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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!
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
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
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.
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.
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?
I take it you've never actually tried to take an online course. For most people it's not anywhere near as good. Having good study skills helps, but it's just not the same. Things like study groups and being able to play off each other to find a solution or better formulate a question just don't work as well online as they do in person. Where an exchange in class might take 2 minutes, a similar one online can easily take an hour if both parties aren't obsessively glued to their keyboard.
I'm sure there are people who do as well or better in online classes, but I doubt that they're in a substantial enough majority to justify cutting back on physical schools.
OTOH, for some things it works just great, for instance one off virtual seminars can be quite useful.
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 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
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
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.
Of all the things I learnt in college, the most important parts were unrelated to coursework. No matter how good the online classes, if they de-emphasize the physical space and community they I think them a disservice to the students.
-- "Oh. This guy again."