Online “education” (2)

Students should be wary of any school that offers them all or most of their coursework via computer. Lots of skills can be taught online, but we should not deceive ourselves that this is a high quality educational alternative.

There are advantages to online course delivery. The instructor can post readings and direct students to a wide variety of very current material. Students can perform a series of discrete tasks and get immediate feedback and reinforcement—in effect, operant conditioning. When I choose the right Spanish sentence to go with the picture in Rosetta Stone, a nice little bell tells me so; a different bell tells me when I’m wrong. Educational software can deliver and grade objective quizzes and tests, the kind where true/false, multiple choice, or short answer questions test a student’s memory of facts and data.

It can also be very convenient for the student to complete coursework without ever leaving home, at any time of day or night. But getting help or feedback from the instructor when you need it can be difficult or impossible. And anyone who has participated in a discussion board for an online course knows that it bears little resemblance to a real class discussion.

(Of course, there are media like Skype that allow you to see the person you are talking to electronically. I talk to my daughter in Mexico using Skype. It is pretty good, but it is still a poor substitute for her physical presence.)

Meanwhile, the real benefit of online courses is for the school itself. A school saves the costs associated with a physical facility—what has come to be called “bricks and mortar”—and may take advantage of online courses to overload instructors with more students than they can reasonably respond to.

In 2001, Mother Jones magazine published an article by Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn called “Digital Diplomas.” The authors explored the inadequacies of online coursework from the standpoint of learning, and they pointed to the dangers of joint ventures between for-profit, commercial producers of online educational materials and tax-exempt educational institutions.

One quote in that article has stuck with me. The authors quoted an LA Times op-ed article by Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh: “[In] the future, traditional colleges will train a select group of students in critical thinking and problem solving, ‘while mass universities will deploy distance learning to deliver low-cost content. . . necessary to turn working-class students into performers for low- and mid-level jobs in the global economy.’”

And there we have it: bricks and mortar for the elites, e-learning for the masses.