Hi
On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Rick Adams wrote:
> Jim wrote:
> > You cited two sorts of evidence. One your own case, which you
> > correctly noted was anecdotal. The second was ...
> > > A good example: The Union Institute (a distance learning
> > institution)
> > > lists over 500 graduates who earned their Ph.D.s there and who are now
> > > working as faculty members at major traditional institutions. Included
> > > among those institutions are Yale, Stanford, The University
> > of California
> > > (several campuses including Berkeley), Northeastern, Duke, Purdue,
> > > Dartmouth, Cambridge, and dozens of other top institutions.
> >
> > This is slightly better than a single case (but see below),
> > assuming that we could in fact verify the validity of the claim.
...
> I'll try to address some of the other issues tomorrow, but I wanted to at
> least address this one immediately.
>
> With respect to verifying the validity of the claim, if you will visit
> the url at:
>
> http://www..tui.edu/Programs/Graduate/GradAlumni/AlumsHigherEd.htm
>
> you will find a list of approximately 500 Union Institute Ph.D.
> Graduates, all of whom are employed in higher education. The list includes
> their names, the year of graduation, their current position, and the name
> and location of the institution where they are employed. Those
> institutions range from community colleges to the Yale University School
> of Medicine, and the positions range from "faculty" to dean. In addition,
> links on the page:
Just to be picky, for a minute, Rick's original claim was that
500 graduates worked at major traditional universities. Now it
has become employed in higher education, a somewhat more modest
claim. I had a quick look at the list. Here are some
observations: there were 18 occurrences of Union Institute as the
place of employment so all of these people are not employed at
traditional universities, there were 45 occurrences of adjunct
suggesting an irregular appointment, and there were 53
occurrences of community college. It is not difficult to imagine
other kinds of evaluations that could be done. One would then
like to see similar information and evaluations for other
distance and traditional institutions. Note also that this only
tells us about successful graduates, not about everyone who tried
the distance (or the traditional) approach.
I followed up one Yale appointment. The person is an Associate
Professor in Nursing but got a degree in 1995. My (possibly
wrong) inference is that this person was probably already working
as a faculty member without a PhD and went on to get it at Union
Institute. So the joint occurrence of being a graduate from
Union Institute and being employed in higher education does not
necessarily tell us about the causal direction (i.e., which came
first).
I am not trying to belittle distance education, nor individuals
who have graduated from such programs. I am seriously interested
in evidence as to its relative effectiveness, in part because
there are people at my university who are promoting these
approaches, I think uncritically and ignoring clues that there
may be difficulties. For example, we had an extremely high
dropout rate from one very large distance education section of
our introductory psychology, taught be a regular faculty member
who has far fewer dropouts in regular classes. How many of those
100+ dropouts were turned off psychology and perhaps even
university? How many of them would have succeeded in a regular
classroom? How many such dropouts should we tolerate in order to
provide higher education to some proportion of students who will
be successful? These are the kinds of questions that it is
difficult (here at least) to get proponents of this mode of
teaching to address. Nor is the psychology example an isolated
incident here and I have seen other comments (at least one on
TIPS I think) on dropout rates in non-traditional classes. But
my casual efforts to find evidence (including asking Rick) have
so far been unsuccessful.
Best wishes
Jim
============================================================================
James M. Clark (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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