… of so much online education.
Excerpts, from the student newspaper:
… With continuing budget problems, some may consider avoiding online education a bad move for Brandeis. Adding a few extra hundred students and going online could possibly fill some of the budget gap without having to build extra housing or hire extra faculty. Proponents of the online system claim that it could offer education to the poor and underserved. But despite all of these benefits, there are serious problems with online education.
The problem with online education is a matter of parity. Those on campus get a much fuller education than those sitting in a remote location taking online courses. Most of the learning in college takes place outside of the classroom. Speakers come from all over the world to impart their knowledge to eager students and faculty on the Brandeis campus. Unless Brandeis were to film all of those moments and offer them to students, those taking Brandeis courses online couldn’t really claim to have the Brandeis experience.
Interactivity is the next problem. In an online course, you can ask the professor questions and take part in group exercises. But talking with a group of fellow students over lunch is difficult if the participants are dispersed around the state or country.
First-class lecturers and interactivity create an atmosphere of ideas that is essential to the liberal arts education.
… According to U.S. News and World Report, Brandeis has a graduation rate of 85 percent. The graduation rate for the University of Phoenix Online is abysmal: According to statistics from the California Postsecondary Education Commission, only 281 students graduated out of 6,578 enrolled, putting the graduation rate at 4 percent. Those are the sort of numbers that could tarnish Brandeis’ reputation as a first-rate educational institution.
… The real-world college experience cannot easily be brought online-from speakers to late-night bull sessions to being involved in extracurricular activities. Brandeis should not belittle the quality of its education by going online and putting its students in danger of the lower-quality education and higher dropout rates that define the online college experience.
August 25th, 2009 at 6:56PM
No one who’s attended online education would claim that the group attending Brandeis is anywhere near comparable to those attending University of Phoenix, but the article uses comparative graduation rates to argue that Brandeis is better than an online education. One difference between the groups is that people attending online classes have more diverse reasons to take the class than do Brandeis students. I don’t think that online graduates claim that their education is the same as or better than attending university.
So, my opinion is the guy has not taken an online class. They are all over the place. For video, there’s Academic Earth, there’s MIT opencourseware, there’s YouTube.com. For audio, itunes. You can audit, you can take courses for credit, it’s all your choice. For the student, I think online is cheaper, certainly cheaper than Brandeis. I was at Stanford in the early ’70s. They were broadcasting engineering classes to local businesses at the time. The surprising thing about MIT leading the opencourseware revolution is that they’ve probably been doing it on a small scale for decades, and found it is successful, by some measure, and decided to expand the program. My guess is that people will be getting some education online or at distance and not thinking twice about it. It will be a matter of course. I’m auditing a Game Theory course on Academic Earth.
The main problem, I think, is that the government decided to fund online education. The feeling is that there is one education pie and online education just took a big piece.
I can’t write this without being snarky. (1) According to FIRE, Brandeis has a major problem with First Amendment rights for their students. Not the case with online classes. You can put out banners saying anything. (2) If online education decides to compete with university education, it will find the bar is set low (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4).
August 25th, 2009 at 7:07PM
There are certainly a number of problems with online education, but frankly these two don’t rate much attention. Many of these speakers are audio or video taped, and the universe of web resources makes it very easy to put together an online speaker series that simply trounces anything Brandeis or any other university ever conceived of, mush less funded and provided to students. And the notion that there are no "bull sessions" in online education is absurd. Online students, in the little experience I’ve had with them, seek out and interact with each other through email, chat sessions, threaded discussions, etc. in a variety of ways. And a good online class can provide an incredibly broad set of interactions. My typical residential class might have 85 percent white upper middle class students from the Mid-Atlantic. It’s not unusual for an online class to have representatives from more countries than my typical residential class has from states in the Union. The diversity of experiences they have brought and shared typically puts RI to enormous shame.
There are many problems with online education, but it’s not these.
August 27th, 2009 at 5:48AM
Just an observation –
Although we all know and love – and some of us try to be – great teachers, it is humbling to consider what students can sometimes do on their own, let alone with some sort of on line course.
I once had a student who taught herself biochemistry at a level sufficient to be allowed to bypass the first year medical school biochemistry course at the University of Chicago. And I also had a student who could not attend my lectures so he read organic chemistry – in the English sense – for a year. He took all the exams and was in the top quarter of the class (at Carleton.)
Oh, and Ramanujan pretty much taught himself math.
Just sayin’…