Essay Question: The Web is Transforming the University. How and Why? (Please Use Examples.)
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By Paul Keegan, December 2000 Issue
As with many Internet education revolutionaries, Schank believes that the computer is better than the classroom because it's a more active experience. Rather than passively listening to a lecture, a computer user is given a specific goal and has to figure out how to achieve it. This requires a student to absorb the knowledge by practical application, through trial and error. Like Cardean University, Cognitive Arts uses "goal-based scenarios" as its main teaching tool. Schank's art-history pilot course used at Northwestern, for example, puts you in the role of an investigator trying to determine whether a work of art attributed to Rembrandt is fake and sends you off to learn everything about the painter and his style.
But do these approaches educate? Advocates of online instruction point to the "no significant difference phenomenon," a group of 355 studies done since 1928 that argues that so-called distance education -- teaching done through correspondence courses and all other forms of remote instruction -- is just as good as traditional methods. But many educators dispute that, saying the studies are too narrow and otherwise flawed.
In fact, online education is so new that the jury is still out on how it compares with the physical classroom experience. For that matter, the experts say, there isn't even a consensus on how to measure the quality of education in any classrooms, online or otherwise. The usual method -- accreditation by one of the six regional bodies -- tends to focus on the "input" a student receives: the size of the library, the number of tenured faculty members, and so on. Those standards don't mean anything in a virtual university.
The biggest online learning laboratory so far is UOP Online, which has graduated a total of 6,663 students since 1989. Comprehensive exams that all degree candidates must take upon entry and at graduation show students "are overwhelmingly meeting the learning objectives and outcomes of their programs," says Terri Hedegaard, an Apollo senior vice president. UOP's graduation rates are between 60 and 65 percent, she says, compared with 51.6 percent at U.S. colleges as a whole.
Conversations with alumni of virtual universities make one thing clear: They like it. Craig Brandt, a pharmacist working in an administrative job at a hospital in Westchester County, N.Y., got his MBA from UOP Online earlier this year. It cost him $25,000. No traditional university could have accommodated his schedule: Brandt says he usually crashed at 10 p.m. after a hard day's work, got up at 2 a.m. to study and post his comments in newsgroup discussions, then went back to bed at 4:30 a.m. for a few more hours of sleep before going to work. It took him just over two years to get his MBA that way.
Brandt says he's certain the skills he gained at UOP will give him an edge in the professional world, particularly over health-care colleagues who have clinical degrees but no business background. "Initially, I was worried about what kind of reputation a UOP degree would have in the job market," he says. "But then I realized that out in the real world, the important thing is not whether you went to some big, fancy school but whether you have an accredited degree, period."
Satisfied customers notwithstanding, many traditionalists view online education the way ancient Egyptians must have viewed the barbarians who torched the library at Alexandria. David Noble, the York University history professor, says the Internet has ushered in a new and potentially devastating phase of what he calls the "commodification of education."
That process, Noble argues, has been under way for two decades, with the result being a deterioration of the old ideal of the college campus as a place to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Universities have moved increasingly toward pursuing knowledge for the sake of profit -- and in the service of big business. A watershed moment in this evolution came in 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which for the first time gave universities ownership of patents resulting from their research funded by federal grants and allowed them to license their discoveries to the highest bidder. Noble says passage of that law caused a dramatic reallocation of university resources: From 1976 to 1994, expenditures on research increased 21.7 percent, while the amount spent on actual teaching declined 9.5 percent. For students, this meant larger classes, reduced course offerings, and fewer full-time tenured faculty members
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