Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its
online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at
least one online class during the fall of 2007.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks
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But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite,
pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago,
online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at
the core of how these schools envision their futures.
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera,
which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences,
mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan,
Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and
Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy
of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen
to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning
diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college
experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and
marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like
philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?
If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the
rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What
happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to
stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is
lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room
with a passionate teacher and students?
The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic.
In the first place, online learning will give millions of students
access to the world’s best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of
students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham
Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and
physics from Walter Lewin of M.I.T.
Online learning could extend the influence of American universities
around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of
colleges over the next decade. Curricula from American schools could
permeate those institutions.
Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective
as classroom learning. It’s easier to tailor a learning experience to an
individual student’s pace and preferences. Online learning seems
especially useful in language and remedial education.
The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online
learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard
drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they
love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how
learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes.
There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as
you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you
test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information.
Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have
learned into an argument or a paper.
Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A.
DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into
a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels
colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where
the real value lies. In an online world, colleges have to think hard
about how they are going to take communication, which comes over the
Web, and turn it into learning, which is a complex social and emotional
process.
How are they going to blend online information with face-to-face
discussion, tutoring, debate, coaching, writing and projects? How are
they going to build the social capital that leads to vibrant learning
communities? Online education could potentially push colleges up the
value chain — away from information transmission and up to higher
things.
In a blended online world, a local professor could select not only the
reading material, but do so from an array of different lecturers, who
would provide different perspectives from around the world. The local
professor would do more tutoring and conversing and less lecturing.
Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School notes it will be easier
to break academic silos, combining calculus and chemistry lectures or
literature and history presentations in a single course.
The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and
elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges
should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.
My guess is it will be easier to be a terrible university on the
wide-open Web, but it will also be possible for the most committed
schools and students to be better than ever.
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