College Guide

Comments

• lena on Wed 2 Sep 2009 04:53 PM

  Great glimpse into the future! You should mentioned some of the 4,300 colleges that will go out of business forever or be taken over by the fed/state government.

• Szalinsky on Thu 3 Sep 2009 08:51 AM

  But are these degrees/credentials obtained through online means recognized by the Board of Collegiate Exams?

• groove me on Thu 3 Sep 2009 03:55 PM

  Transmission of our civilization? Seriously?

• Sarah on Thu 3 Sep 2009 04:48 PM

  Paid puff piece. Although a fabulous idea, don't assume that you will get a degree through straighterline. A local community college may be a better bargain - for now.

• Nick on Thu 3 Sep 2009 05:19 PM

  The big hurdle for these online programs is to be recognized as a valid option for young seniors in high school. As of now - the education that they receive is questionable but it does allow them to get some feel for the material and the skills. The big question here is to test those skills against those in the big universities, understand the disparity and attempt to reconcile the difference in skill either by rationalization or by hard work on the part of both the program coordinators and the online students.

  There will always be a role for the university system with certain majors (engineering and science is definitely one you need to be AT the institution to work) also ancient literature would be hard pressed to find the required texts without a great library. But many majors may be able to get by with just a book and a test.

  I would actually appreciate the deflation if this were all possible but alas, it seems that businesses would be right in questioning the skills that come out of these systems of education.

• Bill on Thu 3 Sep 2009 06:28 PM

  As a teacher at a community college, I don't see our exit skills listed within the exit skills of the basic English course provided by this company. Further, when I looked at the syllabus provided, it was set up to be more like a series of exams that ask questions about "the rules" of the course rather than teaching students reading/writing/critical thinking strategies and having them produce short-long essays....essays that require more reading/feedback than this company is willing to factor in with their business model.

• Derek Blain on Thu 3 Sep 2009 08:08 PM

  Disastrous for universities? The Free Market at work is NEVER disastrous for Universities - but here's whey the author is uneducated enough to try to make this point.

  I'm sure this has been covered by someone earlier on but capitalism has all but been forgotten just as critical thinking has all but been forgotten. This is due to government intervention in education.

  It not only manifests in primary and secondary school - where the government hires the teachers and writes the curriculum! (honestly, if you were the government would you want to teach your future revenue stream to be anything BUT a good little taxpayer when they grow up??). This is also in the post-secondary institutes due to the student loan scheme that goes on.

  Call it an unspoken agreement. The schools teach things that the government finds acceptable for its students. The schools create a monopoly on that information through a labor union and closed guild-style education. To support this system they must constantly raise tuition rates to a level far, far beyond acceptable return on investment for students and the parents who often co-sign the loans for attendance.

  The government's side of the agreement? They will always offer student loans high enough to meet these exorbitant tuition levels. This skews competition because schools really don't have to compete on actual curriculum and even more so on price, so the actual quality of educational material has DETERIORATED post-secondary (not to mention earlier years of public school) ever since the government student loan programs were initiated.

  Thankfully this is an unsustainable course - schools are beginning to realize the errors of their own ways - they can't afford the legacy costs of tenured profs and the huge expansions the pre-greatest-depression credit boom enabled them to have. Take MIT for example. They are posting their curriculum ONLINE IN ITS ENTIRETY!!! This is a HUGE step to removing the guild-like wall of secrecy that has allowed this type of education structure to even exist!

  Now you can take challenge exams through MIT after self-studying the material. This will drastically cut their labor costs while still offering them an impressive rate of return (exams are still pricey but only about 20% of the course cost I think) on their penned curriculum. Hopefully this is the start of a wave of such happenings. This will put many schools out of business whose curriculum is sub-par and who have been using the monopolistic guild-style education system (government-backed, as always with unnatural monopolies) to their unfair advantage.

  We should all be letters of praise to MIT for answering the call of the free market! And to this new breed of course - the more competition the better. This will DRIVE DOWN costs and DRIVE UP quality of education. It will also create more a more diverse and rich selection for potential students. What's NOT to love (unless you are one of these over-paid, underworked, tenured professors whose post-grad students are doing all your lectures for you!)

  Also, I know this is off topic, but if anyone is interested in investing I think the market is rolling over and the USD has formed an intermediary (12 month-ish) bottom. Check out the charts here:

  http://www.investophoria.com

• sassafras on Thu 3 Sep 2009 10:21 PM

  I certainly hope that internet education doesn't come to the massess in THIS FORM. Straightline seems to be outsourcing professorial jobs to other countries. This means that the United States will lose jobs and money. The collapse will be simmiliar to the Ford and newspaper collapse. When these buisnesses fall-America;'s economy will be destroyed. Therefore, the gains in tuition to students ( a very good thing) will be offset by less jobs and eventually less job security. Straightline will eventually create an evironment in which despite one's degree; the person will not find a job.

• Glen on Fri 4 Sep 2009 10:23 AM

  Great article. Accreditation has to evolve. At www.nixty.com we are working on a form of open accreditation - or personal accreditation - that employers/peers can look at to assess a person's competencies. Degrees are still somewhat valid indicators of a person's knowledge, but their predictive value is steadily decreasing for a number of "anonymous institutions". What is needed, instead, is a form of personal accreditation that is based on test scores, work display (papers the individual has written that others can download/comment on), resume, and recommendations. We hope that this type of open accreditation will yield strong results that can help support the current form of accreditation.
  

• vanyali on Fri 4 Sep 2009 11:00 AM

  People don't get degrees to learn things, they get degrees to show to other people (like employers).

  Maybe something like this could be useful for courses in specialty areas, like a specialty statistics course designed for financial professionals for example, that working professionals need to learn quickly on their own to do their jobs, but don't necessarily need a showy credential in.

  A degree does you no good if people don't respect it. But learning can come from anywhere.

• JR on Fri 4 Sep 2009 11:20 AM

  In reply to Bill, look at the English syllabi closer, and you will see that students ARE required to submit essays for critiques and for grades.

• Henry Cate on Fri 4 Sep 2009 12:55 PM

  "Great glimpse into the future! You should mentioned some of the 4,300 colleges that will go out of business forever or be taken over by the fed/state government."

  Is the goal of colleges to provide an education, or to provide jobs for professors?

  If online courses can provide a decent education at a fraction of the price, then it is a great benefit for our society.

  Cars destroyed the buggy industry, but very few today would argue that we should have kept the jobs of the buggy makers.

• Ryan on Fri 4 Sep 2009 01:08 PM

  @sassafras

  Let's stay in the mindset that the all powerful American economy must remain this way forever and any attempt at a unified economy or world system where humanity is united underneath core drivers for humanitarian growth is merely a euphoric world existing only in theory. Recent market behavior hasn't opened anyone's eyes as to just exactly how interconnected the economies of the world are? Yes, let's take 5 steps back instead of one step forward and keep pushing towards economic segregation where hippies run "non-profit" organizations to provide monetary aid to 3rd world countries, when the reality of the solution would be to embrace all nations under a unified economy.

  Cool story bro. Certainly not arguing that this is the future, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

• Yale Wood Shoppe on Fri 4 Sep 2009 06:26 PM

  If this company is hiring teachers and tutors in India, your typical "free market" thinking American student will hire a Chinese student to earn his degree for him. Hell, at $99 a pop, I can hire 32 Chinese students to earn me every degree on tap!

  You are not being educated if your ideas are never challenged and you are not in a social environment where you will learn to think in ways you have never considered before. A fast-food degree online would be useless.

  And if you think the only reason to get an education is to earn more money you are a fool! Our biggest problem as a society is not the inability to screw around with machines and computers, but the inability to think, to reason, and to be capable of relating to different social groups and classes.

  We don't need a country full of isolated freaks, hunched over their computers learning chemical engineering so they can go blow shit up. We are better off with more literature, more poetry, and lunch with the coed sitting in the next row!

• Spastica Rex on Sat 5 Sep 2009 10:32 AM

  Inevitability is a simple rhetorical device used to persuade readers that one particular unknown future outcome is more likely than another. Perhaps the vision outlined by the author will come to pass; perhaps not. Certainly different individuals and groups will benefit and suffer in different ways and degrees depending on the outcome. Proponents of global capitalism will benefit from the future outlined in the article.

  Just as the future described in the article isn't inevitable, neither is capitalism a natural law written into the fabric of the universe; despite what pop-philosophers like Ayn Rand have claimed. Capitalism is merely a societal construct in much the same way that the American university system is. Will a global capitalist post-secondary education system produce superior results to our existing system? I see no evidence that it will. No evidence is presented in the article.

  I think the important question here is not where credentialing services (degrees and certificates)are going to come from, but what is "education" in the 21st century and how will our citizens obtain it?

  In the article, the author conflates education with credentials to present a future that is sympathetic to the aims of global capitalism. I reckon that's easier work than writing about the very messy process of education. Yawn.

• jm on Sat 5 Sep 2009 01:39 PM

  The major flaw with this article is that the author assumes that universities sell content. Education is NOT content. Content is the medium through which education flows. Nearly all of the content introduced to a typical student at a typical university is in the public domain. What a university sells then, which is markedly different from a newspaper or a car factory, is *perspective* on content. Education not only tells us which articles to read, but how to read them, what the key thing to take away is, and gives a relative probabilistic indicator of how well the student actually learned the concept. And this isn't an easy thing to do.

  Accreditation exists because the outcome of education is highly probabilistic, so society needs market controls to ensure that what you the employer get when you shop for a worker is what you pay for. Otherwise you would have thousands of unscrupulous degree mills just selling pieces of paper.

  Also, I think the management of straighterline and the author grossly overestimate universities' general willingness to transfer credits.

  Finally, the author makes it sounds like universities are doing nothing (like the car and newspaper industries) while the long fuse of capitalistic efficiency eventually blows up their freshman cash cow. This couldn't be more wrong. Most of the progress happening in online education right now is in fact happening in the online education units of universities. The online university *is* the replacement for the huge freshman class revenue stream, but its not going to come from private industry, but from colleges and university themselves. Any university that doesn't realize this and isn't working on their online component right now is destined to fail.

• steve on Sat 5 Sep 2009 05:12 PM

  This article makes me wonder if we are destined to have a "War on Unacredited on-line courses". Much like the "War on Drugs", this is just another example of a bloated government bureaucracy maintaining the status quo because it is unwilling or unable to honestly evaluate the costs and benefits of change. Maybe it IS in the governments best interest to keep a majority of it's citizens uneducated (or at least undereducated) because people too busy struggling to survive don't have the time to question what their leaders are doing.
  If half the money spent fighting the "War on Drugs" was spent for ushering in the use of technology to reduce educational costs, the "War on Poverty" (Funny how that one just evaporated, isn't it?) might win itself. Just a thought.
  Unlike newspapers, colleges have alumni in positions of power. Don't expect a swift and radical change in any industry that deeply entrenched in government. Once again, the American public loses to the good ol' boy network. Maybe that can change. The real question is how many generations will it take? Especially if you look at the nepotism rate in government. (Can you say Kennedy?) Good luck America... we're going to need it.

• Michael J. Trout on Sat 5 Sep 2009 07:13 PM

  This is just the begining of a global eRevolution for education. The education singularity is fast approaching. eSingularity is the moment when all education will be open to all and free to all. Sounds absurd? We are looking for Asia to get behind the eSingularity Initiative http://bit.ly/3jzE8d and a new movement called the eRevolution is steadily growing on Facebook/EDUITorg.

  Change is coming.

• jd on Sat 5 Sep 2009 08:52 PM

  I agree that the quickest, easiest road to a higher paying job is the best for this country. After all, it was overvalued houses and not overvalued degrees that sent the economy down the tubes.

  I got my online degree for $200 and now I make $70k a year updating my facebook profile. The invisible hand has yet to have the last word in this mess--maybe we should be trying to invest some time and effort into careers we care about instead of finding the quick and cheap way to make more free money.

• katie on Sun 6 Sep 2009 11:21 AM

  online education delivery is still in its infancy.
  Most colleges offer an online version of their classes, but don't bother to tune the delivery to match the differences between online attendance and in-class attendance. The result is a lower educational experience for online students, but at the same price.

  This model is basically the same as other online models, but students don't pay through the nose. Rather, they are expected to own their education. Online learning is not easy. It requires discipline, drive and the ability to truly understand written material. Decent writing ability is probably very helpful here too.

  I'm a 46-year-old recent graduate from a local community college (Associate's in Computer Info Systems). I found it much easier to attend class in the classroom. Some courses were impossible for me to do online. For instance, math. I need to see math problems being solved to be able to mimic the instructor's actions. Programming, too.

  However, for young people, whose lives have been immersed in technology since they were babies, I think this is an appropriate alternative. There will always be the snobs who think that no degree is legitimate unless it's from an ivy league greed mill. The rest of the world can have access to education for less and know just as much as the butt-time folks.

• Trace Cohen on Sun 6 Sep 2009 12:12 PM

  It is the sad truth that someday this whole collegiate experience will be a thing of the past. There is no way to justify these outrageous tuition especially if no one is getting jobs after they receive their degrees. Almost anything you want can be found online if you look hard enough. The one problem I see with it is the interaction; having everything virtually takes away from the "experience" and social interaction that you get with most universities.

  Still though, something that should be highly considered.

• Louis Mahern on Sun 6 Sep 2009 07:03 PM

  Good job, Kevin. Proud to see an Indiana Senate Democrat alum doing well. I'm going to share your piece with Teresa Lubbers, our new Commissioner of Higher Ed, and others.

• Valerie Protopapas on Sun 6 Sep 2009 08:44 PM

  It's about time! Academia has been bilking the American people longer than the Mafia and taking a lot more money. Instead of an education, most often the kids are indoctrinated into academia's favorite liberal viewpoints and those who resist are often "flunked out" by what is supposed to be the place where young people go to exchange viewpoints and learn about the world.

  I've always believed that the ludicrous cost of colleges and universities would quickly come down if nobody went to college for the next four years and these tenured professors had to learn to live in the real world.

  No, the internet won't REPLACE academia, but it might just jolt it out of its elitist fog and bring it back down to earth with the rest of the masses.

• kth on Sun 6 Sep 2009 10:23 PM

  Most public universities already accept some or all of the AP and CLEP advanced placement examinations. Surely it will occur to some online education provider to piggyback on that de facto accreditation system, if they haven't already.

• jm on Sun 6 Sep 2009 11:29 PM

  great website. hey, i could have saved several thousand dollars of tuition. it doesnt make sense that college education keeps getting more expensive every year. if education did what the cost of transistors when through, we would have kids coming out of college at age 6 with over 20 degrees and can build a spaceship that can fly out of this galaxy. We would have solved world poverty, hunger, cure all diseases, we wouldn't have lack of anything. We would have people who are skilled vs attitude of being superior.

• Paul on Tue 8 Sep 2009 09:12 AM

  Interesting analysis, except for one thing. You say "They're also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows."

  Colleges and universities aren't in the information business - they're in the certification business. The value of individual degrees lies in the perceived value of the certification. There's more value in a Harvard degree because there is more prestige in a Harvard certification.

  The threat to colleges is at the lower end of the perceived value chain.

• Jim on Tue 8 Sep 2009 09:29 AM

  The author of this article failed to dig deep enough into this story, besides the accrediting issues, take a look at the economic ones. Assuming an 8 week course with 30 students in a class the total revenue for a course would be just under $6,000. After paying the PhD faculty member lets say a low rate of $3000 to teach the course that lives $3000 to pay support staff and operating cost. The only way to make this program financially possible would be to make the classes totally non-inactive with auto graded quizzes. The student reads, studies, and then takes a quiz. This system has been around for years, worked for Abe Lincoln, however, the success rate is in single digits.

• Patrica on Tue 8 Sep 2009 10:44 AM

  I ask a simple question, (since I am a simple minded person,)about the value of the accreditation process through a historical perspective. Seems to me, if memory serves, we would be hard pressed to find the accreditation paperwork for classes taken by Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Socrates, Plato, Shakespear, Moses, Jesus, Galaleo, Descartes, Homer, Shelley, Byron, Keats, or Blake. Hummm I think I lost my train of throught. Remind me once more why we care about whether or not a person's education is evaluated by some committee that looks at some list of activities the student must do, knowing full well that there is no way to monitor whether the student really does it. Nor is there a monitoring device that insures the teacher give a hoot, actually discusses what is on the agenda, or is mentally competent to stand trial. But I digress. Can you say, personal responsibility for our own learning? But that's just me and I am a simple person.

• Aatos on Tue 8 Sep 2009 01:31 PM

  Well why does anyone hire a personal trainer? You can eat less, walk, run, jump, squat, bend, sit up, push up, pull up and lift heavy objects for free. All the moves are available online.

  The answer is that most people don't have the self discipline to do it themselves. Most people need an authority figure to give orders, and/or a large group of similar people doing the same kinds of things. Traditional schools provide both.

  I guess to convince me, the author would've had to interview successful online students who landed great careers with their degrees, and major employers who seek out online graduates who know just as much and are better motivated.

  Until I read that article, I'm skeptical.

• Antial on Tue 8 Sep 2009 01:36 PM

  You know, Kevin, you really ought to talk to someone in education, and not just write from the perspective of this guy. I'm a community college teacher, and guess what? You can get a 2-year degree or two years of college, fully transferrable, fully accreditable, at most state community colleges, no funny stuff needed, for about $3000 a year (and most students qualify for federal and/or state aid, which makes it cheaper). You can take that $6000 first two years of college to most of the state's 4-years colleges and get full credit, and you'll pay more for the last 2 years, but you will still get a 4-year degree accepted at any graduate school, the military, and any employer. It's not $99 a month, but it's also not just a class at a time.

  You know, I don't actually care whether the universities have a monopoly, etc. What counts for me is my students. And the truth is, I've never met one who took general courses at one of these for-profit schools and thought it was a good investment... because the courses are not accepted for credit elsewhere. Many if not most for-profit colleges are getting lots of money from federal student loans, and the kids end up with lots of debt and not a lot to show for it when it's time to go into the job market or transfer to a university. That's too bad, but that's the reality. I can't tell you how many students I've had who have told me sad stories about trying to get credit for courses they paid for at different for-profit schools. (1 year and 2 year health care training, btw, seems to be the exception, but those are also much, much more expensive than "$99 a month".

  And most students don't need to go far for either in-person or online education. Most states have a community college system with transferrable credits and many, many campuses. (My own in a medium-sized state has 23 campuses.) And you can also take many of the lower-level (freshman) courses, the required ones, online either at a community college or a big state school (University of Maryland has a very extensive online system, used by many in the military). It's cheaper, of course, if you take the courses in the state where you reside (much cheaper).

  And when you finish, you have actual credits. I don't know if you get a great education-- though I teach online, I'm the first to say that in-person classes are usually better-- but then, I think you can get a great education online at Podunk Comm College or a terrible education in-person at Harvard-- it depends very much on the student's desire and willingness to work hard. I just hate to see those virtues exploited as they traditionally have been by the for-profit college education companies (I don't know if this one is exploitative, but the history of the industry is not salubrious). Yes, non-profit colleges also engage in chicanery (I think they often make freshman classes onerous so that students will pay tuition and then drop out), but at least, if you persist, the degree is worth something. (I'm a firm believer that the purpose of all this is knowledge, wisdom, all that good stuff, but you know, my students aren't wrong to think that there should be a more pecuniary reward too.)

  I really think that if you'd done a better investigative piece, maybe look at whether the graduates of this school thought it was a worthy investment of their time and money, you might have had a better article. This sort of sounds like a press release. How about, next time, interviewing some people engaged in education, and not just the ones who hope to make a profit from it?

  The only profit that can be made from education, I fear, comes by ripping off students in some way. It really isn't a profitable pursuit. It's not supposed to be, and it never has been, and it never will be.
  

• Joseph Thibault on Tue 8 Sep 2009 02:07 PM

  I think that it's great. California almost does this already, but the costs are artificially low because of state funding. Here's an option that is just as affordable but is no burden on state/national coffers and we (consumers) can still vet the courses and be assured their quality because of the accreditation that the credits carry.

  Is it perfect? Probably not, but it beats 800 dollars a credit at my local state university (Vermont).

  www.josephthibault.com

• Josh Jacobs on Tue 8 Sep 2009 05:03 PM

  @Derek Blaine
  As other commenters note, MIT Open CourseWare and other similar free publications of course *contents* are explicitly labeled as not-for-credit materials for self-study or reference by educators/students.

• Kramer on Tue 8 Sep 2009 07:59 PM

  Western Governors University is an independent, non-profit, regionally accredited, 100% online university. Not quite as inexpensive as $99 a month, but students can work at their own pace and complete as many credits as humanly possible for a flat rate of under $3,000 per 6 month term. They are a good option for those who already have real-world experience in their course of study.

• nedm on Wed 9 Sep 2009 10:40 AM

  I can say that having gone to a two year school and then to a 4 year and taking online classes (I'm a senior on my last semester) a few things.

  1) We ALREADY have online classes. I've taken two economic classes one of which was all online and the other was pretty much online but the professor still held class. You had to use Aplia.... Having said that I know one professor that refuses to do any online classes because he fears another professor from another area will take his job.

  2) We also use Blackboard which makes some classes partially online. So the idea that a class cannot be online is a bit of a joke at least on the lower levels.

  I think that with most colleges 100 and 200 level can and in some cases should be online. Going onto some 300 and 400 level ones it can be harder mostly because of the content. The head of my major doesn't like online classes but they can still happen.

  Accreditation IS a huge thing. I went to a two year school and got a decent grade with an associates. At the time however the school had problems with accreditation. A women from where I now go denied me not just a few credits but the WHOLE two years. I was taken aback but later vindicated when I was accepted (and I found out she later on moved to some ghetto in arizona painting cars ?!? I don't get it). Also the program I'm going to for grad school just got accredited and there's only a handful of schools in the state (that are much higher in price)

  as a conclusion education is required for more and more forms of employment but at the same time the prices have to eventually be affordable. Online classes can easily fill this need.

• smchris on Thu 10 Sep 2009 08:26 AM

  Old news. Almost 200 years old.

  With the rise of industrialism came a need for a literate population beyond the upper classes mingling at Oxford and Cambridge. University of London (1836) established an external program. Get the study however you could and get the degree through board examination. The system exists around the world. A direct copy of U of London was UNISA (University of South Africa) which currently handles a huge student population -- 200,000+ last time I looked.

  Is this an efficient system? Yes and no. It's very cheap and standards can be maintained but the results can be miserable (when standards are maintained). UNISA quickly found that their certifying board was interviewing a vast army of the underqualified and they transitioned in the 20th century to providing their own distance education. Even here, the eventual graduation rates are very poor because student isolation puts a real burden on personal responsibility over the course of several years.

  Is it a _good_ system? It certainly isn't an ideal system. Universities were established as a way for students to mingle with scholars and learn through direct apprenticeship. Distance education "virtualizes" that element at best. Distance education can be an _adequate_ system to train people however. At least, _some_ people.

  What I haven't looked into with StraighterLine is how they control cheating. With UNISA, one's papers over the year earn "points" that qualify one to sit for the course examination at centers throughout the country and embassies abroad. Passing the course generally depends solely on performance on that final exam. So how does StraighterLine assure that the student is who he claims to be?

• mbk114 on Sat 12 Sep 2009 03:08 PM

  Interesting article and an interesting change. I'm surprised, though, that there is so little discussion here of the major consumers of college graduates -- businesses. Sure, they want college graduates, but they want those college graduates to be EDUCATED and possess the skills that should come with their degrees, otherwise they have to expend additional resources to educate the graduates themselves to bring them up to par.

  Online education is great for providing access, but are graduates from online degree programs as well qualified as those from brick-and-mortar universities? I've heard from several people in both the public and private sector who hire and train employees that graduates from online education programs are generally less well prepared. While this is not universally true, it was enough for them to pass on online degree-holders as a rule. This may be correctable (though given different learning styles that people have, I think that there is a limit to what can be accomplished in this respect), but until it is online educations will be inferior to the in-class model.

• Professor Smartass on Sun 13 Sep 2009 01:37 PM

  I teach English composition at community college, and once I was curious to hear what my students think of online education. Rather than ask in a class discussion, which would only get a handful of responses, I used a neutral news article on it for a midterm reading and students had to write whether they thought what was presented in the article was a good idea.

  I expected to get roughly equally distributed numbers saying it was good, saying it was bad, and not taking a side.

  Instead, in two different class sections, the overwhelming majority said it sucked. They said it was too easy to cheat and lose motivation, and technical problems were too frequent.

  Humans (and every other living thing) learn best through socialization. Those who claim otherwise are either selling the software or their online degree mill, or are administrators of colleges practicing health insurance company ethics: they are trying to collect money from the state meant to educate students then spend as much on building, equipment, and software contracts that can generate kickbacks as possible.

• wakramer on Wed 16 Sep 2009 02:59 PM

  Professor Smartass:

  I have to call you out on your critical thinking. You demonstrate that you can be impartial by at least presenting students with a "neutral" news article on the subject and stating that you expected to get a somewhat neutral response. Instead, your class overwhelmingly disapproved of online education and you use this flimsy evidence to support your conclusion that people learn best through socialization and that anyone who states otherwise is motivated by money.
  Have you considered that individuals have varied learning styles?

  I for one have had good and bad learning experiences in the classroom. I have had professors who weren't even competent in teaching the subject. I have also been in classes where most of the students were keeping up but the professor spent an inordinate amount of time accommodating the few who didn't "get it". In these cases, I would have been better off learning on my own instead of wasting time parked in a seat.

• Dr. Jillian T. Weiss on Sun 20 Sep 2009 11:02 PM

  Thank you for this thoughtful piece. As a tenured professor at a public college, I have had mixed results with online learning, just as I have with face to face classes.

  In those courses in which I have had many highly motivated students, they have enjoyed the online course and learned a great deal. In those courses in which the class is waiting to be spoon-fed material and is too busy to take advantage of my freely offered time and attention, there have been a lot of complaints that the material is too demanding and they couldn't figure it out on their own. Well, I knew that.

  In the future, I'm going to make online learning much more like traditional face to face learning. I am going to try imposing an attendance requirement at simulcast events. Otherwise, they will continue to think they can learn it all at 3am in their pajamas the night before the exam while watching TV. That doesn't work in a traditional course, and it doesn't work in an online course.

  I surmise that the online teaching industry is going to segment, just like traditional colleges, with some attracting students who are motivated self-starters seeking insight and learning, and willing to commit the time and effort required. Others will cater to those who have a busy schedule and prefer to learn less, and need a lot of structured materials to help them learn.

  I think it is a mistake to talk about "online learning" as if it is all one thing. Different companies and professors have many ways of creating online learning that suits diverse audiences.

  There is a lot to learn before we can announce the revolution.

• Kevin Carson on Tue 22 Sep 2009 01:25 AM

  Imagine how much cheaper AND user-friendly this would be if it weren't proprietary, but were instead organized on open-source and peer-network principles.

  A free P2P University might include online lecture transcripts like those at MIT's Open Courseware project, along with open-source textbooks (or even assign--with a wink and a nudge--proprietary textbooks available for free, in digitized form, via bittorrent at future incarnations of The Pirate Bay). Those in need of special help might turn to wikis, email lists and other social networking tools like those of various software or computer user communities (like user communities giving each other tips on how to fix Apple hardware problems the Genius Bar refuses to handle, Linux support, etc.).

• isha on Tue 22 Sep 2009 01:21 PM

  1.

  "But are these degrees/credentials obtained through online means recognized by the Board of Collegiate Exams?"

  2.

  Two biggest scams:

  A. Over priced higher educational system;
  B. Over priced medical care system;

  Both of them need a serious revolution.

• rl111 on Wed 23 Sep 2009 06:56 PM

  Jaw-dropping hypocrisy. The entrepreneur behind these courses has a B.A. from Williams and an MBA from Harvard, the gold standards of liberal arts and graduate education. The author of the article states openly that the four-year, cloistered liberal arts model, like Williams College, is simply "the best," and that "some people" (the rich, you know) "will always be willing and able to pay for it."

  But for everyone else (i.e. the poor, euphemistically re-branded as real Americans who don't need fancy classes from those overpaid professors) Mr. Harvard thinks a series of cheapo online courses is good enough. And the real American who stars in the article? A fifty-year old mother of three who never got a B.A., has now lost her job, and needs some new training quick so she can get hired somewhere.

  Mr. Harvard is happy to supply a shoddy market solution as the humble folk lurch from layoff to layoff in the New Economy. Any why not further degrade the TA/Grad Student/Adjunct circuit (itself a market solution to the university's "problem" of having to pay professors) by eliminating even those jobs, and letting Harvard-educated entrepreneurs rake in the cash with their McClasses?

  At least the embarrassment of the failed accreditation scam caused the company to come to a parting of the ways with the entrepreneur, and to rest content with their already-dubious online tutoring business, built on (what else?)outsourced foreign labor.
  

• Drop-out by chance on Fri 25 Sep 2009 02:10 AM

  An observation: Most people would agree that there is no substitute for spending the time from ages 14 to 18 in a good private or public high school, with dedicated teachers, innovative administrators, loving supportive parents, and a bucket of money. But many teenagers for many reasons don't get that experience and leave school without a diploma. Those kids can go to night school later or educate themselves and take the GED, a battery of exams that demonstrate basic proficiency in reading, writing and math. An equivalency diploma is hardly the equivalent of, say, an International Baccalaureate, but it is a legitimate recognized credential that someone can show to an employer and college admissions offices.

  There needs to be something comparable to the GED at the college level. Spending ages 18 to 22 at an elite university (once again, ideally with a bucket of money) gives someone educational and social experiences that can't be duplicated, but the world shouldn't end if you miss that bus. A broadly recognized college equivalency degree would allow students of any age and life circumstances to educate themselves with online courses from multiple sources, independent reading, private tutoring, work experience or anything else that worked for them, and demonstrate their accomplishments in a uniform way. This would not be dramatically different from the educational structures in countries where students "read" for a degree and pass comprehensive final examinations, rather than assembling a basket of course credits over a period of years.

  The College Board used to offer Graduate Record Exams in a wide range of subjects. These were designed basically to allow students from colleges with varying standards and programs to compete for graduate school admission on an equal footing. If I recall, at least one state university granted college-level credit for satisfactory scores on the GRE subject exams, which, after all, were supposed to measure what you would have learned if you had majored in biology, American history or some other academic field. If you earned sufficient scores in a variety of subject exams, it would add up to a degree and you would be awarded one. But the GRE subject exam program has been cut back too far for that to work now.

  Nevertheless, this could be a model for a college equivalency degree program. Instead of assembling credits course by course, and maybe not learning much from each one, the student could earn a block of credit by passing a comprehensive exam that would demonstrate broad competence in a particular field. If he passed several exams, perhaps with a specified distribution, he would receive a college equivalency degree that would probably carry as much weight, if not more, than, say, a B.A. in business or communications from a no-name state college, and it wouldn't matter how he learned what he knows. A college equivalency degree would never be much competition for a Harvard sheepskin, but it would be a practical alternate route for folks who didn't get through college the traditional way.
  

• Laura on Sun 27 Sep 2009 05:18 PM

  I agree with Drop-Out's comment that the "college experience" offers more than just a degree, and I also agree that there should be another option for people who do not find that fitting into their life. However, I must disagree with the assumption that classes offered and taken online do not generate just as much thinking and understanding as classes taken in a traditional setting. I think that really depends on the student, their devotion to their studies and their personal learning style.

  http://www.learn.colostate.edu/blog

• Reader of this interesting question on Tue 6 Oct 2009 02:00 AM

  I went to college and absolutely loved the experience. In four years, I went from an ignorant 18 year old to a worldly and very socially astute 22 year old by the time of graduating. Not only the classes, but the people and activities and the knowledge that the world is my oyster, and I can make of it what I wish, is what the college educational experience is about. If I sat at home for four years in my cozy family home in the middle of the far suburbs, I would have missed joining the competitive sports team, becoming elected to my dorm's executive council, studying abroad in Italy, realizing I can overload my classes while getting As and Bs, and meeting people from around the country and the world. College was socialization on steroids....and perhaps the only time in our lives where we figure out who are and what were are capable of within a social context.

  Online colleges, I think, completely fail to provide the environment to grow as people. We are relegated to doing it ourselves. There is a reason why government and business is dominated by people with college degrees...they understand how to succeed in a social world where a combindation of skills is required. Not just bookish knowledge. An online class is equivalent to studying diplomacy without ever meeting a person from a foreign country.

  That being said, I agree that tuition is outrageous and there is certainly a place for online education. I simply believe that an online college will fail to provide the individual the environment to grow as a person, and that sociey and ideas are led by those who have grown and realized where they are in the world earlier rather than later.

• Dictynna on Mon 12 Oct 2009 09:31 PM

  I have a strong suspicion that this is MEANT to be 'catastrophic for universities'...look how well it worked on the newspaper business.

• Kampechara Puriparinya on Mon 19 Oct 2009 02:00 AM

  Billions of people worldwide prefer online education because of their brain
  fit for self-directed learning[SDL]. They can be working, and get their e-portfolios by work-based learning [WBL], and blended learning [BL].
  The ICT generations 2.0, 3.0...are very great initiatives. The world is flat
  for all generations [ Boomers, X, Y, Millennial Generations ]. Also the
  blended learning, ubiqutous learning are very popular. It's a choice for
  everyone to learn amid 24 hrs of the timeframe they prefer. Many mega-
  universities [student body exceeds 100,000 + ] worldwide propose lot of
  quality academics programs in soft, hard sciences, and multidisciplinary
  programs, ie., Global U21, Open universities in India, PR China, UK, Thailand,
  USA, and so on. The body of quality assurance & accreditations should be
  effective, public accountability, academic integrity, and best core values for
  all around the globe, ie, the pre-eminent strategic initiative by Higher Learning
  Commission [USA]. The trends of online education, and distant learning
  are growing alongwith exponential time. The traditional universities with
  a bureaucratic style of management by the boomers' bureaucrats, and
  groups of Academic Mafias including some of the University Council Members
  are running the colleges & universities towards vicious cycles, chaos, nepotism,
  and group-thinkers..The trends of catastrophic for the traditional model of universities, they are going to be died or left behind!!

  Bangkok, Thailand.