This week's edition of Science contains a series of perspectives on how computer technology is changing the education system. Some of them focus on the purely hypothetical, such as the use of MMOs for educational purposes or the development of immersive artificial environments for education purposes. Two of the papers, however, review a real trend in education: the growing access to everything from educational materials to entire degree programs via the Internet.
The trend showed up throughout the articles. For example, the need to get educational material online was highlighted in the MMO article, which pointed out that the World of Warcraft subscriber base was over 20 times larger than the number of science, technology, engineering, and math degrees awarded annually in the US; even Lineage, which was released in 1999, still has a subscriber base that's more than twice as large.
Formal online education
If everyone's online anyway, it's no surprise that education is moving there as well. Many aspects of education are moving there formally, as a variety of online degree-granting programs have developed over the last decade. Some of these are commercial, online-only ventures, but those have been joined by programs developed by universities with a traditional, physical campus. For the most part, the online programs remain a fraction of the size of traditional student bodies, although, in some rare cases, schools are maintaining equal mixes of online and on-ground students.The perspective that focuses on this topic suggests that the majority of those enrolled in online-only classes are doing so at the community college level, and that most take this route because they already have significant time commitments, like jobs. The same features that make online coursework appealing to these students—studying as other commitments allow, avoiding the time spent commuting to campus—appeal to the professors teaching these courses, as well. This, despite the fact that most find preparing for online classes to be more time-consuming than a standard lecture course.
The authors note that initial fears that online coursework would simply be dumped on adjunct professors appear to have been unfounded.
The heavy enrollment at the community college level and the role of commute time as a motivator may explain one of the odd demographic trends: aside from open universities in several countries, online-only education hasn't been big in Europe. Prestigious private universities in the US are also, with a few notable exceptions, staying on the sidelines for now.
Supplementing the classroom
But, even in schools without online classes, the authors note that almost every class has an online component now, even if it's nothing more than a site that hosts some reading material. Many students get access to far more than a reading list, as podcasts, video content, and discussion groups are being used to supplement the classroom experience. A second perspective highlights a number of efforts that have been made to provide catalogs of this material, including the Open Courseware Consortium pioneered by MIT and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative.
The value of this online material was highlighted by a study cited by the author of the second perspective, performed at Carnegie Mellon. Instead of lecturing on the material for a statistics course, professors created an online course for the material and held classroom discussions of it. Students in this hybrid online/offline class apparently completed the course in less time and ended up with equivalent scores on the final exam.
But the perspective notes that many institutions other than schools are starting to place educational material online. Groups like the National Academies of Science and government agencies are producing high-quality online educational material, as are many state educational authorities.
Although the author of the perspective is a huge fan of open access models like Creative Commons, the perspective (unintentionally) highlights many of the problems caused by the proliferation of online material. For starters, the licenses and access models (i.e., browser only, downloading allowed, etc.) for this material makes it difficult to find and integrate into a single online resource.
There are also few guidelines that would help any teacher find the material appropriate for a specific level of instruction, and little in the way of suggestions on how to create a coherent whole out of material initially made for a variety of different purposes.
If there is a coherent picture that can be drawn from this series of articles, it's that there really isn't any such thing as an offline class anymore; we simply have classes in which the online material comprises more or less of the learning experience. Right now, if anything, there may be an overabundance of material; what appears to be lacking is a set of coherent guidelines on how to find and use what's out there.
Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168874
Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168018
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