Education isn’t
the first industry to be upended by the internet, and it surely won’t be the
last. Online education, aka distance learning, is rapidly proliferating throughout
colleges and universities; its future appears inevitable. But there are other seismic
trends and innovations ongoing in education. How these trends eventually
intersect is unpredictable, but one thing seems certain: higher ed. as we know
it will grow increasingly unrecognizable.
With online and
self-paced education, the role of the ‘chalk-and-talk’ lecturer gradually disappears,
being replaced by students essentially doing the work themselves. Learning is
done through a variety of “delivery systems,” all accessible online: video
lectures, the e-book textbook, e-tutoring chat systems, etc. The course needs a
real teacher to set up, but once that’s done the process can be easily automated.
The second trend
affecting higher education is economic. We’re all familiar with the dismal employment
statistics of recent college grads due to a global recession that shows no sign
of abating. Chances are you were served
your Starbucks coffee this morning from one. Likewise the salesman who put you
in that new car. It’s an inconvenient reality and an ugly truth, but in the
employment stakes derby a college degree today serves the same purpose formerly
satisfied with a high school diploma: a certification of sorts that someone is
educable, as in capable of learning tasks required for a specific job for a prospective
employer. But there’s one big difference: the high school diploma is free.
College grads struggling
to get a job that comports with their expensive education are asking themselves
if the thousands of dollars of debt are actually worth it? When considering
$250 textbooks, overpriced room-and-board, and perhaps the ultimate injustice: required
internships where students pay for the full cost of the credits “earned” from
their (usually) unpaid work, the
answer for many of them will be “no.”
A third trend is
related to the first: open education. Many universities are experimenting with
open online classes. These courses don’t qualify for actual credits toward a
degree, but at some point that distinction becomes unjustifiable. Why is math expertise
learned from khanacademy.org inferior to that obtained by taking a credit course
from a university–especially when it’s an online course? It’s only a matter of time before students
rebel at this educational apartheid and demand that their self-directed academic
work be treated equally, once institutional rubrics on the same material are
satisfied and some appropriate fee is paid.
Colleges are racing
to embrace online education. Unless one looks at long term consequences, it
appears to be the best thing since sliced bread. A profit-generating machine.
Essentially, once an online course is set up, a monkey can be trained to
administer it. Classrooms and much of the attendant overhead are eliminated.
Costs are slashed. Why is a full-fledged professor required to merely process
data from an application program, occasionally communicate with students
through the software and generally make sure that everything operates smoothly?
Think of the epic labor battles to be waged by teachers’ unions fighting to defend
full pay and status—or
just simply require a (human) administrator!—in an online-education environment where students
teach themselves.
Perhaps the
ultimate nightmare scenario on the horizon is the “turnkey” college degree. The
criminal mind is always one step ahead of the forces of law and order. Can we
really expect humanities professors to recognize every plagiarized paper given
the virtually unlimited wealth of literature available online with a few mouse
clicks, not to mention the growing number of online businesses created
explicitly to service this ‘need’? How
long until it’s possible to purchase a Harvard degree for some fixed but
presumably substantial amount of money, from an enterprise that will guarantee
a degree after the requisite years of “enrollment”? The ‘customer’ will be
required to provide vital statistics including social security number and the infrequent
but unavoidable flight-in for the occasional face-to-face.
In short, educators
need to carefully consider the consequence of the following trends:
- Functional equivalence of college degree with high school diploma of generations past.
- Sky-high college tuition costs resulting in crippling debt loads for graduates.
- No guarantee that a college degree will be rewarded with a secure, good-paying, professional job, and the growing awareness in students and parents that a college education isn’t necessarily required for a happy, debt-free, prosperous life—there are alternatives.
- Online education that is ripe for fraud, and not worth the cost as professors (the main cost factor) are removed from their teaching role.
- Competing, often free, online education systems delivering a product of equal quality.
Educators rushing
to take advantage of technological advances in education should be careful what
they wish for...
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