College Guide
Blog
StraighterLine, a Baltimore-based company offering $99 a month online college courses through agreements with traditional colleges, looks rather promising.
Earlier this year the Washington Post’s Daniel de Vise wrote that the business is “a serious education company and a force that could disrupt half a millennium of higher-education tradition.”
And as Kevin Carey wrote for this magazine back in October, 2009:
StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound.
[Most students] tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn’t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return.
Well, maybe not quite yet. Last week Inside Higher Ed published an article by Serena Golden. And while it looks like StraighterLine is doing a lot of very innovative things, it’s still got a way to go. Golden took Macroeconomics through StraighterLine. It didn’t go so well.
According to Golden, her course essentially consisted of ploughing through one textbook and answering open book and open note questions based on the book.
There are a number of criticisms to level at StraighterLine here, some about course rigor, about the relationship between the text and the “lectures,” (really just superfluous PowerPoint slides), and about the evaluation and recommendations colleges make before they decided to grant credit for StraighterLine courses.
Perhaps the most damming, however, are two specific problems Golden encountered. They’re just an anecdotes, but they’re telling ones.
The first problem has to do with what happens if someone taking a StraigherLine course doesn’t understand the material. StraighterLine offers a tutoring component:
SmarThinking tutoring takes place in a sort of chat session; the interface is a large white browser window into which students can type questions and their tutors can type responses. My questions showed up in large red letters, while my tutor’s replies were in large blue ones. This was helpful for distinguishing between my words and those of my tutor, although the format of the chat session is such that our words often overlapped and became illegible. When one “page” of type is filled up, the chat session opens a new, blank page, and my tutor and I frustrated one another — and wasted time — by inadvertently moving back and forth between pages.
Tutors have no access to the course materials or any of the work that students have done… [and] students cannot simply bring in a few pages of their work by way of example. To ask about a particular graph or illustration, the student must either save the image to his computer and upload it into the chatbox (which, in my experience, sometimes resulted in graphs too small to read), or save it in an online image program and send the tutor a link — all of which requires time and patience.
The second dilemma is that the actual material was often poorly presented. As Golden writes:
Exacerbating the apparent irrelevance of the lesson materials is their sloppiness in both structure and content. Text boxes often appear where they shouldn’t, or don’t say what they should; hovering over the highlighted keyword “depression” on one slide brings up a text box reading only “insert definition.” A table showing supply curve determinants is entitled “Approximate Absolute Thresholds for Various Senses.
Like the other course materials, the practice tests and exams are scattered with typographical errors; more worryingly, they also contain a number of wrong answers.
These problems should strike observers as particularly troublesome.
StraighterLine exists and can be valuable entirely due to the power of technology. Technology is what allows people to earn college degrees at home.
This is what makes some of this stuff so worrisome; so much of the problems are pretty basic. The lectures and practice examinations haven’t been copyedited or checked for factual errors. Tutoring can only take place in huge white boxes. And new boxes open up whenever one fills up the first box. It’s hard to transmit images and other material. Really. And this is at a time when much of the world, though Gmail, already has access to an easy chat function. There’s no excuse for this sort of thing.
In order for innovative education models to work the technology involved in the product has to be really good. That doesn’t mean really sophisticated or state-of-the-art; it just has to work.
College should be challenging. That’s the point. But the hard part of an economics course should be understanding the concepts, not having a conversation or viewing a lecture/ slideshow about the concepts.
Facebook
Twitter
Burck Smith on December 21, 2010 3:31 PM:
Given the extensive treatment of the article, I think it would be appropriate to duplicate StraighterLine's response to the initial IHE article here...
While we thank IHE for the attention, it is unusual and unprecedented for Inside Higher Ed to dedicate a 3 part article to the review of a single course from a single course provider by a single student under a tabloid-esque banner. To provide a comparable headline, the article could just as easily be titled “Colleges Wildly Overcharge Students and Taxpayers for Online Courses." Similarly, the article casts StraighterLine as a curricular experiment, when it’s really a pricing innovation. There are a variety of issues that should be raised as well.
First, like any good college or professor, we are constantly updating and improving our courses. Prior to the writer enrolling, this course was reviewed and recommended by the ACE Credit service and given a positive review by the DETC, a DoE recognized national acccreditor. Since the writer’s enrollment in April, we have incorporated a variety of recommendations including shortening the time given on exams, including weighted and cumulative exams, and adding an additional layer of identity verification. Further, several weeks ago we announced that, in the coming year, we will give students the option for full exam proctoring and the ability to select moderated cohort based courses in addition to self-paced courses. Lastly, we periodically review the courses to make content updates or even wholesale changes. Given that this course was reviewed and recommended 13 months ago (not the 5 years as implied in the article), we haven’t had a chance to do that with macroeconomics. The writer has provided a very public snapshot of a course that was deemed sufficient by all the course review bodies available to us at the time of enrollment. This course, like all of our courses, are continuously improving.
Second, now that Inside Higher Ed is acting like the Consumer Reports of online courses, I presume that we will see several thousand more 3-part stories on all of the other colleges offering distance education courses? If that reporting burden is too much, perhaps they should just link to Rate-My-Professor and publish the student reviews found there? It is interesting that the writer neither included comments from other students nor actually compared her experience in a comparable online course. Like colleges, we conduct post-course student evaluation and over 90% of our students would recommend the course to a friend. If colleges actually used student comments to make credit decisions on their courses, there would be few colleges awarding credit. StraighterLine has been through every 3rd party course review available to us. The course taken by the writer has been reviewed and fully recommended for college credit by the ACE Credit service, a service to whose recommendations more than 1000 colleges profess to adhere. This course was reviewed by DETC. This course was reviewed by the College Board’s AP service. Our partner colleges, who award transfer credit for our courses, have been given complete access to the courses. What is the appropriate way to evaluate courses – a single student’s perspective or course-level reviews conducted independently by dozens of professors, dozens of accredited schools and several higher ed associations?
Unfortunately, the standard used by most colleges for the award of transfer credit, the presence or lack of regional accreditation, is not only insufficient to determine course quality but is also unavailable to us. Despite the fact that credit (and courses) are the unit of academic currency in an age when students can take courses from anyone at anytime, individual courses cannot be accredited, only degree granting programs. This means that colleges can offer, and accept for transfer credit, taxpayer-subsidized courses of wildly varying and indeterminate quality under the umbrella