get the education I was looking for.
John
PLATO @ 50: Perhaps the greatest untold story in the history of computing is the development of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois and later also at Control Data Corporation.
Online learning is no substitute for a good teacher. The secret to teaching is pace and emphasis. A good teacher introduces new concepts and explains each step at a pace that can be absorbed by the students. He places emphasis on the important steps and explains them more completely. A teacher can also read the class and will go over concepts that the students are having difficulty with. A good teacher can also say the same thing in different ways as one way is not understandable by everyone. Another secret is to keep the mind awake. Reading is boring. By using volume, inflection, humour, and gestures the teacher keeps the class lively and the students interested. One can only read for so long before the brain shut down and the learning stops.
On line learning is much the same a learning directly from a book. If they were the same as lectures then lectures would already be obsolete.
The original question is a false dichotomy; the question isn't whether or not college should go online or not. The question is under what circumstances is the application of information technology and integration of online access and collaboration to the university education process appropriate and to what degree?
I am the Moodle Coordinator for the University of the People, a completely online tuition-free university. We have students from 119 countries learning in a collaborative fashion through online discussion forums, downloadable resources, and assignments including peer-assessed work and online quizzes, exams, and projects.
The mission of the university is to provide "universal access to quality, online post-secondary education to qualified students". Without the online component (through the open-source Moodle LMS), the university could not hope to fulfill this mission without charging a large tution and pricing most of the world's population out of the market. All coursework is online, and from my own perusal of the course materials, I find the curriculum to be challenging.
While this model will not and should not completely replace the traditional university, it is a viable model for providing a quality education, particularly to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity for financial or other reasons. For example, the university has a number of students from Haiti who, due to the 2010 earthquake, would have no other options.
I agree with several other posters who state that there is something to be gained from the interaction with professors, students, and others in the university community. That, of course, does not preclude posting resources online, creating discussion forums, and having students collaborate through the Internet. As an undergraduate (at Penn State) I had several undergraduate courses with 300+ students - my largest had over 1000. The professors in these courses mostly lectured; why couldn't the lecture be posted online and the quizzes, exams, and papers be submitted online? Not to mention there were students who did not attend class, but rather purchased the notes from one of the note-taking companies on campus. What's the difference?
A strong argument could easily be made that the blended approach is best; the workplace is increasingly becoming more diffuse and more and more collaboration is done between remote locations; in my case I live in Japan and collaborate with my university colleagues in the US and Israel and with intructors and students from around the world. The modern university education needs to adapt to and reflect this reality.
On a side note, it would be great if more world-class unveristies and colleges put their coursework online for all to see like MIT is doing with its OpenCourseware project.
The statements above reflect my own personal opinions; I do not speak for or represent the University of the People in any way, shape, or form.
For those of you interested, here is more information on the University of the People.
Wikipedia
Inside Higher Ed
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
Home schooling has proven the marginal value of institutionalized instruction. Many schools, such as MIT, are putting their entire courseware online. The only brick-and-mortar universities that will survive are the ones who emphasize their alumni networks for getting students jobs.
... It already is online. I myself go to one. Is it the future of higher education? Yes in some proportion. Should it be? I don't know.
Some might fight me over this, but university really isn't about getting another paper on your wall, and it especially isn't about running exams for people who've learnt something from online sources (even if they are the university's own). Good universities are about getting you in contact with great people, profs, thinkers, getting a glimpse into their views, listening to what they have to say, getting to know their views, eventually working with them and get something plus out of it you'd never get by studying online materials. Also, universities are the first real life social network that matters and can have a great influence on your professional life. If a university makes available courses and materials online, that wouldn't hurt, but it's not a silver bullet.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
It depends on what you want to get your graduate degree in. Just about any Ivy League school will offer some sort of business-related degree. On the other hand, very few -- if any -- will offer a graduate degree in a hard science.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
incidentally, reminded of a sarcastic S.H.I.T acronym for my real school.
RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) as South Henrietta Institute Of Technology
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
that movie was awesome and funny, unrealistic though it may be
reminds me of my high school, open minded but not quite that much so (was starting to go downhill in practice, though)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I have a BSc in Computer Science on my wall and I dont think purely online courses are the best idea (I had none in my degree)
However, use of online resources makes a LOT of sense including accepting assignment submissions by email and distributing lecture slides/notes/recordings/assignments/etc.
Being able to talk to tutors/unit coordinators face to face helps (being able to send them email questions right on the spot without needing to wait until they can see them in the flesh next time also helps)
And yes as others have said, being on campus gives you campus culture and stuff (not as much as if you actually live on campus but that's not as common here in Australia as it is in the states)
I'm currently studying a masters on a distance learning basis, where the whole course is delivered online - lectures come in the form of podcasts, and all supplied reading material is for download. Assignments are submitted via email, and we have regular real-time (text) chats and forum-based discussions.
For me, it's been a great experience, since I can fit my studying in around my work, listen to my lectures when driving or doing the ironing and the like. However, on the other side of things, I miss the casual chatting and discussion which takes place in person at an institution which, in my experience, fosters the best ideas and thinking (at least, this was the case in my undergraduate experience). If I could come up with a solution to that, and to overcome the chicken-and-egg situation of needing a critical mass to try to use it to generate enough interest (nothing worth than a blank discussion board), that would tick the final box for me.
(For anyone interested: distance-learning masters in IT and telecommunications law.)
Whoever wrote this hasn't been paying attention. Colleges have been going online for years to capture revenue from sources that would not otherwise become revenue generators.
Even by the time I graduated Ga Tech in 1999, they were starting to offer online courses, and now it is big business for them. There's a lot of money to be made from revenue sources that cannot relocate to Atlanta
I learn primarily by listening not reading, or writing. This is not that uncommon. The reading and writing helps though. Trying to teach the concept verbally to someone else is the final test and also a learning experience. This learning style means that watching a lecture online where I can pause and back up if my attention waivers or I can't keep up with the discussion, is even more valuable than a meatspace lecture, unless it is one-on-one instruction where I can be allowed to stop the discussion to ask questions and repeat what I think I've heard in different ways to verify my understanding. Specifically the Gilbert Strang lectures(MIT OCW) on linear algebra were great at refreshing my memory on a class that was poorly taught my first time around. If I had been learning the material for the first time I agree that performing the written work and readings that went with the lectures would have also been necessary. As for getting stuck, its amazing how helpful the internet community can be for that as well, though in my case coworkers would be sufficient, there really are few substitutes for being surrounded by brilliant people.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
First, remedial courses do two things: 1) they make up for shortcomings in students' backgrounds, and 2) bring everyone to the same level. Not all high schools are good. Many are kinda lousy, and despite their best efforts to destroy their students' learning skills, kids still manage to do well enough on the SAT to get into good schools--after their inflated grades have been kicked in.
I don't think he's talking about "remedial" courses. At least, I didn't see any indication of it. From the "generic" I assume he's talking about the oft-griped about "core" classes (English, Economics, History, Foreign Language, etc..) that most schools require for any degree.
Look at where we are really headed with our tech, and tell me we aren't growing as a species (at least in the west) faster than our institutions are.
Considering that said institutions are the ones in control of said tech, if you're right and we're a stateless society, I'll give you five for ten that it's because we're back to harvesting dirt by then.
I started my B.A. in 1992, via Distance Education from the University of Waterloo. Course notes and a set of audio cassettes would arrive in the mail. One would listen to the lectures and submit assignments by set deadlines. I took a bit of a break from education, and when I resumed, they had moved to MP3 lectures mailed out on CD. Some of the newer courses involved online message boards, which was a great step forward, offering current information as well as feedback.
I completed my degree entirely through this method. I am presently doing work for the same university editing the new courses as they are produced; they now consist primarily of animated Flash videos. I find these to be much more engaging that the old audio-only cassettes.
I don't actually know if these course materials are still delivered on CD or DVD via snail mail (I use ftp to retrieve the material to be edited). Regardless, I have observed first-hand the transformation from deadly-dull audio tapes played in isolation to full audio-visual presentations with message board (and possibly chat) integration. Many (not all, but many) courses work well in this format, and one can complete a number of degrees in various faculties entirely through what UW now calls the "Centre for Extended Learning." I don't think that the students miss out on anything at all by going this route.
-- 1 sig beneath your current threshold.
Certainly not for undergrad degrees, a few courses maybe, but not the entire curriculum. For graduate degrees and graduate certificates (specially those geared towards professionals with a certain number of years of experience), online coursework is a viable alternative (talking from personal experience with UND, WPI, and UC Berkeley).
...just knowing many lazy, tenured douchebags are out of work would make me happy.
MY wife and I both tried the online studies track. In a traditional classroom we both do great and average 4.0-3.5 GPA. when we both tried online courses our GPA dropped drastically.
Why? 90% of all online courses are taught by a "professor" that really cant hack dealing with students AND is majorly overloaded. Teaching 10 classes at a time was what I was told by one of them, oh and he was in China NOT the USA, but his education degree was from a USA college. Questions asked would go unanswered or answered far later than it should have been answered. Plus the class pace is so fast you CANT do anything else during those 3 weeks. every minute of my time after work was dealing with my one onliine class at that time. God help you if you take more than 1 at a time and work full time. Plus I ended up with very little education from the class. It felt like it was just a churn and burn experience to get the credits.
I have fully given up on Online learning at the UNI level. IT sucks, I have not met one person that liked the classes or felt they learned anything from the class that they could have done on their own.
If they make online education on par with traditional education, I.E. same class length, same professor access and REQUIRE the professor to actually answer emails, let me access his/her lectures, etc... then YES Online can work. But the way the colleges have it structured right now. IT's a sub par education that only creates stress and wastes time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's not always correct.
For instance, if you go to a smaller school that only really does undergrad, those first 2-3 years are a big part of what the school does. The profs who work at places like that do so in large part because they want to teach, and they genuinely care about the freshmen students because that's how they're going to pick up people majoring in their subject. In my alma mater, for instance, the English courses geared towards first-year students were not "English 101", they were something like "The Heroic Epic Tradition" so the professor could teach both of his favorite Old and Middle English epics and some Heinlein.
If you're at a big research university, then you're may get professors who care far more about their research than they do about teaching. That's perfectly fine if your goal is to get involved in some big research projects. But if you want professors who care primarily about teaching, you need to seek out schools that care primarily about teaching and rate their professors on how well they do at teaching.
I am officially gone from
There are many, many ways people learn. Some people can learn by listening, some can learn by interacting. Saying that everything should go online dosen't account for the way that at least some students want to consume knowledge. For me, having face time with a professor gives me value -- often more value than the material that is being presented.
That being said, there are a lot of legal issues that are present when trying to with innovate the "U" online. One of the biggest issues facing universities at the moment is the expansion of FERPA in the US. FERPA pretty much says that schools have to know where student data is PHYSICALLY, and students have to explicitily allow for that data to travel anywhere outside the campus. This restricts the use of cloud services, services from new startups (who usually don't put much effort into the legal aspect of their data retention), and other cool new stuff. Heck, even services like Google Apps is often a sticky widget when it comes to universities -- causing them to either invent it themselves or to make one-off contracts with those service providers to store their data differently.
Then we also have to deal with the old crumudgen professor. Many professors have grown up thinking that their only value in academia is their lecture. They copyright it, and they hate the thought of it 'getting out there' so that kids won't sign up for their classes. These are often the professors who teach the same thing year after year and don't provide any other value other than their spoken word. This is not the case with most newer professors, but the old guard is still out there.
That's one reason. I know kids cheat regardless, but online items are so much easier to cheat on.
I took one online class. I didn't like it. I want the interaction you get in a classroom.
"To stop the terrorists."
I will say that my experience has been FAR better online. After reading the comments, most people who are against online education have never taken an online course before. Talking without a real basis of knowledge or experience is typical here at /.
When I was at a traditional school, I could sit in the back of the classroom and not say a word. And, most people around me did just that. While listening to the professor drone for 50 minutes, there wasn't much time to ask questions or have open debates.
Fast forward to the 21st century....
I earned my MBA from an online school (accredited by a legitimate and respected accreditation body). The school required people to participate in discussions. It is irresponsible to suggest that you don't get human interaction from online schools. In fact, you get more of it. Occasionally, a student would say something really inaccurate. You get a chance to blast them. You hone your skills for developing critical thinking skills and logic. The other person hopefully learned something new.
There are all kinds of pros and cons for both sides of the educational spectrum. Online isn't for everyone. Brick-n-mortar isn't for everyone. And it is all ok. The point of all of it is to learn new ways of thinking, expanding your skill set, and improving your life personally and professionally.
Don't allow yourself to dream away time. Be productive. -- Some fortune cookie
But in the end it is moot. All that the top college degree buys you is the first job. After that your performance depends on lot more factors than the amount of education you managed to extract in on-line/on-campus college.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The old-fashioned version of online courses, mail correspondence courses, have been around for a long time. Online courses have most of the same problems except for the potential of faster feedback.
Books have been around for even longer. Why take any courses when everything is already in books? I think there is some social reason why most students can't learn by themselves, but need to be physically in a class with other students in the same predicament. I guess it must be something about how all the students are in it together plus a little bit of competition. Of course, teacher-student interaction is a plus, but this aspect is overrated, I think. There are lots of classes where there is little interaction or only a few students are active.
The truth is that the first 2-3 years of undergrad are generic, profs generally hate teaching them, and it's about a cash grab before the students go on to something else. Online school can eliminate that for those students most likely to continue on - in my opinion, for what that's worth.
It is not until your final years in engineering, anyway, that I felt there was real engagement from faculty.
While true, I can say for certain after several years of engineering grad school and TAing undergrad classes at all levels, that a very very firm grasp on the material in those first 2-3 years is the most important. Higher level material is worthless without solid fundamentals. So, just because the courses are often very large, and oftentimes more "dry" than later more advanced courses, it's a mistake to paint them as any less important.
I've done an online undergrad course that was as execrable as described here; spent 10 hours on it all told, came out with an A, learned nothing. But I've also approached some of the MIT OCW stuff on youtube, and The Teaching Company sells lecture series of mp3s for $30 a course, and the amount of learning available in those packages is impressive. I think that the experience of the student really depends on the effort the school puts forward. If the school's effort is slapping up some htmlized quiz forms, then no, it's not going to do much for the student. But if it's lecture presentations, a faculty or TA-moderated forum, and full-on tests that include essay questions (or better yet replacing tests with research papers), there's little difference between an online course and any well-run distance education class, of which there are plenty. It's a medium that influences content, not determines it.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
The idea also ignores, as several have suggested, the social interaction part of higher education, which is invaluable. Not just the parties and outwardly social gathering, but the one-on-one intellectual exchange.
There are even schools which offer a complete degree on line - one or two at the doctoral level. Of course, we don't hear much about how well these people fare in the job market. My guess is that anyone with a legitimate degree won't hire them.
It's another example of how education is being watered down at every level.
...in my opinion. To me, it seems clear that a good formal education is simply a vetting process. Specifically, a provision of a certification of work completed by an accredited, dispassionate entity. It has very little to do with teaching. Universities expect students to achieve passing grades in their classes regardless of how much or little the professors of those classes are interested in actively teaching versus simply requiring students to cover the material on their own. It also has very little to do with learning. Anyone can learn, say, architecture or mathematics independently of a university. While that is great it, in reality, means very little if there is no one can verify that you did in fact learn it, i.e. no one is going to have you design their building just because you say you know how. While employers or even universities (for advanced degrees) could attempt to verify this knowledge independently, it costs a lot of money and quality of that would be all over the board. However, universities really can't say that students learned the material, either. They can just say that students completed work that should require knowledge of that material. This is why cheating wrecks the system, i.e. it is a way to complete the work without the knowledge.
Universities exist for this verification process and are accredited based on the quality of this verification process. That is, they are not just trying to be greedy or hoard knowledge nor are they trying to provide great environments and contacts and experiences. Rather, when they issue a degree they are signing off on a person. If that person doesn't know what they said the person should, it diminishes the perceived quality of their degree.
The point: it is very difficult, and costly, to provide the same quality of verification with online classes as you can with face to face classes. Cheating becomes a much more prevalent factor. Getting more and more students through the courses increases the likelihood that a false positive will be issued. Evaluating a student's commitment to their education is more difficult when it is impossible to determine how much time the student has spent "in class", i.e. viewing lectures. And more. This is why universities hesitate to go that route.
Edison initially promoted his phonograph as an "education revolution" according Randall Stross's recent biography. In fact, every major new media- movies, film, television, computers, internet- has had the same promotion. In practice, they become absorbed into the educator's toolkit to a greater or lesser degree.
The phonograph was invented to accelerate the proto-internet, called the telegraph. A telegram would be pre-recorded on a phonograph, then played through precious telegraph lines at high speed to a recorder on the other end. Then it would be decoded off-line.
The killer-app of the phonograph turned out to be musical entertainment. Edison resisted this initially as trite.
College students have deeper needs and may frequently ask or share some rather profound thoughts. Access to the best professors is a great asset. But that is not true in an eighth grade history class. A security guard to control behavior and machine learning can get the job done and replacing a large sector of teachers should be much easier than at the college level.
For the most part, I think a large proportion of college classes have already been "commoditized" by Universities, by assigning adjunct professors, teaching at off-campus locations or 1000+ student lecture-hall settings, etc.
In these cases - these types of courses should very well, absolutely be taught on line.
Universities are trying to provide some kind of perceived "value" for the CONSIDERABLE dollars that students pay.
The value is:
1.- the ability to put "I went to this school, and completed studies successfully" at the bottom of one's CV/resume - - - which leads to (presumably, hopefully) a secure, and productive ability to earn an income.
2. - the social, professional, and business contacts with classmates, which one carries forward into their future life.
3.- the "experience" of being able to live life in an academic community, unfettered with "real life" concerns. Party till you puke, be true to your school, root for your team, etc. etc.
Live on-campus, and you can get all 3, but you're perhaps "wasting" a lot of your time and money on some of the core required classes that can just as effectively (and much more bang-for-the-buck) be taught on-line.
However, if you take a completely on-line curriculum, you will miss out on #2 and #3.
I don't think (my personal opinion) that #3 is really all that important. Just an extension of the WORST parts of High School? Over Rated. And #2 can be of limited value for some people, anyway. But say you go to a really reputable school, and take a class from a well-known teacher on-line - that teacher could open doors for you, answer questions, if you see them face-to-face, in a context of a 4-year specialty program, but in the context of an on-line program, where the automation tools allow that teacher to teach perhaps 100 times the students? There will be no personal, lasting, relationship. That student could be the next John Nash, but if he doesn't get that rapport with the teacher, and maybe have a game of chess one afternoon, or talk about a book or an idea for a project - then the online class isn't going to provide that student with that opportunity: WORST OF ALL: all of society is deprived of the creative spark that was to otherwise have occurred from the interaction of two creative geniuses - which was turned into a nearly anonymous membership on several class rosters, never meeting face-to-face, and never really connecting on a personal level.
So; in conclusion:
Some classes, are too hands-on for online schools. (I think, your science classes that require labwork, OBVIOUSLY, and your studio art classes too, etc.)
Some classes, where students are getting into a specialty field of study, should not be taught on line, either.
But I *do* think that probably 70-80% of what is taught at Universities can and should be done on line, if only to make the experience more affordable and accessible to a wider audience, and to intensify the experience for those classes where the students must attend in-person.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The University of Pittsburgh is on the Public Ivy "runner's up list." Seeing that and knowing 50+ people who attended Pitt as undergrads, I take the notion of "Public Ivy" with a grain of salt. Pitt U. is far below even mid tier-private schools.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
What's in it for me? What do I gain by agreeing to teach on-line?
This attitude is exactly why education in this country (university, secondary, and elementary) are such a goddamn mess. When my employers told me to do something I never asked "What's in it for me?" The sense of entitlement of American "educators" never ceases to amaze and disgust me.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
..or else.
You saw the fate of the newspapers and books.
...What's in it for me? What do I gain by agreeing to teach on-line? I lose the give-and-take relationship with my students; how can I see if my explanation of a new concept is working if I can't see the expressions of the students as I try to explain it?...
I hear ya. Not like I know anything, but it's been a major qualm of mine from the beginning; what's the point of canned education? I wouldn't expect an answer to that question from anyone because there is a double:
1a) It's very necessary because it's a teaching of many elements learned over time to prevent every person from having to learn every element of humanity from the ground up. Not teaching in this manner will act as a barrier for progress due to time constraint.
1b) It's completely unnecessary because different people have different methods of understanding. Learning is inferred by some to the point where canned education is a barrier to progress.
There are ALWAYS people following 1a, and ALWAYS people following 1b. In fact, I just realized my comment is pointless (humor).
Anyhow, I liked your comment. :)
Learning on the job is more effective than anything; you get to see actual REAL-TIME causes and effects. You can distinguish garbage from useful data. You can learn what is real and what is perceived as real when it's not. You can learn methods of communication that are effective yet don't follow a simple rule base that hinders the growth.
Having said that, no one wants to do it for IT positions (except for college students, but that's just to help them get a degree). I believe companies should open up a little more effectively and learn about the people that they're using as employees on a daily basis. If HR doesn't have to scrape through resumes trying to find keywords or buzzphrases, but actually hires people on their ability, we would move forward a lot more effectively.
It's not going to happen, though. Companies aren't willing to take the risk.
I'm with ya, Joe_Dragon, but I don't see it happening. It's what I wish for every day.
anchored in Mexico. I think the online thing has worked pretty well for him.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Sometimes online courses make sense, other times not so much. My university is planning to spend millions of dollars building two huge lecture halls, while figuring out how to handle all the traffic that will be created before and after each class. You can't convince me delivering huge classes like that online doesn't make more sense, there's no interaction to speak of in a class of 500+ students.
On the other hand, meatspace often works much better for small recitations and labs.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
To an extent I disagree, the school I got my most recent certification from offered it both online and in the classroom with the credits issued by an accredited institution. Anybody inquiring about my credentials would have no way of knowing whether the classes were online or in class without actually seeing my transcript.
That being said, be careful, not all certificates and degrees are equal and make sure that the accrediting body is going to be recognized by people that you're likely to be applying to.
Hmmm...true...until they ask you. Whenever I get around to hiring somebody, I'll have to ask the pointed question: "Did you acquire your cert while studying online?".