Online Education

A friend sent me an article a few months ago called "The End of the University as We Know It" that I've been meaning to read for a while (American Interest). I finally got around to it and was amused to read these opening lines: “In fifty years, if not sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.”

It is, of course, possible that these predictions will come true. But comments like “nothing can stop it” always give me pause. It is the common penchant of not only the technophile class but most writers about technology to assume that humans have little control over the spread and proliferation of new technology. Some new technology has a life of its own and the power to control the population, without or advice or consent. We are mere pawns to its alluring power and promise of progress. But is that how society really works? Is technology, which is by definition created and reproduced by humans, somehow omnipotent once released to the general public? How does this process occur?

These are obviously questions that whole books have been written about and beyond the scope of one silly blog entry, but it is important, I believe, to sometimes remind ourselves that humans do have the ability to reject technology (Betamax), to alter its use (ala the rearticulation of Facebook and Twitter during the Arab Spring) or to ban it (human cloning). Politicians, concerned citizens or consumers can all undermine the power of technology to spread or have its intended, or unintended, consequences. Even Marshall McLuhan, who argued from a perspective of extreme technological determinism where new technologies like books or the television fundamentally change who humans are and how they interact (by changing our sense ratios), believed that there was always a period of negotiation when a new technology was invented and then released in a limited way to the public.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) are all the rave these days, with classes sometimes enrolling 30 to 100,000 students. The author, Nathan Harden, believes these are the future, providing education without cost to anyone who has an internet connection. He then goes on to argue, “The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruction produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die. Meanwhile, students themselves are in for a golden age, characterized by near-universal access to the highest quality teaching and scholarship at a minimal cost. The changes ahead will ultimately bring about the most beneficial, most efficient and most equitable access to education that the world has ever seen. “

While there is some truth in the argument that making higher education available to all is a form of global democratization, it also makes some troubling assumptions about education that are increasingly the norm: 1. Education can be improved using business models, 2. Efficiency is a key goal of education and should be a the center of decision-making processes, 3. Kids being online all the time is a good thing and education should fully adapt to this new reality, rather than provide spaces where kids actually treat their new addiction, 4. Universities are implicitly inefficient and wasteful and major reductions in government funding should be ignored in exploring the changing nature of higher education. 5. Online education provides the same quality as in class learning. It is this last assumption that I will focus my attention on, as it is the most troubling challenge to the contemporary higher education model. Yes, higher education is in trouble and needs to adapt and, yes, online instruction is one mechanism toward that end.

There is also a sixth troubling assumption in the article which is much less obvious. And that is the notion that the Ivy League and other elite institutions that would survive the “Great Virtual Purge of Higher Education” are in a position to provide the best education. For one, these are research one institutions whose primary goal is, well, research. Teaching has always been secondary at elite schools (except private, liberal arts varieties), and while many professors are great educators, many others are not. Further, this puts even more control in the hands of the elite universities in knowledge production and dispersal, allowing for even fewer dissenting or alternative voices to be heard. And finally, is the reality that MOOCs do not provide much direct interaction with the instructor (if any) and no direct interaction with other students.

And it is this belief, that people spending almost all of their time online will have few adverse effects on society, that is the most appalling assumption. Already we see the dramatic increase in ADD and ADHD, the depression that appears to be coupled with spending too much time online, the cyber-bullying, the kids and students who can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, the hours and hours of wasted time each day and the ways in which people are becoming more insular in their social circles. This last trend would only be amplified by online only education, where you could comfortably ignore any challenge to your opinions, values and beliefs while pretending to abide those challenges. Kids today are surrounding themselves with magazines, websites, television news programming and blogs that essentially support their positions, shutting off the channels of dissent. And we see the effects in the political arena, where one party simply says no to everything and the other can’t seem to find any mechanism to build consensus.

Harden concludes, “Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise. Few who will be affected by the changes ahead are aware of what’s coming. Severe financial contraction in the higher-ed industry is on the way, and for many this will spell hard times both financially and personally. But if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate.“ Have universities always run on “business models” and is this really the metric that should be at the forefront of determining their effectiveness? Is our goal really to education as many students as possible at the post-secondary level -- particularly when there are fewer and fewer quality jobs? Is the end of the university really something to celebrate? And is the virtual classroom really such a great thing? There are no easy answers to these questions, but it is important to not blindly embrace the new common sense, particularly when provided by the cheerleaders of technological progress at any cost.