Online education isn’t new, but recently its gotten a bit bigger. Stanford taught 160,000 students CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. MIT was already in the mix with MITx. Now Harvard and MIT just put together 60-million dollars to work on a whole platform called edX. Not to mention the non-University competition. Obviously there is a lot of interest in providing education more broadly and outside the classroom.
Sebastian Thrun (Stanford)
The question in my mind is how will it be better or worse. The good seems obvious. Online education can be made available to more students in more places at more times. The student has more control over the speed and repetition of their input. Assuming some thought is put into the process, I imagine that both the ability to ask questions, have a dialogue, and assess the students can all be achieved. All the above assumes some slick technology, thoughtful faculty, and some disciplined students. Then again that isn’t too far from what a physical classroom takes to be productive.
That seems to leave the real difference between the online and offline is the human contact. Is there a difference in watching a video of me giving a lecture than seeing me in person? Is there a difference in instant messaging/skype/google+ and a traditional office hour? I think the answer is yes there is a difference, but maybe not the dramatic difference faculty might like to believe. In a recent editorials on Chronicles of Higher Education (part I and part II), Jeff Selingo interviewed students at different institutions and one of the students’ comments was how face to face is more important than ever, given our digital social experience. I know people have studied how strong emotion ties information to our long term memory. That is why you remember what the entertaining, engaging, and motivated professor taught you longer than the boring professor. Will the online counterpart be able to create this environment?
I don’t know the answers and I can’t see the future well, but it seems likely this isn’t going away. It means there are changes coming for those traditional faculty/lecturers because unless they are bringing something very worthwhile to their students, they will likely be replaced by a more clear video, good education technology, and some solid tech support.
UPDATE: (5/15/2012) Purdue gets in on the action too.
UPDATE (5/31/2012) “The Future of Undergraduate Teaching” is a view of how undergraduate teaching may look in a world of online education. Online lecturers with support staff and peer-to-peer learning in early coursework. Live lectures are a rarity, while small group learning becomes the norm.
UPDATE (6/1/2012) Chronicles of Higher Ed just had an article summarizing a study saying hybrid online/traditional courses teach just as much. The study was done by a consulting firm on technology in education, so take it was grain of salt.
UPDATE (6/19/2012) How about online education without teachers? Chronicles had an article today on Peer-2-Peer University. Here is the quote from the front page.
At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.
UPDATE (7/12/2012) “What the matter with MOOCs?” discusses the differences in online education compared to in class.
The delivery of course content is not the same as education. And training students to perform technical tasks, such as doing basic equations in calculus, is not the same as education.