Posted on 10/02/2009 5:45:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
Some trends are so evident that even I can't miss them. Chapter 9 of a book I wrote in the 1980s, Prodigal Press, has the title, "Network News and Local Newspapers: The Coming Economic Judgment." It was easy to forecast that "use of personal computers in homes will lead to a more efficient delivery system" for the news, and that in the process liberal behemoths would stagger and fall.
Should Christians be upset that some major city newspapers have gone out of business, and that even the mighty New York Times has mortgaged its headquarters? No: We should work on filling the gaps. In that vein, another opportunity is coming: The small shock of falling endowments at many universities will soon be followed by a larger shock of falling enrollments, as online education leads to a more efficient delivery system for education.
The media/education analogy starts with the way cost of entry has gone way down in both realms. It used to take tens of millions of dollars to buy printing presses and distribute their products, or to build classroom buildings, dormitories, and performing arts centers. Now, with online news and online education, anyone can get in the game.
But in other ways the academic game is unlike the media game. Online media can bring words and photos equivalent to those of a newspaper, but can online education match the classroom experience? And, since college tuition buys not only education (sometimes) but higher status and improved future earnings, will online diplomas be satisfactory union cards?
Some new evidence suggests that the answer to both questions will soon be yes. More than 1,000 studies of online learning have been published during the past 13 years. A U.S. Department of Education analysis of them concluded that, on average, "students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction" in the same courses. One reason is that face-to-face is often not face-to-face: Many college students snooze in big lecture halls. In good online courses, though, instructors require every student to answer questions and stay involved.
I've spent three decades in college classrooms and have been to only five operas, all in New York, but here's a tentative analogy: Opera in person is great if you're up close and can both hear the music and watch the expressions on the singers' faces. It's not so great if you're in the balcony. I enjoyed last month sitting with my wife, Susan, in the Lincoln Center plaza and watching Metropolitan Opera HD films, especially since the price was right (free). That's far better than paying $160 just to hug the back wall of the hall.
Similarly, it's great for students to sit in a small seminar with a wise, passionate Christian professor pushing students to think. It's a waste of time and money for students to sit at the back of a big lecture hall as a time-serving tenured mediocrity drones on. The Washington Monthly last month ran an article, "College for $99 a Month." Author Kevin Carey wrote, "The day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before."
Such articles along with the Department of Education study show that online education has moved from the margins to the center, and that online degrees will soon be thoroughly respectable. The best Christian colleges, the highest-prestige private ones, and the best-funded state universities with good football teams will survive in a bricks-and-mortar way, but online schools will take the place of many mediocre ones.
My Sept. 12 WORLD article about the purge of a hard-working Christian at a state university began and ended with the famous country music line, "Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Boney fingers." One reader responded that the ending was depressing—so let me clarify. Mene mene tekel upharsin: Leftist professors who feel entitled to parade their views and purge their opponents will lose their captive audience. That's good news for parents and students. That's opportunity for Christians who teach true ideas and learn to compete boldly in this emerging marketplace.
Gee...I dunno!
Can listening to an online lecture given by Walter Lewin of MIT ever be better than listening to an idiot graduate assistant in a classroom?
/sarc
The only education is self-education; formal education is just indoctrination and getting your work permit punched, to the exclusion of others not willing to grab over and bend their ankles for a sheepskin.
Dick Gaines
AKA: Gunny G
********************
There was a study done that shows that students learn better from lectures given by “presenters” rather than professors.
The left is REALLY going to have to address this issue -
far too many Christian “fundies’” children are getting their education without being exposed to leftwing indoctrination.
The used to have the colleges as their “safety net” to catch homeschoolers, but now there are homeschooling colleges and online colleges that allow students to avoid the leftist/Marxist professors and teachers all the way through their education.
On the other hand I have 332 credit hours at the bachelors level and one degree, with so much crap & fluff classes.
At the end of the madness I was 1 credit shy of graduation and needed a "Strategies for Success" class where upon the counselor said that is was a very important class to gage if I have been successful, I responded "Ma'am I draw a pension from 20 years in the military" I surely can judge for myself if I have been successful or not, and the last thing I need to quantify my life is a garbage 1 credit class on being a success.
The college I work at has been offering on-line classes for years now and it’s been growing steadily. These are mostly in the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Subjects that require labs such as chemistry or biology are for the most part still the same but on-line lectures for these subjects are offered as well. Classes meet in a classroom once a week the core material is on-line all the time so a student can study the current lesson at any time. It is more convenient and cost effective. The instructor can update or augment the material at any time. Multi-Media specialists such as myself find it quite challenging and even fun to come up with new and more effective programs for our instructors and students. We don’t produce the tired old Powerpoint stuff. Streaming video and use of new dynamic software makes these lesson modules the stuff instructors could only dream about before. Tests such as mid-terms and finals are still conducted in the classroom. Most textbooks are now including a CD or DVD for students to use.
Post secondary education has been trending this way for quite a while. As delivery systems changed from chalk to digital projection with user interfaces such as Smartboards and Ray Beam the material itself along with teaching methods had to adapt. It’s far from perfect but light years better than I had when I was in school.
I am a college professor and teach most of my classes online. I agree that online teaching can be very effective, but it is a challenge and not all students have the discipline to keep up with their class work without a regular schedule. I also believe that not all classes can be done well online. Obviously science classes with labs are not practical for online courses. However, online college classes are here to stay.
Congrats on your masters, SERE! My daughter, a junior in high school, has had nothing but trouble getting her credits in order to graduate because of educational requirements. She’s taking an online Japanese class as well as an English/Lit class now and it’s been a huge benefit.
Ironically, my husband trains social workers for Michigan (a thriving field at the moment) and he uses as much eLearning as he can. There’s a huge opportunity for online education and, as you experienced, it lets you avoid a bunch of liberal pap and crap.
I've been espousing online education for years, excited that this incredible tool, the Internet, offers that opportunity. It's moving far to slowly, but online schooling, especially for college, I believe, is going to pick up steam - and obama may just be the kick start it needed - by his takeover of all college loans which will necessitate anyone wanting to go to college and needing loans, will be forced to serve in his National Service program - while still be hamstrung with decades of paying back the loans.
That, combined with what has become the norm at colleges: "classrooms" in lecture halls, with 600-800 students in the room with a student teacher on stage. (The professors that the schools tout, and that parents/teachers believe will be actually teaching, will be busy off in their lairs doing 'research' or?
My grandson, that grew up in my house, quit public school in the 10th grade, after years of butting heads with socialist teachers. He didn't appreciate their heroes, like Che, for example. And he knew too much about our REAL history to swallow the revised hype.
He enrolled in an accredited online high school and, in conjunction, became such a regular at the local library - and such a favorite - that they gave him a "private" room, up on the attic level, with a big library table and big sunny window.
After getting his cert., he moved to Texas and attended college - after a year, he went into the service - Airborne - has served a 15 month deployment in the most dangerous hell hole in Afghanistan - and is readying to go back.
His units story (over 1,000 firefights) has been the documented on Frontline, 2 features in Vanity Fair, a cover story in N.Y. Times Mag...and will be a featured documentary in Jan. at the Sundance Film Festival...written by a famous writer you will all recognize, who embedded with the unit many months.
We are all aware of the terrible sacrifices of our troops in these wars. But this documentary will bring it home even more - especially in light of the criminal new ROE that this lily-livered administration has put it place that forbids our troops to defend themselves if there's ANY possibility of a civilian getting hurt - or, as in a recent battle that resulted in 4 marines killed, many wounded, in a battle where they were pinned down in a mountain valley and called for air cover - and were refused even after they assured that there were no civilians in the area, only Taliban.
We are now loosing more troops than at any other time since 2001, because of the ROE. And they have ALWAYS been undermanned in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, obama and Washington fiddles.
It's becoming clearer to more people that the 'hope and change' they believed in is not the 'hope and change' obama intends.
I still have grandchildren that will go to college. I now have hope that they can get their education - and without indoctrination and 'National Service and decades of loans - online.
And pray that the public - those that are still not really aware of what it's all about - will become more supportive of our troops and demand they get the add'l boots on the ground and defense they need.
It's going to be race - this very real war we need to win against our 'enemies within', if our children/grandchildren are going to live in the freedoms our Forefathers established.
Done properly it's motivation for self-education. The vast majority will not learn to read on their own, much less figure out algebra.
I love it! I am a 4.0 Student at American Military University. Not only am I happy with the depth and volume of the education I am getting, I am attending a CONSERVATIVE university on a level of which that cannot be matched by anything in my home state of Oregon. The scope of my classes is far more specific, and I can do them FASTER than the standard 16 weeks. Many of mine are condensed into 8 weeks of hard work and tremendous reading! I love it! Its SOOOOOOOO much better than anything I got from Oregon State University.
I highly recommend it!
The group exercises are what gets missed in an on-line situation and whether we like it or not that is a situation that people will face at one time or another.
Underground History of American Education...
http://spotgunnyg.blogspot.com/2007/03/underground-history-of-american.html
They certainly are here to stay. Like the post above yours the college I teach at has been conducting online courses at the undergraduate and graduate level for many years. We are fully accredited and we have fully online courses and degree programs as well as face to face courses that have online components. My classes are hardly reading/powerpoint lectures and we use a variety of videos and other tools to enhance the courses both in the pure online environment as well as in the classroom. It does take a bit more discipline for online students, but it takes more discipline from the online professor as well. There is a set class week with assignments, deadlines and projects and it requires good time management. I have deployed students as well as students in Europe, Asia and in the past there were a pair of students at a research station in Antarctica.
I think in the long run we will wind up with a hybrid. I took classes that were 75% online, 25% in the classroom for my master’s. Real time conversation and questions are valuable learning tools.
The bulk of the learning was self-directed and I thrived on it. I have a work colleague who dropped out after the first semester. He preferred the structure of regular classes and the weekly accountablility.
I think there are traits such as long-term time management (that 15 page paper looks easy in week one, not so easy in week 14), performing with limited supervision, more likely to take initiative that will appear in an on-line learner more than a brick and mortar learner.
I read both of your posts as teachers and posted after. I should have posed my opinion to you. Do you find that your succesfull online learners have better time manangemet, initiative taking, and other similar qualities?
For the most part that is true. We also have students who do not start out with the attitudes and skills they need but if they have the desire to succeed they quickly develop them. We have completely online programs and our on campus students, both undergraduate and graduate all will have to take at least a couple of their courses in an online only environment. For graduate students the number of courses they will end up taking online is even higher. A majority of our students are online at a distance.
I see no reason for a hard-and-fast distinction between online college education and homeschool/online secondary school education.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.