Winston Churchill once said, "There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction," an assertion that accurately describes the possible peril connected to a trend entering colleges and universities across the country: the online class.
Sixty-five percent of higher education institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy and more than 6.1 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students from the previous year, according to the Sloan Reports' "Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011."
Those are pretty staggering numbers considering most private schools, such as the college I attend in North Carolina, are fighting to keep their enrollment numbers up in the face of financial aid cuts plaguing the state.
We might find ourselves feeding the need for ultimate convenience and boosting revenues as a trade-off for a solid education.
As mentioned in a piece by The Times of Malta, we are becoming a very secluded society; by diminishing classrooms replaced by electronic portals, there is a level of dehumanization that replaces real-life interaction.
A solid education holds students accountable for attending classes at a certain time, fosters
interactions with a diverse set of individuals, measures whether or not one is truly grasping the
material and gives students the tools they need to survive in the real world.
Will online learning lead to a sort of "bifurcation" of higher ed, where a small minority get the "full-strength" version with on-site living, face-to-face professors and fellow students, inspiration from professors, one-to-one career counseling, networking, etc., vs. the "decaf" version of looking at a screen, only occasionally getting the chance to ask questions in chat rooms or group discussion not to mention the other important aspects of a college education?
Any sensitive theatergoer will tell you that live theater is a completely different experience than watching the same thing on TV or your computer screen. Can the energy that an inspiring teacher calls forth be funneled into a computer screen?
While there has been some definite momentum and excitement as Harvard, MIT and Yale announced online learning projects earlier this year, we should caution ourselves from jumping head first into a seemingly deep pond only to discover it was a puddle.
There seems to be more questions than answers where online education is concerned. Will employers glom on to the certification of online learning grades and quickly determine that an X online grade is equal to a Y grade at MIT, Yale, and Brown for example?
And how quickly will some statistically clever Mark Zuckerberg come up with significant and reliable tables and charts comparing "full-strength" college grades with the equivalent "decaf" grades?
Be that as it may, transforming the classroom experience to your laptop seems to lessen the traditional college experience and thrusts students further away from reality. Turning to an online model for ones educational experience has some pretty far-flung implications and also lacks marketability for real life jobs.
But could my thinking be archaic fodder?
An incredulous college administrator announced that half the world is already using Skype, Apple's FaceTime and texting more than they talk when I suggested that creating an online atmosphere might actually dilute the college brand, experience and connections offered in traditional classrooms across the country.
Essentially, then, I was left to wonder if the perceived complete and utter reliance on emerging
technology should define a student's educational experience.
In a world where students demand certain services it will certainly be interesting to see where this road of leisure leads.
Follow Victor Lopez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/victorunn
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Learning takes place in the theatre of the mind. Even an inspiring teacher can do no more than inspire that play.
Class time would be for class discussions and for answering questions and clarification. This would deepen the learning experience and give the students more interaction with a real professor.
In current lecture classes, there is little professor-student interaction. With free on-line classes already available from top professors, colleges will have to start defending what it is they are offering. If all they can say is that they are offering a bunch of lectures that people can already get for free, it is hard to see why many people would accept that.
On the other hand, if they are offering interaction with top professors and class discussions which make the learning more individualized and interesting, then they have something to offer other than high tuition.
Already, some high schools have opted for this method, calling it flipping. Instead of assigning problems to do as homework, the teacher assigns videos to watch on the internet. Then, during the class period, the students work on the problems so the teacher is available if they have questions or need help. Colleges could likewise move to out-of-class videos, saving class time for real interaction with a knowledgeable professor.
For the average student, it's an ineffective trainwreck.
But it's cheaper. That means it can be more profitable. So I don't expect the idea to go away just because it's largely a failure.
But while it's possible that it might not be cheap if done right, it's generally NOT done right, and certainly seems to be cheaper. The one thing you said that seems to be correct is your last statement: it's not going away.
My experience teaching on-line has been that this format works well only for students who are already highly-motivated, disciplined, and conscientious. In other words, for the upper 5%.
You mean those who are now learning all by themselves in the library?
:-)
And of course there is a group of people who are greatly interested in suggesting that we don't need classrooms and that we can do it all remotely. It's the for profit colleges that have done this through remote studies for many decades. It's the people giving out "diplomas" at which the hiring managers will merely frown.
Of course the best kids didn't go to class. They went right into the library and they learned the advanced material in year one that the rest of us took three or four years to digest in the classroom. And then the smart kids went to a professor, showed him how much they knew and asked to be allowed to do real science... in their second year.
Guess how many smart kids there were in my class, Veronica? Two. Out of 150.
You think these smart kids need a tv screen to learn? Nope. They don't. But the 148 not so smart ones greatly profit from having a classroom with a teacher that they can ask about the things they don't understand.
Sort of ironic that you'd be passing judgement on the quality of an educational strategy.