Christopher B. Hays commented on Facebook on a post “The End of College? Not So Fast” by Donald E. Heller. These posts and the comments prompted this reflection on my own experience. The Chronicle of Higher Education post also suggested my title, which deliberately mimics, but perhaps by removing the question mark subverts theirs.
First though, since this post depends heavily on my experiences as learner and teacher, I’ll begin with elements of my story. When our third son was diagnosed ADHD it was easy to see that if the diagnosis had been available in the 1950s and 60s it would have been applied to me. This combined with learning styles strongly skewed towards kinaesthetic and visual, or against aural and reading, and bad experiences with teachers from primary school on, did not set me up well to appreciate the value and richness of “classroom based learning” at tertiary level.
Indeed almost all of my learning through two undergraduate degrees was obtained outside the classrooms. Though admittedly some came with the help of friends who were capable of taking notes, much much more came from voracious reading and frequent arguments on buses and over coffee or beer. Please do not underestimate my comparatives here, I will rephrase it to make the point. Almost all my undergraduate learning came from materials and experiences outside the class room. Almost NONE came from classroom learning.
Also please, while you recognise that I am an extreme case, do not assume there are few who would share such tendencies among your students, and there are undoubtedly more among the potential students your current education system fails!
My next move agrees with most of the commenters. MOOCs as an alternative form of higher education are a disaster. I have participated in several MOOCs and learned little from any. (The exception was Jacob Wright’s excellent The Bible’s Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future however, it succeeded where the others failed largely because I was already well versed in the material presented and interested primarily in the presentation and organising of the ideas. Also because it was well-resourced and supported, and because Jacob is a great teacher.)
However, when the conversation moved to the size of online class that might work well I think it went badly astray. I have been teaching wholly online, largely online, and partly online courses for 15 years, such courses now comprise almost all my tertiary teaching. Class size has varied from 8 to almost 80.
The small classes worked badly, it was difficult to get the students to engage with each other and they would only engage significantly with me when I was responding to their questions. Small online classes are basically “correspondence school”.
By contrast, the bigger classes produced real, and sometimes deep, interaction and learning.
Here, however, is the rub. They also require a high load input from the teacher, between assisting and guiding discussion, responding to questions and marking the time required by an online student in such a class is similar to that required to support a classroom bound student. There are two time savings, lecture time (including the preparation that is needed each year, though the first preparation for online classes may take as long) and travel time (at something like an hour per day four or five days a week this is also significant ;)
ACOM “where” I currently teach runs very efficiently and economically compared to traditional tertiary education. Teaching as well as learning is mainly by distance, library resources are purchased as needed (including a subscription to a good journal database). Several of the big expenditures of traditional institutions are thus avoided or minimised.
Perhaps the biggest saving, however, is an undesirable one. A high proportion of the teachers are adjuncts, we are much cheaper to “run” than full-time or even part-time staff. As well as lowering the salary bill this means that the institution does not need to provide access to a research level library – adjuncts are responsible to fulfill that need for themselves.
With the exception of the high use of adjuncts (which may be a temporary feature as ACOM is preparing its future teachers by encouraging them through higher degrees) the system works well and as far as I can see can produce results that are comparable to traditional higher education. The courses are also easily accessible to many students who by reason of jobs, family etc. cannot access onsite education (not least since this is limited mainly to big city dwellers) or who by reason of learning styles, or other aspects of personality, would benefit less from such onsite classes.
My title? Well it seems to me that the important question to ask is the goal or “end” of higher education. If it is to educate as wide a range of the population to as high a level as is useful then larger (though unless really well supported not huge) online classes – onsite classes discriminate against many people and contribute to a significant but under-acknowledged inequality in modern Western societies. Equal access to higher education is an end of higher education!
