Anya Kamenetz of the Huffington Post in her article the “Online Education and the Laying on of Hands” May 18, 2010 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anya-kamenetz/online-education-and-the_b_580769.html) covered UC San Diego professors, one of whom was an opponent of what we in Connecticut would call fully online education programs. While Ms. Kamenetz herself apparently is not such a Luddite, she thought some points were valid…and she has managed to convince me of the potential problem in at least on area.
Financial and budgetary motives are behind our decisions to build and grow online courses and programs. Over the years I have worked to convince many colleagues at my institution of the value of online courses to our commuter population of students. It is so obvious from the online instruction at institutions all over the world over the past two decades that students can and do learn well online when we design the courses with best practices in mind. It is so obvious that commuter students want and need more flexibility in our course scheduling to achieve their goals in a timely fashion. It makes so much sense for the institution to stop using only what in football would be called its “ground game.” We are gaining yardage this way but it is a grinding slow game; we could improve our overall student success numbers (certificate and graduation completions) with more properly designed and managed online courses. Nothing seems to spark any interest until begin to talk about the potential to generate greater revenue. If online courses can help us here, collectively we show great interest. This is the problem…for our students.
In the past, several for-profit colleges and other entities have tried creating online programs and failed due to the costs of building infrastructure, marketing problems, accrediting issues, staffing and recruiting talented faculty and staff, lack of any experienced online educators, and myriad other more minor problems. A college program must have a mechanism to overcome these problems if it truly desires success online. Ms. Kamenetz expressed concern that in resource-poor institutions the mechanism may include gimmicks, poor content infrastructure (open source?), unedited publisher content, courses that only include assignments, courses with no interaction ,and heavy use of video and audio in lieu of the hands-on instruction. (The best practices in online instruction encourage facilitation and student-student work but, based on constructivist thought, is still extraordinarily hands-on.)
One of the faculty Ms. Kamenetz interviewed expressed the following.
“The less fortunate citizens of our state will make do with underfunded campuses or settle for inferior and dehumanizing ‘virtual’ alternatives.”
The statement, while a too-generalized and flawed comparison between good on-campus courses and bad online courses, should cause those of us who work at commuter colleges to tread more carefully as we make decisions about growing online. We should want to grow online but for the right reasons. Our community college students academically fall into the demographic of the average college student. To the non-academic challenges we should not add programs that are solely profit-driven if we want to avoid creating haves and have-nots online.
Edtech Synthesis 