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Originally Posted by catscratch /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Uh, yes, let's scrap college. Let's get rid of all research, academic and practical, altogether. Technological advancement, who needs it? Oh, you want trained medical personnel? Yup, that's fine, the next guy to operate on you will have his MD from an online university. You just bet that he has all the experience he needs. Yup, no worries there at all. Oh, what's that? Liberal education? You mean, like literature, history, and stuff? Who cares. We've got hip-hop and r'n'b! We've got lolcats and failblog and head-fi to read, we don't need Proust, or Kafka, or Dumas. screw** Dumas... what kind of a name is that anyway? Who reads that ****? Let's play some CS instead. And history? We've got History Channel for that. Never mind that it's a bunch of US propaganda, that's how it happened anyway. No lie. Besides, anything outside of the US doesn't matter anyway
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Sorry, but I don't buy it. I'll take my live college education and get my Ph.D. Thanks.
P.S. revision of existing higher-level education is a very different story altogether. If the idea of the thread was "how can we improve higher-level education" rather than "let's get rid of most live higher-level education because what we have now isn't working for most people" then it wouldn't get that kind of a response.
I agree, the modern academic system is flawed. But, that's a different topic.
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Nice post, catscratch.
(((Long post warning, don't say I didn't tell you...)))
I don't even want to get started on this issue... ah, but I suppose I should throw in my 2 cents, just for fun.
Background-wise, I couldn't possibly be more biased in terms of supporting higher education. I have 6 college degrees (4 at the graduate level) and 4 professional certifications (CPA, CFA, etc). I've taught at the college level (either on a full-time or part-time basis) for 25 years now, am a co-author of a college textbook, and have served in administrative capacities as well. So I'm biased.
But I've never been more biased in favor of formal, traditional, chalk-in-hand teaching, big buildings, and football teams than I am today, after having served as the managing director and dean of graduate studies (all from my laptop) for an online university for several years. While I no longer serve in this capacity, I have absolutely no misgivings about the particular online university that I worked for; I just don't think that, on average, it works nearly as well as does formal, face to face interaction with students.
The only saving grace in my experience with online education was the fact that it was graduate level only (MBA and Ph.D. level programs) and thus none of the degree candidates that I worked with were "robbed" of the experience of actually going to college (as undergraduates) and learning what they could from the overall educational environment.
In short, it's not all about book learning.
The online university that I ran from my laptop (well, Ok, there was a server and backup systems and so on, but still...) was quite efficiently structured and managed. There were no required courses. In fact, all students were required to design their own curriculum in consultation with myself as the dean and a student-selected program advisor (i.e., a faculty member who had a background that meshed well with the particular student's interests and needs). Nor were there any tests. Each course was a one on one experience with an individual student matched up (with my approval) to an individual faculty member.
The student and faculty member would determine what books or other resources to use for the course (we had literally hundreds of courses and dozens of areas of specialization for students to choose from, but they were also free to design their own courses), as well as what outcomes were to be expected from the course. Via email, students and faculty members would interact, and I was copied in on everything. For each course, the student would write a graduate level "original" paper that had a significant element of real world application of the ideas that they had learned about from their readings or other coursework, including field trips and so on (i.e., when papers were submitted for grading, no "regurgitation" of ideas as expressed by others was allowed, or put another way, student papers couldn't be an endless series of quotes or what we called "book reports").
All papers were sent to an editor in Australia and vetted in great detail for writing style, grammatical structure, syntax, and any number of other related matters. The faculty member would, in turn, read the papers as submitted with a critical eye for subject matter content, clarity of ideas, practical "real world" relevance and an overall "BS detector". Typically, a paper would go back and forth in at least 3 or 4 iterations before the faculty member was satisfied with the level work; students were also required to keep course journals that detailed the amount of time they had put into various aspects of the course, on a day to day basis. When a final paper was submitted for grading, I'd then give it a once-over for quality assurance (i.e., checking for internal consistency between and among faculty members to ensure that all students were appropriately challenged and properly guided for each course, that there wasn't grade inflation, etc).
As the dean of graduate studies, I got to review all sorts of papers on every imaginable business-related topic written by students from all around the globe. I've never learned more, read more, or been more impressed by such a wide variety of hard working, clear thinking, highly motivated students, in my 25 years in higher education. Moreover, the system was extremely efficient. Students would get responses to most of their emails within 24 hours or less!
I managed about 80 different email accounts. We had one set up for every possible "office" that you would normally find on a physical campus (an email account for admissions, for transcript requests, for accounts receivable, for various academic departments, for editing, for anything you could possibly think of). This streamlined the administrative process like you couldn't believe. Everything was compartmentalized; some email accounts were more active than others, but almost everything submitted by students (other than the papers themselves) was done via online forms. There were no postage costs.
On top of all of that, we had an outstanding group of faculty members, the majority of whom were entreprenurial in nature. Most of them had written books, but not necessarily college textbooks. Instead, they had published more empirically oriented works, or had written "popular" (i.e., best selling) books about various aspects of business. Most of them were between 60 to 75 years old and had the time as well as the inclination to work closely with our graduate students. They were both challenged and inspired by the level of maturity and intellectual curiosity that our students (on average) approached their studies with.
As an example, one of our faculty members who I used to chat with for hours on end had actually (believe it or not, someone had to) "invented" the term "time management" way back when. In other words, he coined the phrase and was the first person ever to write a book about it (or so he claimed). Over the years, his simple little book has sold millions of copies. After doing the lecture/training seminar circuit for many years in the 70s, he retired quite early in life (some 30 some years ago now) and prior to joining our faculty hadn't "worked" for at least two decades. When students took his course (one on one) using the book that had made him rich and famous, you had better believe they were getting a good experience! He was one of the most insistent people I've ever met, and was totally dogmatic in terms of the application of his methodologies. He made sure that his students not only understood his time management concepts, but that their lives were completely changed and rearranged as a result! And he was just one example.
So why didn't it work? Our online graduate students got (by far) more attention and guidance from their program advisors (in sort of a gestalt sense), their highly qualified faculty advisors (who worked with them on a one on one basis to help develop their research, writing, and practical business skills), their dean (myself) who was available on a 24/7 basis for any questions they had about the program itself (I'd check my email accounts several times per day), the editor, and any number of other administrative people who could help them with various matters.
So why? Because everything that they learned was self directed and there was no real interaction with other people (no fellow students, no real-life faculty members whose office they could drop in on, no weird/interesting characters to meet around "campus", not even a graduation ceremony). I'd actually print off their degree certificates when they completed their MBA or Ph.D. degrees, and then send them off in the mail. Don't get me wrong, they were nice looking degrees, just like what you would expect with a high quality paper stock and a specialized printing process. But no cap and gown, no pictures, no socialization whatsoever, other than via email for several years with myself, the editor, and their course advisors.
Did they learn? No doubt about it. I'd actually go out on a limb and say that they learned as much if not more than they would have in a comparable real world, live interaction, type of university. More to the point, they studied what was relevant to their lives and careers so there was no "fluff" in their programs unless they decided to put it there themselves. Not only that, but they were required to do original thinking and writing for each and every one of their courses, and everything that they turned in had to have a significant element of real world, practical, application. But what they learned was only from books (or at least mostly from books).
Their degrees, of course, were not accredited, nor will they ever be. How could they be? We didn't have a library with tens of thousands of volumes (although we subscribed to all sorts of amazing onlines services that gave them access to millions of volumes, but none that you could "touch" to show someone from an accrediting association). Perhaps equally important, we didn't have a football team. I'm kidding, but you get the point. We didn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, so we could never be accredited by any association made up of, well... ducks. We were too different, too radical, and would never be accepted by mainstream academia.
But as I think about it now, several years later, that's as it should be. No matter how well we did what we did, it was and always will be qualitatively a much different thing than what traditional higher education is or ought to be. There is only so much you can learn from books.
At the graduate level, online education certainly offers an interesting, or at least different, alternative for students who are mature and highly self motivated. At the undergraduate level, I suspect it would be much more difficult to maintain quality control standards. In my experience in the real world classroom, I've found that younger people (on average) are simply not mature enough to be able to: 1) figure out precisely what it is they ought to be learning in order to advance in their chosen career path, or 2) self disciplined enough to actually do the necessary work, assuming they can figure out what they want to do to begin with. This is where traditional college helps them, considerably in my estimation. But again, I'm a bit biased.
