Publication: Scientific American
Date: July 1999
Title: On-line U
Author: Wendy M. Grossman


**This is the article as submitted before editing and copy-editing. When quoting from it, use the published version.**


The last few years have seen a race online by higher education.  The notion of reaching students who can’t fit into the standard residential degree programs has gotten everyone from traditional universities such as UCLA and distance learning specialists such as the University of Phoenix to start-ups such as the Western Governors’ Virtual University project and the California Virtual University, putting everything from individual courses to whole degree programs online.  Also experimenting with online conferencing techniques is Britain’s 25-year-old Open University, the worldwide pioneer in distance learning which by 1998 had awarded more than 200,000 Bachelor’s degrees since its inception in 1969.  Management guru Peter F. Drucker has predicted the death of the traditional residential higher education within 30 years.

Now, two reports, both released in April, question whether online learning can do what’s been claimed for it.  

The first of these, “The Virtual University and Educational Opportunity,” was published by the College Board, and covers equality of access.  Poor kids, the report argues, are even more disadvantaged by technology-based learning because they are less likely to be familiar with the technology or have access to the equipment needed.  Citing figures from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s 1998 “Falling Through the Net II” survey, the report points out that three-quarters of households with incomes over $75,000 have computers, as opposed to one-third with incomes between $25,000 and $35,000, and one-sixth of those with incomes below $15,000, and warns that the Internet could become an engine of inequality.

This is backed up by other research, such as Vanderbilt University professors Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak’s study on race and its impact on Internet access, concluded that a racial digital divide persists even after other variables such as income, class, and education were accounted for.  Hoffman and Novak cited a number of studies showing that although 70 percent of the schools in this country have at least one computer connected to the Internet, less than 15 percent of classrooms have Internet access, and that access is not distributed randomly but correlated strongly with income and education.  A National Science Foundation-funded study carried out in Pittsburgh and reported at the Policy98 conference found that without special care access tended to gravitate towards the already advantaged schools and students.

The second report, “What’s the Difference?”, is an overview of research into the efficacy of different types of distance learning technology.  The report, carried out by the Institute for Higher Education Policy on behalf of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, concludes that the proof is not there that the “learning outcome” (their term) is on a par with traditional classroom teaching.  The report criticizes the research efforts for, among other things:  studying individual courses instead of overall programs; ignoring the drop-out rate (typically higher in online courses) in assessing the overall success rate of students; failing to control for extraneous variables so that cause and effect are not shown; not randomizing subjects; and failing to show the validity of the instruments used to measure those learning outcomes.  In addition, the report complains that the research does not look at differences between students, explain why drop-out rates are higher in distance 
learning, look at technologies used together, adequately assess the effectiveness of digital versus physical libraries, or consider how different learning styles relate to specific technologies.  In other words:  we’re racing headlong into a new set of educational techniques we don’t really understand.  Given that an ever-increasing percentage of the US’s economy depends on knowledge workers, and that those workers need to be highly educated and skilled, this could be a really stupid move.

And yet this is not a topic that’s received much critical attention.  One exception to that is an essay written and circulated in October 1997 by York University historian David F. Noble, called “Digital Diploma Mills.”  In it, Noble connects the soaring cost of a university education with what he claims is the commercialization of academia since the mid-1970s, when industrial partnerships and other commercial exploitation of university-based discoveries and research became common.  (Some of these efforts are impressively organized:  MIT, for example, maintains its own office solely to assist students and staff in filing for and getting patents.)  Noble believes that moving courses online is part of a larger drive to “commodify” university education and de-skill the labor force – that is, college professors. 

There are many other issues.  How do faculty members find time for their own lives and/or research in an environment where they’re on call via email 24 hours a day?  What about student services, extracurricular activities, and, as the IHEP report said many times, libraries?  What about interaction between students?  One reason people go to universities is to interact with each other; nowhere outside a university do you rub shoulders with such a variety of people with so many different interests.  

Replicating the student experience online is very much harder than creating courseware.  England’s Oxford University, for example, which last year announced it was preparing Web-based courses for its lifelong learning group, wants to replicate its famed personal tutorial system work online.  At the time, Bob McIntyre, the program’s manager, commented that many universities, struggling with overburdened staff, see the Internet as a way to make themselves more economical, a trend he didn’t think was healthy long-term.  But with computer vendors looking at higher education as a huge, new potential revenue source, what worried him most was that there would ultimately be only five universities worldwide – and they would be Microsoft, Disney…you get the picture.  

Of course, there’s a lot of snobbery involved in higher education.  We don’t react the same way when someone says they’ve attended Cornell as we do when they say their degree is from Podunk Community College. Learning at your own pace sounds great if you’re either extremely bright or extremely slow to learn:  most classes tend to be structured around “average” students.  Equally, the only way an average person can satisfy the need of most professions to constantly update knowledge can be satisfied is through either very short courses or through distance learning – unless we want to sentence everyone to taking two years off work to go to school every five or ten years, with all the personal disruption that would cause.  Even so, the fact is that like it or not, most of the time learning is something that happens between people; it is not broadcasting, however much it feels like it when your professor’s lecture heads into the second hour.


copyright (c) 1999 Wendy M. Grossman
**This is the article before editing and copy-editing. When quoting from it, use the published version.**