Online Vs. "live" Education: The Real Issues

[Lancewen]

I think there is a real place for online education. I also believe this article missed a few key issues on this subject.

 

How to build the absolute best online educational system. For each subject the very best instructors can be hired to work with the very best presentation specialists to put the courses together. Then to give a more personal experience, have a special forum type program for the students to interact with subject knowledgeable moderators on topics covered in the course.

 

As with any program, once started it will only get better over time as experience accumulates. This article makes a big deal over the personal touch of a good instructor. But I have to ask how many people would ever have access to a good instructor in every course at a price they could afford? Online will change that so that almost everyone can have some access to the very best instructors at a very reasonable cost. I would like anyone that wants a higher education to be able to have it on a flexible schedule that could be made to fit almost any lifestyle.

 

http://bigthink.com/rightly-understood/online-vs-live-education-the-real-issues?page=all

[Buffy]

I agree with you that there's a real place for online education.

 

What scares the heck out of me is that most of the business plans for this--especially by the for-profit universities like Phoenix, Capella, Ashford, Full Sail, etc--pretty much are built on the notion that you just pay a professor to produce the content, *and then get rid of them*. Just put the content up for on-demand learning.

 

When you can't even ask questions, I don't know how you learn. I mean, I went to Berkeley and had more than a few classes in big lecture halls, but NEVER was there a case where you couldn't ask a question or hit the professor during office hours every week or at least get ahold of a TA who knew something.

 

But as usual, "for profit" really translates into "pay more to get less". Hey, how are they going to pay investors dividends if they can't cut into the costs that you have in a non-profit to pay them?

 

Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable, :phones:

Buffy

[Lancewen]

I agree with you that there's a real place for online education.

 

What scares the heck out of me is that most of the business plans for this--especially by the for-profit universities like Phoenix, Capella, Ashford, Full Sail, etc--pretty much are built on the notion that you just pay a professor to produce the content, *and then get rid of them*. Just put the content up for on-demand learning.

 

When you can't even ask questions, I don't know how you learn. I mean, I went to Berkeley and had more than a few classes in big lecture halls, but NEVER was there a case where you couldn't ask a question or hit the professor during office hours every week or at least get ahold of a TA who knew something.

 

But as usual, "for profit" really translates into "pay more to get less". Hey, how are they going to pay investors dividends if they can't cut into the costs that you have in a non-profit to pay them?

 

Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable, :phones:

Buffy

 

I know many won't agree with me on this, but I think the government should sponsor it as a nonprofit higher education available to all citizens. This country would gain a great deal by having a broader segment of the population able to get a quality higher education. They could charge a fee for foreign students and for companies requesting special education to meet their corporate needs.

 

They could also, afford to pay for a permanent quality staff to run the course forums. You have to admit that forum software has been improving at a very fast pace. Once you've established an archive of questions and answers, the best of those could be selected and made available for all online students. This would give the students a feeling of class participation as they could review the Q&A and then ask their own questions which could start a dialog with other students and the knowledgeable moderators. The topics would have to be only course topics, but any Q&A within the course topics would be okay. You could even have a forum section for testing and writing requirements. Not sure how to make sure students can't cheat good grades, but if a good percentage of the grade depends on active forum participation, that may help a lot. It's my experience that participating students are usually good students.

[CraigD]

A central feature of the fictional near future word in one of my favorite recent novels, Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel Ready Player One, is a completely free online school system, beginning with preschool, provided by a private online game company who’s virtual reality system, OASIS, has, for all practical purposes, replaced the WWW. From it:

I was introduced to the OASIS at an early age, because my mother used it as a virtual babysitter. As soon as I was old enough to wear a visor and a pair of haptic gloves, my mom helped me create my first OASIS avatar. The she stuck me in a corner and went back to work, leaving me to explore an entirely new world, very different from the one I’d know up until then.

 

From that moment on, I was more or less raised by the OASIS’s interactive educational programs, which any kid could access for free. I spend a big chunk of my childhood hanging out in a virtual-reality simulation of Sesame Street, singing songs with friendly Muppets and playing interactive games that taught me how to walk, talk, add, subtract, read, write, and share. Once I’d mastered those skills, it didn’t take me long to discover that the OASIS was also the world’s biggest public library, where even a penniless kid like me had access to every book every written, every song ever recorded, and every movie, television show, videogame, and piece of artwork every created. The collected knowledge, art, and amusements of all human civilization were there, waiting for me. ...

The novel isn’t a discourse on pedagogy, but a SF adventure and expert homage to 20th century pop culture, especially role playing and computer gaming, so may not be as wonderful a read for everyone as it was for me, but I think its both utopic and dystopic depiction of the near future is worth the read to folk interested in such things (if you’re reading this thread, this likely means you) regardless of their affection or lack thereof for the book’s main genre.