Online courses have been around for nearly two decades, but enrollment has soared in recent years as more universities increase their offerings. More than 4.6 million college students (about one in four) were taking at least one online course in 2008, a 17 percent increase over 2007.

Institutions like Rutgers University and the University of California system are looking at expanding online courses as a way to keep down tuition costs or increase revenues. Recently, Rutgers said it would triple online revenues from $20.5 million to $60 million in five years.

Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?

As Good as Classroom Lessons

Greg von Lehmen is provost and chief academic officer at University of Maryland University College. UMUC offers more than 100 bachelor’s and master’s degree programs and certificates fully online. The university has approximately 90,000 students worldwide.

Online education that is consistent with best practices is immensely beneficial to students. First, there are fewer and fewer doubts about whether it can be as effective in achieving learning outcomes as face-to-face instruction.

It’s a mistake to assume that online education is inexpensive to support.

A growing body of research — which critical metastudies regard as methodologically sound — supports this conclusion. Second, and as often noted, a primary advantage of online education is that it can be asynchronous, greatly increasing the flexibility and availability of education.

Adults in the workforce who are seeking post-secondary education have benefited the most from online education, but those enrolling in online programs include students of all ages, even from elementary, middle, and high schools.

Read more… There is no question that, for brick-and-mortar institutions, online education offers a way to scale up operations to meet increased demand at a marginal cost that is lower than that which would be necessary to add physical infrastructure. Community colleges offer a very good case in point, given their growth. However, it is a mistake to assume that online education is inexpensive to support. For institutions like my own that offer online education to students, the infrastructure requirements are still extensive. Instead of classroom buildings, there is the need for robust IT systems and staff to maintain them, a flexible and reliable learning management system, online student services that cover the range of student needs, online library resources and services, course development — whether conducted internally or externally — and the staff necessary to train and manage faculty while maintaining quality control. Depending on the scale at which online education is offered, the marginal costs may still be considerable for an institution making the transition from face-to-face to online course offerings. Certainly, there are problems within the online educational sector, but it is worth noting that these problems are not necessarily unique to that sector. There are schools that use unscrupulous or illegal student recruitment techniques. There are schools that have no accreditation at all or hold accreditation that does not allow students to transfer credits easily to other schools or qualify for admission to graduate programs. If anything, the advent of online education has helped draw attention to the differences between national and regional accreditation, and the problems that national accreditation — which is generally regarded as a weaker standard — can create for students. There are many challenges, even for institutions that have well-established online programs. One is the dizzying pace at which technology evolves and the importance of accurately assessing which developments are fads and which are valuable to improving or extending online learning. Student authentication, for example, is a concern. Online learning is still relatively new, and there is yet to develop a robust secondary services market to support schools that offer it. Most companies offering assessment engines or technologies that verify student identity or other services are small, and questions remain about their sustainability. Ultimately, though, I would say that the overarching challenge for online education is the same as for higher education in general: accountability for outcomes.

Another False Gold Rush

Robert Zemsky is a professor of education and chairman of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.



Once again higher education’s electronic El Dorado beckons. The promise of new students and new revenues easily generated through the magic of the Web is once more proving irresistible.

There is almost no evidence of online offerings changing traditional instruction, no cross-over, no cross fertilization.

It’s as if NYUonline had never dropped more than $20 million in its pursuit of an online empire or Columbia had never lost a like amount and for the same reason after launching Fathom.com.

Forgotten as well are the attempts of many of the world’s top business schools to launch online programs that charged premium prices in exchange for brand-name diplomas.

There are, to be sure, revenues to be garnered and students to enrolled, but the lesson to be learned from past efforts is that success will likely come primarily to non-traditional providers who understand that what the electronic market wants are what I have come to call 2-C products — two Cs for convenient and credentialed.

Read more… Most successful online educational offerings are limited and linear as well — not much more attractively packaged (or even less attractively packaged) than electronic workbooks. The brand names that matter in this online market are the University of Phoenix, Strayer, and Capella. Where traditional institutions have mounted successful online programs they have kept them isolated, walled off-from the institution’s traditional offerings, often contained within a wholly separate corporate structure and identify.

There is almost no evidence of online offerings affecting, let alone changing how these institutions deliver their traditional products, no cross-over, no cross fertilization. Often when traditional institutions offer online courses their enrollments come from their traditional students who like the convenience of remaining in their dorm rooms or apartments an extra hour or two in the morning.

Institutions moving more in this direction like Rutgers may discover that which glitters is probably little more than quicksilver.

Better and Cheaper

Anya Kamenetz is the author of the forthcoming “DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.”

Online learning has been growing much faster than traditional enrollment for at least six years, and almost one in four college students now takes at least one class online. This can be great news for students, but only if institutions take advantage of the latest research in designing online courses, and — a bigger if — if they pass the savings on to students.

Online learning can be less expensive, and tuition should reflect that.

The phrase “distance learning” betrays a snobbery that online classes must be a ways away from the real thing. It doesn’t have to be so. Professor David Wiley at Brigham Young says classroom teaching is to online teaching as regular polo is to water polo.

You can’t run the same plays in the more fluid, immersive environment and expect the same results. Online classes consisting of prerecorded video lectures and multiple-choice assessments are flat, poor imitations of a teaching model that’s outdated to begin with.

In the right hands, though, online learning can be even better than the “real thing.”

Read more… The modern era of research-based learning software began with the work of John R. Anderson at Carnegie Mellon, who published “The Architecture of Cognition” in 1983, detailing how learners master a cognitive skill as a system of procedural rules. Today’s best-of-breed learning programs draw on cognitive science, developmental psychology and artificial intelligence to teach math, reading, physics, computer science, foreign languages and a host of other subjects faster, more thoroughly, and more engagingly than traditional classroom instruction. They do this by allowing students to move at their own pace and prompting them to spend more time on task, reflect on what they learn and collaborate. The Department of Education released a meta-analysis of more than 1,000 studies of online learning last fall, and concluded that in most cases, online learning actually produces significantly better outcomes than classroom-based learning. Hybrid approaches, which combined some face-to-face time with online practice and assessments, scored better than both all-online and all-classroom approaches. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, for example, developed a stats course that was a blend of online practice and in-person instruction. The course met twice a week for eight weeks, versus four times a week for 15 weeks in a conventional course. The students learned more and retained the information just as well a semester later, without spending any more time on their homework. According to estimates by the Open Learning Initiative, putting a foot on the gas like this to a large course taught in several sections could potentially save a university $200,000 a year or more. Which brings me to my final point: online learning can be cheaper, and tuition should reflect that. It’s great to see colleges with the best reputations exploring the possibilities of scaling up online teaching, but it’s not fair if they don’t pass the savings on to students. One dean of a graduate program that had implemented an online section over a Facebook-like multimedia platform told me rather defensively, “If you want a degree from us, you have to pay our tuition.” That attitude doesn’t serve the public interests of higher education.

Missing the Personal Connection

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”

College finances are a daunting mess, and they don’t stand to improve any time soon. Any program that economizes instruction and sustains learning is a no-brainer for cash-strapped deans and presidents — which means that online education will expand swiftly into more post-secondary schools in the U.S. in the coming years.

Writing is still best taught face-to-face between teacher and student.

Will they work? More or less, here and there. It all comes down to effectiveness, and common sense says that information- and policy-heavy disciplines can fruitfully adopt online delivery.

In one area, however, instruction works more effectively the old-fashioned way through face-to-face exchanges between teacher and student: writing. Writing classes don’t involve a body of knowledge, and lessons there aren’t easily standardized. You respond to each class differently, recognizing strengths and weaknesses and blocks and deficiencies in unique combination from student to student.

Read more… The best occasions happen in the office. A student brings in a rough draft, hands you a copy, and the session begins. “Look at that verb in your opening,” I say. “What do you think?” “Passive?” student mumbles. “How about an active verb, one that lets us drop that preposition, too?” Student ponders, tries out a few, then we settle on a better choice. I move on. “How about that phrase at the end, ‘gets his message across’— a little commonplace, no?” “Yeah,” student agrees. “Let’s find something more precise, more vivid.” Three minutes later, student has worked it out. The session continues for another 20 minutes, tackling diction, transitions, modifiers, etc. The problem is obvious. To do the same thing online would take two hours! Each query, comment, suggestion, and rejoinder would have to go into print and travel from screen to screen. This amounts to revision by correspondence, a slow and exhausting process. It works with skilled writers, perhaps, but tentative and inexperienced 18-year-olds need closer and more expeditious guidance.

Writing is just one part of the curriculum, of course, and it won’t much hinder the digitalization of campus space. Still, we shouldn’t underestimate its college-wide value. A month ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities commissioned a survey asking employers where colleges need to “increase their focus.” What came up in the top spot was not “media literacy,” “collaborative learning,” “diversity,” or other fashionable 21st-century skill or knowledge, but rather the basic ”ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing.”

Flexibility and Time

Karen Swan is the James Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield and an expert on online and blended learning.

Online learning benefits students in a variety of ways. First, it opens up higher education opportunities to many people who would not otherwise have these opportunities. Although online learning does provide access to those who live far from university centers, the biggest factor that keeps most people from higher education is time.

A federal study found that students who took all or part of their classes online performed better.

When I started researching online learning we surveyed students about their reasons for taking online classes, thinking the answer would be distance. It turned out overwhelmingly to be a matter of time. In today’s world, working people and people with families especially just don’t have time for face-to-face classes.

Two recent large scale studies have shown that online learning is more engaging and that students learn more online. One study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, did a meta-analysis of 51 reports on online instruction comparing student outcomes in online, blended and/or face-to-face environments. It found that students who took all or part of their classes online performed better, and that the effectiveness of online and blended instruction was broad across variations in students, types of programs and content areas.

Read more… Another study used new questions about technology in college classes in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to assess the effects of technology on student engagement. Answers from 31,000 students at 58 institutions revealed that even after controlling for age, gender, major, type of institution and number of fully online courses taken, technology use was positively related to categories of engagement measured by NSSE benchmarks (for example, active and collaborative learning and student-faculty interaction), deep approaches to learning and self-reported learning outcomes. Online learning is also cost- and/or resource effective. Students don’t have to pay for babysitters, gas, parking, etc. to attend online classes, or expend time to commute to campus. Done properly, online learning can provide benefits to students in terms of access, satisfaction, educational outcome and cost savings. I think U.I.S. has clearly benefited from it as well.

More Tech Support

Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

In my view, the important question we should be addressing is how we can improve our nation’s higher education system to increase the numbers of students who gain access to college and who achieve college degrees.

Clearly the use of technology is part of the solution and online courses are one way to use technology.

Online classes are only one way to use technology to improve higher education.

As we think about expanding online courses we need to be careful to analyze the types of courses that are best delivered in this way and the types of students that benefit the most from these types of classes (research suggests more mature learners and better prepared students).

We also need to be very careful about how we design these courses, the types of support services that are coupled with them (online tutoring and/or call centers), and to note that research also suggests that a combination of online and face-to-face meetings also often increases effectiveness.