The Atlantic
MIT Online vs. Your Local College: How Will Web Learning Stack Up?
By Alan Jacobs
Feb 23 2012, 11:31 AM ET _37_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/mit-online-vs-your-local-college-how-will-web-learning-stack-up/253
473/#disqus_thread)
The success of e-education depends on whether universities can design
online environments that are conducive to learning.
In one of my first posts here at the Atlantic, I wrote about _universities
and the problem of credentialing_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-great-unbundling-of-the-university/251831/)
. If a school
like Stanford offers online classes to non-Stanford students, and those
students learn a great deal, then what is that learning worth? Or, to be more
precise, what might a potential employer think that that learning is worth,
in the absence of a formal credential like a grade or a degree?
Well, as Megan McArdle _has reported here recently_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/envisioning-a-post-campus-america/253032/)
,
at least one university, MIT, is moving towards making a kind of credential
available for people who take and pass its online courses. The plot, then,
is definitely thickening. And some questions are beginning to loom in my
mind.
McArdle quotes Stephen Gordon, _who posits a scenario_
(http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-12/ideas/31049175_1_coffee-shop-student-debt-online-student)
:
Now, imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized corporation who's looking
for an employee with some particular knowledge. There are two candidates:
one with an appropriate college degree from the local state school, a second
with relevant MITx certificates. Let's say all other things between the
candidates are equal. Which should the manager choose?
Given the caliber of professor at MIT, the online student may have learned
just as much.
Now here's where I start asking questions. What do we mean here by "the
caliber of professor at MIT"? Almost every prof at MIT will be deeply
knowledgeable in his or her field, and will be a first-class researcher. But
online as well as in the traditional classroom, we still have to ask whether
and
how those kinds of expertise translate into learning for the student. If
the most knowledgable scholars in the world can be lousy teachers in a room
full of people, they can be lousy teachers online too.
And then there's the question of what kind of teaching excellence is
needed for online learning. So far, universities that have sought an online
presence have tended to put their best lecturers online -- the people with the
most dynamic personal presences. The Richard Feynman model, the funny,
charismatic master explainer, seems to be the thing sought for -- but what if
people don't actually learn all that much from such figures?
Consider the distinguished physicist from Harvard, Eric Mazur, who has
_recently discovered_
(http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture) that his students
haven't been learning all that much from him and
have tended to forget most of what they do learn soon after learning it. He's
completely rethinking his teaching style from the ground up, and while his
students are now learning more, they're not learning it by watching the kind
of show that Feynman once put on.
So: let's go back to Stephen Gordon's hypothetical manager who's trying to
decide whether to hire the local college grad or the person with the MITx
certificate. Right now that manager is in the dark, because the MITx
certificate is an unknown quantity. But a few years down the line some data
will
be in, and if the MITx certificate holders are able to hold their own, or
outdo the local college grads, that will not be because they have watched a
bunch of stimulating lectures from world-class scholars, but because people
at MIT will have figured out how to design online environments that will
maximize learning and retention.
That's going to be the key to the future of online learning: not whether
universities simply film their best lecturers, or place all their course
materials online, but whether they find an optimal design for online learning.
But of course, _as I suggested in my earlier post_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-great-unbundling-of-the-university/251831
/) , it may not be universities who first figure this out: it may be
educational entrepreneurs like _Sebastian Thrun_ (http://www.udacity.com/) . If
so -- and depending on what kinds of intellectual property claims people
like Thrun can make and sustain -- universities may find themselves playing a
futile game of catch-up.
The ones best placed to avoid such an unfortunate turn of events are, of
course, the wealthiest universities, and if they are willing to invest a lot
of money, time, and energy, then they may well end up, as McArdle suggested
in her post, ruling the roost even more confidently than they do now. But
I'm not yet convinced that many of our most prestigious institutions are in
this particular game to win it.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
