Online education is often dismissed as a pipeline for expensive degrees of little value and a sponge for veterans’ tuition payments. But while it’s true that for-profit universities have made a hefty business out of e-learning, it’s becoming apparent that learning online can also benefit almost everyone else.“It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world on the web,” Bill Gates recently predicted in an interview at Techonomy 2010.
Gates is not the only smart guy pulling for online education to extend the reach, affordability, and even quality of education. Here’s why the virtual classroom counts deans of prestigious universities, entrepreneurs, and people who want to change the world as its advocates.
1. Online Education “Doesn’t Have to Suck”
This July, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s business school will enroll the first students of itsonline MBA program. Offering an online component to university courses isn’t a new idea. In the 2006-2007 school year, 66% of postsecondary learning institutions included in federal financial aid programs were already reporting that they offered some form of online education. But one of the top business schools making an entire degree program available online raised some eyebrows.
“What we try to explain is that [while] there are low-quality providers online, there are also low-quality classroom providers,” Dean James Dean says. “There’s nothing about the particular delivery mechanism that makes it intrinsically low quality, and that we had the opportunity to reinvent what was meant by online and to really shatter those perceptions.”
The co-founder of 2tor, UNC’s technology partner for the course, puts it more bluntly. “Online education doesn’t have to suck,” Jeremy Johnson says.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, Johnson is right. In a 2009 report based on 50 independent studies, the agency found that students who studied in online learning environments performed modestly better than peers who were receiving face-to-face instruction.
2tor also works with a master’s of arts in teaching program at the University of Southern California, and other partnerships with prestigious universities are in the works.
“We believe that we can basically preserve the higher education experience if the university controls the faculty, the curriculum, and the selective admissions,” explains Alexa Scordato, the community manager for 2tor.
The USC online program, for instance, has components the student completes on his own time as well as discussion sections and lectures in which the class interacts through video feeds that several people have described as “stacked like the intro to the Brady Bunch.” The professor can break the students into discussion groups, and the class can interact outside of the classroom on a Facebook-like wall.
Ninety-eight percent of the faculty hold Ph.D.s or Ed.D.s, and the admission requirements are parallel to those of the program at the physical university. Online students complete the student teaching component of the program at one of their local schools, and their performance is evaluated by both a supervising teacher at that school as well as their instructor, who watches videos that the students take of themselves teaching. About 80% of the first class, according to USC, are now employed as teachers.
2. Universities Have Limited Physical Space
The online programs at USC and UNC charge the same tuition as courses at the physical university. According to Dean, maintaining a low student-to-teacher ratio and paying for technology means that, at least at UNC, the cost to the university won’t be drastically reduced either. But offering programs online does enable both schools to educate more students without expanding its facilities.
“We’re not that big of a physical facility, so in order to grow, we’re looking for innovative ways to grow that don’t involve building new buildings,” Dean explains. “This isn’t really a good time to do that. So this is really an opportunity to give access to our MBA program to people around the world without having to increase the size of our facility.”
Before instating its online teaching program in 2009, the MAT program at USC graduated about 100 students every year. By contrast, it currently has more than 1,500 students enrolled in the online program.
3. Education Can Change the World
Over his 20 years of work at for-profit online universities, Shai Reshef started to notice something spectacular. Online communities that helped each other with their homework were popping up all over the Internet, and people were teaching each other –- for free. At the same time, open educational resources and open source technologies were becoming increasingly available. This gave him an interesting idea.
“If we take the millions of people around the world who could not afford going to university and teach them tuition-free, we’re not only changing their lives, and their families’ lives, we also change their communities, their countries,” he says. “And if we have a lot of them, we will change the world.“
Reshef left the for-profit education industry and founded a very different organization in 2009. The University of the People is a completely tuition-free university that offers programs in business administration and computer science. Volunteer professors teach the courses using free and donated educational materials, and discussions take place in online rooms among about 20 students per class.
The university has enrolled about 700 students from 100 countries over five terms, the first of which will graduate from associate programs in 2011. But Reshef expects the power of the idea to reach many more than just the University of the People’s students.
“I think that what we’re doing is building a model for developing countries’ governments, and they can see what we’re doing and instead of keep trying, with the few millions that they have, to build universities, build buildings to create their own Harvard…instead of wasting the few million dollars that they have, they can build a university that is similar to us and teach the entire population,” he says.
4. Global Understanding Is More Important Than Ever
In an increasingly global world, it makes sense for students to interact with students from other countries. Anincreasing number of students study abroad or cross international borders to attend school, but it’s much easier to create an international classroom on the Internet, which has no borders to begin with.
“If you take a class, in our case, you’re very likely to meet 20 students from 20 countries,” Reshef says about University of the People. “We believe, by the way, that being exposed to 20 people from 20 cultures — the way they think, the way they function in the class — is as important, if not more, than the subject area itself.”
Offering programs to international students without making them relocate can also make programs more competitive. Dean, for instance, says that UNC believes there are thousands of people worldwide who would qualify for a UNC MBA degree but who can’t physically be in Chapel Hill.
The school hasn’t opened its application for its online program, but it’s received 423 inquiries about the program since it made the announcement in November. More than half of them are from outside of North Carolina.
5. The Internet Empowers Self-Motivated Learners
The virtual classroom provides access to materials that were once only available to students enrolled in college courses. Consequently, we are approaching the day when self-motivated learners are limited only by their initiative.
Bill Gates habitually praises the efforts of Khan Academy, an organization that posts math and science lectures online for topics ranging from kindergarten level addition to college-level calculus. There are a number of similar websites. Academic Earth offers free videos of lectures with professors at top universities, and MIT posts free lecture notes, exams, and videos on a website that anyone with a desire to learn can access. In some ways, said Gates during the Techonomy interview, this approach is superior to traditional lesson plans.
“We re-teach the same concepts again and again,” he said. “The teacher has no sense of who in his classroom is getting it, not getting it…and when you look at all of the successful innovations, it’s where you let the student assess his knowledge, understand where they are, and proceed at a pace where they’re actually seeing that they know something before they move on.”
The Department of Education’s meta-analysis, which focused on older learners, supports this. Online learners who self-monitored understanding — by, for example, deciding when to move on to the next lesson — performed better.
6. The Virtual Classroom Can Make the Physical Classroom More Effective
Nobody suggests that online learning will ever completely replace traditional classroom learning, especially for K-12 students. But research suggests that online learning can make classroom time more effective.
The modest difference in performance between online and physical classroom learners in the meta-analysis, for instance, was larger for those students who learned through a blend of online and physical classroom conditions.
The report warned that the results might not be caused by the medium itself because the students in blended learning conditions often had extra learning time and instructional elements. Which is exactly the advantage, says Sandy Sandy Khaund, the founder of Irynsoft, which makes social apps to complement online course material.
Right now class time is typically used by a lecture. But if teachers move the lecture online for students to watch on their own time, they can use the class time to work on activities and interact with students.
“It’s sort of inverting the model so that homework happens in the classroom and classroom happens at home,” Khaund says. “And the idea of that is that then the actual student-instructor relationship, the actual reaction, is going to be far more valuable.”
There are other advantages to moving the lecture online, and universities like UC Berkeley offer video and audio podcasts of lectures for its on-campus students. When watching a lecture on a video, the student can pause it to reference something the teacher has mentioned or rewind and replay it to listen to something he didn’t understand.
“If you try to do that in a classroom setting, it either slows everybody down or you don’t ask the question and you’re confused,” Khaund says.
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