<p>University of Maryland University College is already providing the kind of blended online/bricks and mortar experience being mentioned here. </p>
<p>UMUC serves over 90,000 students world wide. It offers 120 academic programs in instructor led and on-line classes leading to bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. It is a member of the University of Maryland system. It has been a pioneer in distance learning.</p>
<p>The 4 and 6 year graduation rates at most colleges are ridiculously low. Some of that trend can be explained by people needing to work full-time while going to college, but it does not explain it all. </p>
<p>The trend I see right now is colleges wanting to be more residential - building more residence halls. I’ve seen that at several less selective private colleges in PA. </p>
<p>In Pa, most of the state-owned colleges have partnered with private companies to build expensive new housing with lots of amenities, while they tear down the 1950s dorms.</p>
<p>Penn State also promotes itself as a leader in distance education through its World University. However, it appears from the little I know about it that their programs are offered mainly to additional people beyond the 100,000 students they serve in the classroom, and it doesn’t replace classroom education.</p>
<p>We’re Virginia residents and I have to tell you that the courses my son has taken online through Virginia’s “virtual high school” have all been SIGNIFICANTLY better than the courses he has taken at our local high school. What sets them apart is:</p>
<p>A. The quality of his teachers/faculty: The high school teachers that teach are some of the best in Virginia and most have won state level teaching awards. The college faculty that teach the AP courses are truly outstanding. Most have published articles in the fields that they are teaching our kids – history, english, etc. which makes them that much better than the local high school teachers.</p>
<p>B. quality of the students: My kid has been kind of a big dog at his high school academically, just because there aren’t that many serious students. However, in the virtual classes he has encountered “the kids from Northern Virginia” – all of whom are extremely motivated. And being a young person with access to technology, he has friended all these guys on facebook, twitter, etc. and is talking about colleges, etc. with them.<br>
(In other words, the image of some lonely guy sitting in the basement “taking courses” is inaccurate. Students taking online classes often receive assignments that involve going to a museum, a lecture at a nearby college campus, etc. They use Google hangouts and other technologies to “meet” their instructors and fellow students, and if you were my student you’d be posting youtube videos where you discuss material with other students, using Facetime to contact me as your instructor, and working on a group project with your classmates using Google docs and Skype). </p>
<p>ALSO, if you’ve seen the acceptance statistics for the Stanford University EPGY online high school, you’ll see that clearly those guys are being taken seriously when they apply to college and no one is starting from the assumption that anyone got a second rate education. That’s for sure!</p>
<p>I can see distance education at the college level becoming a serious option for people who live in more rural locations where there are fewer bricks and mortar options available. I could see a top-notch online institution being a better choice than the local community college.<br>
Not everyone is in a position to simply move away for four years – those who married early, girls who got pregnant during high school, people with dependent elderly parents, service members who are deployed, etc.
I’m concerned about the position of small rural schools like Hamilton College myself. Why be a poli sci major at Hamilton when you could live in DC, have a great internship/job and take online classes through someplace like Stanford?</p>
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<p>I don’t think you understand the “college experience” for most. Most don’t do the 4 years out somewhere in some foreign city. More often the “average” kid out of high school will do some combination of working, in-and-out living with their parents (by which I mean over a span of 4 or 5 years they’re sometimes going to be living on their own, with friends, and with their parents moving from one to another pretty quickly). They’ll continue to hang out with the same kids from high school. They’re not living the “college experience” touted as crucial on CC.</p>
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<p>Sorta… I signed up for like 8 of them (they’re free - why not) and didn’t follow through with any except 1 (which I quit about half-way through). The failure rate doesn’t really mean anything here. Now, if we were talking about a several hundred dollar course, that’d be a different situation. </p>
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<p>Can they be layed-off if the department decides there are just too many professors in a department. A school might not want to close a department with 20 students a year, but staffing it with 15 professors is too many. </p>
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<p>LOL. Which one? Looks like either from where I’m sitting.</p>
<p>Most kids that do the college as an extension of HS also never graduate.</p>
<p>Momzie, thanks for describing actual facets of online learning. I think many people are missing the potential this kind of instruction has to raise the quality of teaching that everybody is exposed to. From what you have said, it seems some systems already promote real engagement with the material and interaction with other people. The technology and accompanying software is only going to get better. Your son’s experience shows that there can be real benefits over traditional schools for many.</p>
<p>Since physical location is not an impediment to accessing the best instructors in the online world, quality is guaranteed. And that does mean cost savings with economies of scale. Instead of 1,000 or more different classes of Econ 101 throughout the U.S. there may be 10 to 20 that are deemed to be good enough to attract followers from around the world. And one option can serve hundreds of thousands of students. Also any given course may have a variety of lecturers each focusing on different concepts. TAs will still be needed but I imagine they are not a large part of the current cost of higher ed.</p>
<p>In any case, all but the richest, most sought after schools are going to struggle to find a model that can compete in the upcoming education revolution.</p>
<p>Debating the quality of online learning versus the quality of classroom learning is pointless.</p>
<p>Some online learning opportunities are very, very good, and some are worthless.</p>
<p>Some classroom instruction is very, very good, and some is worthless.</p>
<p>And infinite shades of gray, in both cases.</p>
<p>The idea of hundreds of thousands of students being taught the same syllabus with the same professor is a little frightening. But maybe I am being too fantastic.</p>
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<p>Hundreds of thousands of students are taught the same syllabus with only slightly different professors currently. Not such a huge jump.</p>
<p>However, that’s not necessarily what online learning would have to entail. There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t have online classes the same size as classes are today. It’d still be cheaper. </p>
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<p>Could say that about anything. Men come from all different heights, women come from all different heights. You can still say that on average men are taller than women. Perhaps anecdotes about online vs. in classroom learning are useless…</p>
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<p>Really? I assumed each professor created his/her own course syllabus; that is how it was done in my day. Are the syllabi standardized across all uni’s in the country nowadays? That doesn’t sound good if all US students are graduating with the same or only “slightly different” viewpoint on each subject.</p>
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<p>At my university most the the main classes (things like intro calc, econ, chemistry, etc.) all have the same syllabus, but there will be a few different professors who teach the sections. It’s the same pretty much from semester to semester. Each semester I think something like 1400 students take Calc 2 (which I think is the most commonly taken course at my school).</p>
<p>Calc 2 is pretty standard. I bet if I went to a third of the other state flagships it’d look almost exactly the same. That’s not the only class where that’s the case either.</p>
<p>Online education described in Momzie post 123 sounds attractive.</p>
<p>I’ve often wondered how small colleges in upstate New York survive. Who would choose to spend their winters in that climate?</p>
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<p>If global warming is happening (and I’m not implying it isn’t), they may become the preferred places to study. Last winter (or lack thereof) might become the new normal.</p>
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<p>How about a big school in NYC? NYU is pushing plans for a massive expansion of its campus. To me, this is incredibly shortsighted and foolhardy. Who is going to pay NYU prices in 20 years when it will be much cheaper for those wanting that big city experience to just move there and take classes from Stanford? </p>
<p>Now as my elder daugher just graduated from there as a film major, I realize that there are certain types of hands-on training that absolutely must be done in situ–but that kind of education can and will be offered separately from the academic components. There is no reason that her CAS courses for her psych minor and even her script-writing classes could not eventually move online. I am happy she is armed with this (very expensive) degree as she faces the world in this day and age, but I honestly think that it will be better for society when one day online education has greatly evened the playing field.</p>
<p>I don’t think Stanford would want to water down the prestige of their degree by offering too many for-credit online classes. However, I can imagine someone being able to live in Manhattan and taking online classes for low cost from the best profs in the SUNY system. With the money they save on NYU tuition, they could actually afford the housing costs.</p>
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<p>As far as financially vulnerable colleges, I’m fearing that some of them will use too much fluff to attract full pay students. There is one college in NC that offers an ice cream truck that drives around the campus and hands out free ice cream to students. It has been compared to a luxury resort in terms of the type of dining and housing choices, and hasn’t been emphasizing its academics. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine the average employer having a good impression of people who choose to go there.</p>
<p>Just saw this article:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html</a></p>
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<p>How many course certificates from top-notch schools will eventually translate into a degree? At some point people will accept that it is more important to have the ability to complete and do well in these courses than have a paper from any specific college, no matter how prestigious. But I do believe the institutions themselves will begin to offer degrees this way.</p>
<p>My younger daughter is on route to having a degree from Princeton in a couple of years. Do I believe that her credential will be seen with the same regard in 20 years? Maybe among some of the old guard, but with the next generation, not so much. But it doesn’t matter because people like her will go as far as they can based on their work ethic and many other skills, and we’ll be a lot closer to equality of opportunity. </p>
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<p>Even the top schools know they can’t ignore the coming revolution and they seem to be taking the lead in adapting to it. Good for them.</p>
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<p>Yup.</p>
<p>The biggest issue with online education is that we have NOT yet seen what online education could be, as the current model merely equates to stick a camera in front of a lecturer. This is not dissimilar to the idea that online reading should consist of reading a series of scanned pages and pretend it could be an interactive book. </p>
<p>On the other hand, do we really think that the broadcasts of a lecture of an applauded teacher is a lot worse than the actual lectures that many students have to endure courtesy of the often (ab)used model of lecture cum sections “taught” by the armies of TAs that populate most large universities? What is the difference between watching an academic primadona in the comfort of your house or dorm versus sitting in an auditorium seat (or in the hallways as it happens in overbooked classes?) </p>
<p>In secondary education, considering the level of the talent and dedication of the teachers in middle and high school, it seems evident that there is plenty of room to integrate online classes in the current offering. Teachers who are well-educated and well-trained in their field could provide the lectures while the NEA crowd could serve in a role similar to TAs in college. </p>
<p>In the end, it is a matter of resources. The free for all days of unlimited spending are gone, and all we have to show for is an incredibly dismal result. Despite massive increases in spending, we must now have the worst educated … educators, courtesy of six decades of focusing onto limiting the scope and length of services by our “leadership.” And there is very little hope that the current model of educating the next waves of teachers will be any better, unless we decided to severally limit the number of classes taught by generalists and teachers whose training has been in pedagogy as opposed to in a subject. </p>
<p>So, perhaps, the model that fits the US will be to get the real teaching done via online classes while the physical presence in school will be more along the lines of a day camp. The cynic might say that is not much different today, safe and except the organized online classes element.</p>
<p>Why does anyone believe that top-ranked, elite schools will dilute the prestige and value of their names by offering degree-bearing online classes to everyone, or that employers would perceive those degrees in the same way (given that one of the main “appeals” of hiring someone who went to Harvard is how hard it is to get in to Harvard, not just the education in and of itself)?</p>
<p>Just saw this: “Wesleyan Announces Three-Year Degree.” Just another way expensive LACs will deal with the decreasing appeal of their original business model.</p>