We have had online colleges and universities for about 20 years now; even still, enrollments in online courses have been pretty slim all of these years. There is a certain lack of credibility they suffer from, even if it is only in people’s imaginations. But over the last couple of years, online institutions have been planning and taking on board course upon new course to appeal to every kind of academic interest, and they have caught the eye of nearly 5 million college students in America. That actually accounts for one out of four college students in the country. It simply looks like online academics have come of age. In a time when thousands of students drop out of college each year because they’ve run out of ways to fund the exorbitant tuition fees asked for, online courses are an admirable way to get a great education at a great university like Rutgers or the University of California, and still keep expenses down, studying as they live at home.
But really, who do these online courses at universities actually benefit – the students, or perhaps just the universities? Do students of online courses actually get the kind of education studying at home that they would get in a classroom with the motivation offered by other students and a knowledgeable and strict teacher looking over their shoulder? Lots of experts just call this a mirage offered by the business-minded at the online colleges and universities. They just look at how it is possible to disseminate their course material far and wide over the net, and they feel that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to charge for it. Lots of major universities, Columbia and NYU have in the past, for instance, tried their luck with online courses, and failed. And they lost about $40 million in the process as well. Lots of B-schools to have tried the same, offering online business school degrees from great universities, and they have failed too.
It’s not that the whole online idea is thoroughly unworkable. It is. It’s just that online education is not meant to replace traditional education. It is supposed to be the way the University of Phoenix does it successfully. Its online offerings sound nothing like its traditional courses. And there is no option to do a little bit online, and then move back offline. They don’t just repackage their traditional courses and put them online. Their online classes may be just one way out of many to make education cheaper and more accessible.
There are some courses that just cannot ported over to an Internet-based model. Take a writing class for instance. There is no standard set of instruction manuals on how to write creatively. It is all something that comes down to how you interact with a teacher who inspires you, one on one. It depends on the teacher, the assignment, and the student’s strengths. A student comes in with a roughly written story plot, and the teacher and student discuss how it would be better if this or that sentence would be more powerful or more punchy with fewer words or something. Things like creative writing would just not be the same at online colleges and universities.
But there are some cases where an online education can be better than a traditional one. And the very best ones, are like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative – a mixture of online learning, with some actual real classroom time thrown in as well.
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