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Virtual university: is online learning changing higher education?

Regional Review - March 1, 2002

College education hasn't changed much since the first modern university was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1119. Higher education was then, and is now, at its core about communication. It is a continuous dialogue between teacher and learner, who work together to find a path toward a new understanding about the world. Nearly a millennium later, despite many changes in the technology of communication, professors and students are still participating in this same exchange.

This is not to say that new communication technology has had no impact on higher education; indeed, it has played a key role in expanding the university's boundaries. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing press, for instance, enabled the rise of the modern university itself. No longer was the expansion of knowledge limited by the scarcity of manuscripts, since books could now be reproduced quickly and cheaply. As more people became literate, universities sprang up to meet the new demand for higher education. But until the mid-nineteenth century, education was still primarily a face-to-face affair. Students could read books on their own, for certain, but the interaction with a teacher so critical to the learning process could only happen in person. Mail-based correspondence courses, offered in Britain as early as the 1840s, for the first time allowed personal contact between teacher and student outside the time and space constraints of the classroom. From then on, the many improvements in communication h ave all been used to extend education's reach. Instructional films were introduced in the early 1900s, and later advances like satellite broadcasts, videotapes, and teleconferencing were exploited for their teaching potential, as well. But in the end, none of these technologies could hold its own against the traditional classroom. Students worked in isolation from one another, faculty were not easily accessible to students, and there were frequently considerable time lags in feedback and communication--all poor substitutes for a campus-based education.

Today the Internet is staking a claim as the solution to the problems of teaching and learning at a distance. Its popularity in the higher education setting is indisputable. Online courses enroll almost 2 million students at nearly 2,000 U.S. universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. A quarter of these universities offer entire certificates or degrees that can be earned without ever setting foot on campus. Distance learning enthusiasts argue that the Internet can speed up interactions into real time, reduce the barriers to communication between students and faculty, and make the university accessible to more people by eliminating the need to come to campus physically. As a result, online classes can replicate the traditional university environment with more success than any previous distance learning tool.

On the one hand, this is good news for students who have difficulty working with a campus-based curriculum; the Internet will make higher education more accessible to them. But it also means that online learning, unlike its predecessors, is a potentially formidable competitor for students' higher education dollars. Education specialists worry that it could knock marginal schools out of business or reduce the quality of higher education overall. Some say it might even end face-to-face instruction as we know it. Is online learning the death knell of the university?

THE CLASSROOM GETS CONNECTED

In her graduate-level "Leadership and Management" course last May, Professor Deborah Nutter of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy posed the question, "Who do you think is the most successful and effective foreign policy leader of the twentieth century?" One student defined successful and effective as "a person who has been able to spread his thoughts, ideas, and activities internationally and has thus influenced the whole world significantly." He then noted that Lenin could be seen as such a leader since he was a powerful purveyor of Communist ideas both before and after his death. Another disagreed, arguing that Lenin's influence was no more than a myth perpetuated by the Communist Party. The two parried for a while, and then the discussion turned to other candidates.

None of this classroom debate is so remarkable, except that it all occurred online. Stepping into an Internet classroom is at once familiar and alien to anyone who has experienced a traditional college education. All the usual elements of a class are there--the professor, the students, the syllabus, the lectures and discussions. But each has metamorphosed into something recognizable as, but thoroughly changed from, its in-person counterpart. For instance, rather than face-to-face introductions, online students often meet the professor and their fellow students by reading online biographies, or perhaps by downloading prerecorded audio or video clips. The syllabus is accessible with a click of the mouse, and it may change frequently as students and faculty work together to chart the direction of the course. Lectures, broadly defined, still play an integral part in conveying course material for many classes, but they often take advantage of the Internet's interactivity by including links to relevant sources or providing alternate explanations to mesh with different learning styles. Course discussions like the one in Nutter's class do not require all students to participate at the same time. Instead, they happen via "asynchronous chats" in which students log in at their leisure, read the prior discussion on the topic at hand, and participate by responding in kind. Students even do group projects, communicating with group members via email or instant messaging facilities. All these features are made possible by courseware such as WebCT and Blackboard, a new generation of software that integrates all these classroom-related functions into one seamless and easy-to-navigate package.

Why would universities adopt this teaching model, so far outside their usual purview? Student demand is a primary reason. As the nation becomes increasingly wired, students expect to communicate online with their professors and their university as easily as they do the other businesses they patronize. It makes sense for universities to invest in courseware to facilitate this interaction--and once courseware is available for on-campus courses, it's not much more effort to move a course completely online. As universities have added technical capacity, they've also discovered other advantages of teaching over the Internet. For one, the lack of physical boundaries in Internet-based learning can help public institutions and community colleges achieve their goal of serving the whole community. John Christensen, a coordinator of academic services at the Community College of Vermont (CCV), says, "Online learning is the ultimate fulfillment of what's been our mission since we started 30 years ago. We're bringing coll ege into people's homes." Furthermore, online learning can be cost-effective; most online courses are no more costly than their in-person equivalents. "The software for teaching online is not inexpensive, but online courses don't have the facilities cost," says CCV's president, Tim Donovan. The price is worthwhile since distance learning helps expand the student base, increasing revenue potential.

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