In this article, the author predicts that technology will make the university obsolete.
He asks, why should anyone pay for a degree from Nowhere State University when they can go online and get a degree from an elite university for free? Or go online and learn whatever they want for free?
The underlying idea, at least for me, is the commodification of the higher learning.
If all we want from a university is a credential, we can buy it without going to the trouble of actually learning anything.
Inspired by this article, I logged on to Yale Online and picked out a course that interested me, offered by a very distinguished professor whose works I have read and admired. After 15 minutes, I found my attention waning, then wandering. I got so bored, I turned it off.
There are many good reasons to use technology to learn things that we can’t get out of a book or a lecture.
But technology is no substitute for human contact.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane. For a different view about the value of some online courses, this account by Ian Chowcat of Al Filreis’s online course on Modern and Contemporary American Poetry may be of interest. Whether these kinds of course are any good depends on their design, their organisation, the disposition of the students, and the nature of the curriculum, and they are not a panacea. I fully agree that technology is no substitute for human contact; but sometimes it can enable contact, and sometimes that contact can feel pretty human, as is indicated in Ian’s account. Seb Schmoller
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The bigger concern is a willingness to sell isolation. The many, many people encouraged and trained to be isolated from each other are easy pickings for exploitation by the powerful few who DO coordinate and collaborate in tight social and economic circles.
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Thank you.
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while I do not disagree with the thrust of this post, Diane, I also note that I have through technology built relationships that I value a great deal. After all, other than that first phone call when I interviewed you many years ago for a graduate school project, our relationship has been almost exclusively through electronic communication. Oh, i came to an event or two where you spoke and once drove you to the airport, and our paths have crossed directly more frequently in the past few years. But it has been technology that has kept us connected. And given my handwriting, you should be grateful that it has not been by conventional hand-written snail mail.
Much of what I have been able to accomplish on education and other subjects has also been the result of technology. In many cases I have collaborated with people I have never met – that was true of the chapter I did for The Handbook of Public Pedagogy, for example.
Technology is a tool that can enrich the lives of people, both through personal contact, and through our ability to access resources that otherwise might not be available to us.
That said, it is still just a tool, and for me it is most valuable when I am in interaction with other persons directly. Something may start as a blog post, or a comment I make online. Then there are further interchanges on the comment threads, or we begin to exchange emails, Facebook messages, instant messages, etc.
No matter how much I admire someone, no matter how much I can learn from reading a book, I still greatly value the human interchange.
As a teacher, I was once offered the change to teach AP Government online to the brilliant kids involved with the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins. There were several reasons I declined, one of which is I value the classroom setting for several reasons. I like to watch the faces and body language to see if my communications are effective, but I also like the dynamic where students begin to react to each other and thus learn from each other, and not just from the teacher.
Some of that is clearly possible through technology of various sorts.
Merely listening to or reading lectures on line to me is a weak substitute.
I value what technology can do.
I do not want it to replace face to face interaction.
I am always thrilled when I can finally meet people whom I have only known electronically. It makes the subsequent electronic exchanges that much more meaningful.
The university or college still has role in my opinion. I hope that is not something we abandon.
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I couldn’t be in stronger agreement about the value of certain types of technology—particularly electronic communications such as live chats, webinars, Twitter, blogs, and even email—“ancient” by 2013 standards or when I solicit the opinion of my early twenties niece and nephew.
However, taking online courses are vastly different from enrolling in a real university; note that I’m calling it “real” as opposed to “traditional”, “conventional”, “physical” or “brick and mortar”, etc.
We have to make a very clear distinction between “online learning” and getting a degree from an accredited college. Those are two very different things.
Interestingly enough, large corporations and associations are “sobering up” after the initial, unbounded enthusiasm for “Virtual Meetings” and the equivalent. By early 2009, the cost and the technical challenges of virtual meetings had been greatly lessened. This coincided with the Great Crash of late 2008. Corporate executives everywhere saw that the enormous amount of money that they had been spending on “physical meetings” of all types—from the half-day seminar and breakfast at the downtown or airport hotel, to the 5 day International Developers Conference—could be done “virtually” with all courses available online for a fraction of the cost. They’ve also found a way to offer a “virtual trade show” and even “social hours”—a virtual version of the cocktail hour you’d find at a real conference.
Bottom line: The short “morning seminar” to say, introduce a new product, brought essentially comparable results, when it was done, alternatively, as a webinar. Internal business meetings went reasonably well too, if the duration was limited to 2 hours or less.
However, it didn’t take most companies and associations to realize that a large conference, lasting a full day or more, is impossible to replicate “virtually”. There are major differences in everything, from intellectual and cognitive engagement, to forming and reinforcing key relationships between individuals, business partners, customers, and so forth. Much more to tell here, in this continuing story.
I’ve written a lot about this and I’ll be doing more soon. Things continue to evolve in this area and I’ll be putting more out on the business blogs soon.
However, what has been learned by major corporations and associations about learning, human connections and intellectual engagement, at a “virtual” versus “physical” conference has profound implications for the “virtual school”. It’s obvious that there is a vast difference between obtaining a real college education and taking courses online in order to obtain a credential.
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Well put, Ken. Thank you.
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Ironically a lot of my teacher colleagues are getting their master’s degrees through on-line programs. It’s just too convenient. Sadly they don’t see they’re helping pave the way for their own obsolescence.
Diane, I agree with you, but look at the Big Picture: since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has destroyed (excuse me, “disrupted”) one industry after another to make way for new opportunities for profits. It’s finally set its sights on education. I doubt the juggernaut can be stopped, as much as I’d like it to be.
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One of her best, D
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IHE recently published a viewpoint of mine, “Where Have All the Faculty Gone?” that discuses what online teaching and courses are doing to the community college. More and more faculty are teaching online–online courses are growing fastest in the community college–and CCRC research suggests that community college students are i’ll served by taking online courses.
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The link to the article you refer to is not working for me.
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Michael Flower, I refreshed the link. See if it works now.
Or google Nathan Harden, “The End of the University As We Know It,” in The American Interest
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The whole point of the university experience is to engage in the interchange of ideas with other people. This interchange is a source of learning ideas as well as how to present defend one’s own ideas. The in-person education is about thinking and learning from our learning and from one another.
In a philosophical or existential sense, the university experience is about joining the tradition and the social experience of learning. Learning and education are about joining the historical and social ebb and flow of ideas, developing an understanding of the human condition as well as finding a cure for cancer or developing a new grand unification theory or learning how to do accounting.
Learning is meaningless without an ethical and social context. I am not disparaging technology, but we have to remember that it is simply a tool of our time. Technology is not the arbiter and dispenser of knowledge. If we do not have an ethical or moral context, a responsibility to our fellow learners and teachers, we are dangerous.
On a more cynical note, online education is wonderful for those who would control society. Book learning without a context. Memorization of facts. Passive learning. Learning and education become commodities like a bag of potato chips, pleasant while we eat them but forgettable in the next minute. “Learners” who cannot extend their thinking or engage in the debate of ideas are merely consumers of educational potato chips.
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I wanted to express how learning is a social construct- at least for me. The exchange of ideas and exposure to alternative world views have been the underpinnings of the learning that has changed me most. Yes, I can read a book, take an online course, but face to face human interaction has had the greatest impact on me.
You explained this far more eloquently than I could have.
Thank you.
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Predictions of the demise of universities because of MOOCs (largely free, online courses) are dubious because idea that learning can occur by merely watching a (distinguished) lecturer is inconsistent with we know about how people learn.
Like you Diane, I signed up for one of these courses, watched a few of the abbreviated lectures, and withdrew. There were no followup assignments, no one to look over my work and provide feedback. (I guess this is a disadvantage of being in a class of 15K students!)
Too many of the elements of a high-quality college course were missing from my experience, including outside readings, critical duscussions, required writing and feedback, as well as challenging anxiety-producing assignments and cumulative tests. These elements provide students with a reason and the means for interacting with the course topics.
It is dissappointing when college faculty and administrators advocate for faddish instuctional changes that have little evidence of being effective and fly in the face of deep experience and learning reseach. Though there is much room for improvement in higher education teaching and learning, it should be aimed at strengthening the role the learner plays in analyzing and applying what they are learning, not in finding new ways to make lecture-based courses accessible to all.
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“I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.” AE.
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Ironically, the idea that Einstein said this appears to be a myth circulated on the Internet.
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I was just telling some of my college student’s how basic the concept of personal contact is to education.
Someone will say they don’t understand an assignment, I will simply repeat what’s on the handout right in front of them (that I had explained just a few minutes prior), and the light bulb will go on over their head.
If we could learn by just reading books and visiting websites, we would have no schools in the first place.
That the education “reformers” are selling this snake oil of “Massive Online Open Courses,” MOOC’s, shows how little they know or even care about teaching and how much it’s just about the bottom line.
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“We’re a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.”
― Roland Joffe
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I have been teaching 100% online for over ten years and this Massive Online craziness is just that, crazy. I just wrote a critical history of the university that goes a little deeper into the problems with the university itself before we even get to online and I think you would enjoy it. (Go to the Journal for Social Era Knowledge on my site and pick Spring 2013). Your experience of trying to take a course in ANYTHING online without a good teaching design AND A TEACHER is exactly the standard experience when online teaching began A LONG TIME AGO!!!! Why administrators are just learning about online teaching now is one of those mysteries I will never understand.
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I’m very cautious by nature, to a fault, and there is a very small set of things that I feel certain about, all of which strike me as either obvious, macro-historical trends or immutable laws of nature.
One of those things is that, considering that it took (at a minimum) around 4.5 billion years to form all of the oil and natural gas on Earth, and that human beings have burned through about half of that in the last 150 years, one of two things will happen in this century: (1) we will succeed in finding new, currently unimaginable ways to harness extraordinarily massive amounts of energy; or (2) we will fail. If we fail, then few if any of the things that people currently fear about the future will matter. Billions will starve as civilization “right-sizes” itself.
If we succeed, then it is equally obvious to me that technology will utterly transform the way people do almost everything, including how people communicate, work, think, and love; the way our bodies function or even what our “bodies” are; how people interact with machines and how we perceive (or fail to perceive) the distinction between the two. And certainly how we learn and how we teach. In the short term–say, the next 30 years–technology will probably transform education in ways far deeper than than we imagine. Every university will be “online,” all the time, probably sooner than we think, although being “online” will certainly mean something very different than it does today.
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It’s actually pretty simple: Watch the elitists and what choices they make for their own children.
If a “degree” from an “online university” was “just as good” as the degree one obtains after enrolling at a real college or university, the elitists would be jumping on the bandwagon before anyone. Correct?
So, when I read that the children and grandchildren of Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch, Whitney Tilson, David Coleman, Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush are bypassing Yale and Stanford to instead enroll in the “University of Phoenix” or “Full Sail University”, and will be “attending” their post-secondary classes from the comfort of their homes, THEN I’ll take this whole discussion seriously.
Until the American Aristocracy sends their own kids to these supposedly “wonderful” schools, then I’m going to continue regarding them as a bunch of hype and hogwash being pushed on the other 99% of us, with the hope that we’ll be gullible enough to buy it, and “know our place”, as we did 100 years ago, when the “great unwashed” were told to stay away from college—unless it was a “state teachers college”, “correspondence course” or the equivalent.
Now, the new “state teachers college” or “correspondence course” is going to be the “Virtual Degree”, offering the things we “consumers value most”: Convenient, Casual and Cheap. And the propaganda machine, extolling the “benefits” of such “college” will be grinding away, 24/7, while the progeny of the elite giggle quietly—when they’re not demanding that their drinks be refilled, “NOW!”
Both Obama’s kids and Gates’ kids are rapidly approaching college age: let’s all see the “choice” they make for education beyond high school. And then ask them if they think that choice should be reserved exclusively for people in their social and economic class.
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Right on target, Puget Sound Parent. These are management tools and policies to adjust labor for a subordinate place in society. The elite never send their own kids through the public schools or public colleges they provide for everyone else’s kids. Merit pay so appeals to authorities in govt and business b/c it divides and conquers the mass of teachers in pub schls. It sets teachers against each other competing for a small extra. Solidarity by the vast majority of folks born into and living at the bottom is the antidote to the management schemes of the few folks born into or rising into the elite who want the rest of us to believe “there is no alternative.”
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I teach a number of university online courses, and I can tell you that to do them well is a lot of work. I spend many hours updating the courses online, providing specific and direct feedback to students, prompting and encouraging online discussion among the class members, adding content that is up-to-date and relevant, emailing my students individually to respond to questions, and setting up “real time” phone calls with students who just need someone who can help them by talking through some content.
To me, online courses can “work” only when I spend the time to make them more human and personal. I can’t really imagine how the MOOCs can work for everyone–to me, they’re like those “The Great Courses” videos and audio sets. Nice for people who can stay both awake and motivated to learn that way. But as a “new model” for universities? I just can’t see it.
As valuable as technology is as a tool, it can’t replace the benefits of a face-to-face course. I love and value my students; it’s important to know them as people, not as products. I see distance learning as one piece to the problem of providing “content” to those who live far from the university — but preparing teachers isn’t just about “delivering content.”
I continue to strive to make my online courses as interactive, personal, and “real” as possible. But we also require face-to-face contact as well as the online component, and we build in practicum experiences as well. It’s not about “information”–it’s about knowledge, judgment, caring, thoughtfulness, and (eventually) wisdom. Those are things that are best learned from other humans.
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I have always found I’ve learned as much from my fellow students as from my lecturers – and it’s the individual and group exchange of ideas that make the difference. Khan Academy has worked well for my grandson (13 y.o.) but I suspect he talks with family members (as well as me) about what he’s learning.
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I remember ads on TV where colleges tried to attract applicants by showing how they individualized and how professors would be there to guide them. And part of that was not using large lecture halls but intimate classroom settings where ideas could be exchanged. I think my favorite part of college was those interactions.
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I think the real question is not the commodification of higher education as it has long been a commodity that only a few can truly afford. Instead it is a question of who steps up to make this learning comparable to a brick and mortar degree. While human contact is important, cost, accessibility, opportunity, and a host of other issues that plague traditional higher education may ultimately be more so.
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“Instead it is a question of who steps up to make this learning comparable to a brick and mortar degree.
“Who”, as in one single individual? (Superman, perhaps?)
You CAN’T just “make” online content, no matter how high the quality, comparable to achieving a REAL college degree. (FYI, the “brick and mortar” language is pretty egregious and shoddy in an education context; please confine it to comparisons of walking into a Best Buy or Target versus buying it online, with lowest price being the primary, or sometimes only consideration.
Do you really want that mentality imposed on our society? (Are you possibly employed by any of the online “education” companies?)
Finally, I am dubious about your claim that there are numerous issues that “plague” traditional higher education.
No disrespect intended but using such hyperbolic words about our country’s colleges and universities sounds eerily similar to the mendacious narrative we’ve been hearing about our “failing schools” and “education crisis”, ad nauseum, for almost 30 years.
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Exactly. This push for online “learning” has as its ultimate goal to limit education for the masses.
The rich, however, will still have their private academies and Ivy League schools taught in real buildings and with real teachers.
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Walmart University…need I say more?
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I’ve been saying this since the ETHERNET was introduced in 1995. I was an undergrad English major at WCU in NC. Our professors told us stories about “televised learning on the computer” and he discussed reading books from the computer in our hands. Next thing I know in 1996, I began teaching after graduation and the community college where I taught wanted me to do Distance Learning via satellite. I laughed to myself because my professor’s prediction came true. Catapult yourself fifteen years into the future and we have Nooks, Kindle Fires, and all the rest of these I-gadgets PLUS with Khan Academy (which is also backed by the Gates Foundation) and other online colleges taking over, there is NO use for the physical, breathing instructor AT ALL. So, who has a job? The geek who knows graphic design and other tech. I like geeks. I am one, but I chose to be a geek teacher rather than a geek GAMER. The GAMERS are the ones making the cash. The TEACHERS are the ones suffering.
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