Online Education: What's the Buzz?
by Prof. Jim Lengel, Boston University College of Communication
Some say it will take the place of schools and colleges. Others suggest we
are in the midst of a revolution as far-reaching as the invention of the printing
press. But the critics suggest that online education will never duplicate the
intimacy of the classroom or the central role of the teacher. Many consider
the attention being paid to learning over the Internet to be a fad with lots
of hype but few concrete results. This week's article looks at the current state
of Web-based schooling, and offers some suggestions for the future.
The National Center for Educational Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department
of Education, released recently a report entitled Distance Education at
Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions: 2000-2001. At about an inch
thick, this is probably the most comprehensive study to date of how American
colleges and universities are providing education over the Internet, outside
of the traditional classroom. It's not a set of opinions or commentaries on
the subject, it's rather a collection of dry facts and figures drawn from a
scientific survey of about 1600 schools. (The response rate to the survey was
94%, an amazingly large proportion, which makes this study perhaps more believable
than most.) We'll base our discussion in this article on the findings of the
survey. Remember that this survey represents reports from the 2000-2001 academic
year, so it's a bit behind the times -- we may predict that any trends in the
survey have continued and increased by today.
What's going on?
Not surprisingly, most of the higher education schools in the U.S. are providing online courses for students -- 56% provide at least a few courses taught at a distance, without
a classroom. Interestingly, public colleges are ahead in this trend, with 89%
of them online, versus 40% of private colleges. And this seems to be more than
just an experiment or a pilot project: about 3 million students are enrolled
in 120,000 different online courses. Most of the colleges that offer these courses
are fully accredited, traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions that offer
hundreds of courses in the classroom, along with a few dozen online.
But it's not just a few courses here and there: one in five colleges allows
students to earn a degree through online courses only, never setting foot in
a classroom. Only a few degrees are offered in this manner, mostly in subjects
that lend themselves to distance learning. And the proportion of online courses
and degrees seems to be higher in graduate professional programs than in the
traditional undergraduate liberal arts.
What technologies are used?
Distance education has long been available by correspondence and through television,
but the technology of choice today is the Internet. 90% of the distance courses
are delivered over the Web. Video conferencing and CD-ROM are also used for
some of these courses, but their percentage is small, and I suspect shrinking.
On the Web, the methods used most for online instruction are email, and asynchronous
text discussions -- forums or bulletin board where students and teachers post
messages and comments about the course topics. Fewer than half the online courses
use video, synchronous discussion, or multimedia presentations. That's probably
due to the higher cost of developing the richer media, and the difficulties
in receiving them over a slow Internet connection.
In fact, the University of Phoenix, which advertises itself as the world's
largest online university, uses none of the fancy media technologies -- its
courses are conducted solely by email correspondence. One might conclude that
much of the online education going on today is similar in form to the correspondence
courses that have been offered by colleges since the 19th century. The federal
study did not address whether or not students enjoyed their online courses,
or how many dropped out, but other studies suggest that online courses suffer
a much higher dropout rate than classroom courses.
Why are they doing this?
The study asked colleges why they were offering online education. In order
of importance, they reported that they wanted to:
- make courses available at locations more convenient to the student.
- make courses available at times more convenient to the student.
- make courses more affordable for students.
And while more than 60% of the colleges see online education as a way to reach
new and underserved audiences, and to increase enrollments, only 15% reported
that online education was aimed at lowering costs. Community colleges seem to
take this outreach mission seriously, and are first in line to offer online
courses to reach students who can't come to campus -- about half of the enrollment
in online courses is in two-year colleges.
So we might conclude that colleges are not using online education
to replace the traditional four-year, classroom-based bachelor's degree program.
Rather they are using it to reach new audiences for whom the campus and the
classroom may not be the best way to learn.
Why isn't everyone doing this?
Almost half of the schools in the U.S. are not offering online courses.
When asked why, they report these reasons:
- online education does not fit with our basic mission (44%)
- program development costs are too high (33%)
- course quality is not as good as in the classroom (26%)
- our technical infrastructure is not up to the task (24%)
- we don't perceive a need for online courses (22%)
So while online education is thriving and growing at the college level, it's
far from universal, and a long way from replacing the campus and the classroom.
Since many colleges see their mission as providing a comprehensive four-year
education in a campus setting, many with a residential component in loco
parentis, it is not surprising that they find little need to offer courses
online.
Though the NCES report did not survey K-12 schools, we might extrapolate the
findings to suggest that the K-12 educational mission is most like the traditional
college setting, where the classroom and the campus and the presence of a teacher
is the most important part of the experience, and the most difficult to duplicate
online. However, the growth of virtual high schools in many states, and the
offering of online high-school courses by many publishers, suggest that K-12
education is not immune from the online trends in college education.
What does it mean to me?
If you are a teacher in college, you should consider making your course materials
available online, so that your students can access them right now, and so that
you can be ready to offer your course to students at a distance when the time
comes. As a teacher in the K-12 schools, you need not worry about online education
replacing your role in the classroom, but you should be aware of your students'
increasing use of the Web to find educational information and to learn new things.
And you may find that many of the materials, techniques and software tools developed
for online education may be put to profitable use in your own classroom.
The complete NCES can be found at report can be found online at nces.ed.gov .
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