For some time now there’s been an amazing wealth of college courses online such as Coursera, MIT Opencourseware etc. My question revolves around how to make college affordable to many more and having them end up with a degree that is respected in the work place or academia. One element would be to proctor exams at physical test locations that prove mastery of online presented content. Our local community college already uses this approach for the first two years worth of Mandarin Chinese. The students just visit the professor at the start of the year and come back in to take the tests. S1 made huge strides online through studying Mandarin with a teacher in southern China using iTalki. He skipped a full year of formal instruction by working with the tutor over a summer. And as I mentioned in another thread he also made enormous strides in math using a fully automated online system. Perhaps some other courses would benefit more from discussion groups and professor interaction. But I’m trying to be pragmatic about the costs of sharply expanding the population of students.
The main downside I would see of 80% online college experience would be the bonding with the peers. But what if instead of living with your peers in dorms you had a shared experience in a remote location - say Costa Rica or Tokyo - in the summer following high school graduation. You meet other students from all over the world and professors. Then when summer’s over you go back home and start your online coursework. This would save a huge amount on housing, transportation etc. One professor could probably reach far more students than a physical classroom. At the end of the semester the student need to make their way to San Francisco, Boston or Dallas to take their exams in a controlled setting.
What would it take to have this approach be respected to the point of being perhaps even mainstream?
The first is a masters degree that can be done with distance learning. The student is actually enrolled in a current on campus class and completes the same course work and tests remotely at testing centers. He has access to the professor with emails and, I believe, phone calls.He is graded with the actual on campus class.
Admission is the same as for those students on campus. Costs are the same. He can go to Georgia Tech and take a class on campus if he prefers. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/academics/degree-programs/masters/distance-learning-ms-cse
What a person gets from (and gives to) college is much more than absorbing and remembering information. Impromptu discussions with friends, romantic drama, trying on personas, doing personal reading, athletics, clubs, foreign study, watching athletics, parties, working closely with faculty, learning how to cooperate with others, social etiquette, etc. Many of these can be done online, but not in the same way as in person. I think that a job candidate with a brick and mortar college degree will almost always win out against a student with an online degree. Old fashioned, I guess, but as I’ve served on several hiring committees I can’t imagine ever taking a candidate with an online degree seriously.
@GMTplus7 Plenty of people have made it big in tech with no degree at all.
Online courses already have credibility. Most major universities offer them as part of their regular curriculum offerings and they look like any other class on the transcript.
Getting your entire degree online? It is a matter of when. Part of the issue is that the technology has to catch up.
I have actually taken both in class and on line classes. The main difference is that it is more difficult to interact and ask questions on line. The computer and the microphone is somewhat clunky with a lot of feedback. Typing questions is slow. On line classes tend to be more one way communication. Discussion type classes are not synchronous. Most discussion classes end up being a lot like CC (posting in a forum) without the thread high jacking. Online classes are best for a very motivated independent student. Group projects are terrible in an online environment if the students are in different places. Concerns about cheating on tests are pretty easily addressed by the way. Test taking centers, etc.
The on line student is not sitting idle while they get their degree. Many are working real jobs learning the very real life lessons that college kids are not. No excuses. Being on time. Dealing with corporate structure, corporate politics, team projects, etc. They are actually ahead of the college students in this regard. They also may be participating in sports leagues, political groups,music groups etc. in their spare time. Really no different from your college kids.
Companies seem to be more interested in people with experience that have the proper skills for the job. The last hire they want is one that they have to spend time training.
I think online learning is going to greatly increase world wide skills and competition will be stronger than ever. Especially keeping current. Why hire someone with a 10 year old college degree when you can hire someone that has kept pace with technology step by step. You really won’t care where or how they obtained their skills. You will only care that they have them.
Continuous education will be the key to employees and employers. It will be the new normal. That education will be on line education in order to allow the employee the ability to work and learn globally.
I think at best, in the foreseeable future, online degrees could earn some respect but not the same level of respect as normal on campus college degrees. They may eventually reach some better level of acceptance than they have today but I think the online degree itself will likely always been seen as a lesser cousin.
I think it is analogous to relationship between MBAs where the student is on campus 2 years vs. weekend or evening MBA programs. Getting a weekend or evening MBA is generally better than no MBA at all, but a lot of employers will not perceive them as equivalent to the on campus MBA.
@snarlatron An on-line degree transcript from a major university won’t say “on-line” degree. It will just say degree from university of ______.
I don’t think the all on-line college be accepted as legit for a really long time if ever but traditional colleges offering online degrees- hiring committees won’t be able to tell the difference.
I’ve always had this nagging feeling that I forgot to do something while in college, and now I know what it is! I should have purchased a $20 ukulele and then spent a semester being “Tiny Gator”…it would have been AWESOME!! I wonder how the wife would feel if I tried it now?
Online technology is getting better and better and a lot of funding is being poured into it (since it’s a proven money maker…). Acceptance may vary by major (it’s almost impossible do to as a pre-med and very difficult in lab intensive majors), but it’s coming. The limited number (a dozen or so) of degree’s offer via UF Online are exactly the same as the Brick and Mortar degrees. A hiring manager would not be able to tell the difference.
Since most college students commute to a commuter-based community college or local university, then go home to their pre-existing social lives, it is not like their college experience necessarily includes all of the social extras described above that one may assume come with the package at a residential university (particularly an elite one with a tightly knit residential environment for all four years).
The potential on-line and distance education student is probably more like the commuter student, but s/he may be interested in an on-line program because there is no local program of his/her intended major or some such. (Of course, the effectiveness of on-line and distance education is a different subject altogether.)
It will happen. You’ll see hybrid degrees like @patertrium described and in that Harvard article. Some folks have old-fashioned attitudes, but they will die out. Duke has offered a hybrid EMBA for a while now.
It’s absolutely going to happen, and the institutions who do no lead in this area will see the consequences.
My son is taking Pre-calc through UF online dual enrollment, and it’s tough. It’s set up well, though, and he is learning on pace. His exams are proctored.
He’s also utilized a couple of things from MIT’s MOOCs, but never for credit.
MOOCs will take off when they find a way to administer proctored exams and grant meaningful diplomas that are accepted by employers, similar to the way the CPA, CFA, BAR, ARE exams are handled these days. These exams are universally accepted by employers as the standard by which applicants are measured. MOOCs need to figure out a way to grant equivalent exam certificates for different majors such as Computer Science, History, Sociology.
Another way for them to become accepted is to work closely with specific employers to grant certificates to those who complete a set of courses particular to certain job skills that certain employers are looking for, and have the graduates of those programs(who pass the exams) placed into jobs with those employers. The courses can be partially subsidized by the employers to bring down the cost.
As most of us know, after your first job, no one cares anymore where you went college. These certificates can be completed in 1 year vs. 4, saving both time and money for everyone, that is, everyone who doesn’t have a rich daddy who pays for him/her to party for 4 (or 6) years at a traditional brick-and-mortar college while he/she finds him/herself.
I’m not sure why something like Coursera is going in the same breath as something like the Harvard Extension School. They are fundamentally different.
I do think extension schools through established Unis will rise in respect but not MOOCs. I love MOOCs but I don’t think they’ll have the respect of more self-contained courses.
I took online courses as an undergrad (physics, public health, demography, etc). There is no way of knowing that though because they have the same course number as the in-person courses. I took at least one online class most semesters because I had to work and that was the only way I could take a full courseload. Lifesaver for me!
I don’t know why there is so much focus on the MOOC’s as an example of online education. One of my kids took online APUSH because her high school teacher was abysmal and she learned a lot. We convinced our school to join Virtual High School and got funding for 25 kids per semester to take an online class. They can take philosophy, a language, children’s literature, anything, and correspond with students all over the world.
The students love these classes, and they can take courses in their area of interest that would never be offered at our small school (environmental chemistry, Latin etc.). I know of students who hated school who actually had a huge turnaround from the A’s in online classes: they suited those students learning styles and encouraged more creative thought.
I have taken a few online classes myself (developed an interest in history in my 50’s) and liked them better than in-person classes. The level of discussion was high and noone could hide in a corner, lots of writing, and great use of online media by the teacher.
In our area, our state university, a small LAC nearby, and Harvard all have online classes, as do most of the schools I know. These are regular classes in the catalog, not MOOC’s. There are usually about 20 students and an attentive professor. Check out Union Institute, Lesley or Goddard as well for use of online technology in a non-traditional program. Or BU’s online degree, UMass online, etc. etc. So many online options, and in my opinion so much better than MOOC’s and generally just as good and just as respected as in-person classes.
I think a large part of the issues is grading. You can scale up the number of students reached with online instruction but how do you assess them? Who will grade the papers and essays in the humanities and social science classes? Even in math or science which are probably the most amenable to being scaled up for online instruction, my exams were not primarily multiple choice. Many problems were a lot more complex than that and the solutions might easily have involved several pages in an exam book. Being graded by another student in a MOOC, while possibly a good learning experience, isn’t any kind of certification. If a University offers instruction online but the students are still being held to the same standards as those taking the class in the classroom, then I don’t see a big difference, if all you are concerned with is mastery of that course content.
Many online programs are already respected… generally the ones that grant 4-year degrees at known universities. For example, I started a master’s at Stanford as a campus student, then decided to leave campus for a job after I was only ~2 classes in to the degree. I did the vast majority of the degree online while living and working in southern CA. Some other class members lived as far away as HP Barcelona. I took the same classes as other students, took exams at the same time as local students, and received the same degree as other students. No employer would be able to distinguish my degree from on campus students, nor should they need to.
I also have taken online classes at University of Wyoming as part of a degree program for fun. I chose Wyoming because they only charged only $70/credit (they have been dramatically increasing rates above this recently, increasing from $100/credit in 2013-14 to planned $430/credit in 2017-18). At UW online classes were separate from campus class, and in a few cases were previously recorded, such that one could go at their own pace and complete the class in days if desired. Being separate from the campus class led to different types of class interactions. It was common for the class to have discussions on forums like this one, in which both students and the professor participated. As I recall, one class required we write something like 10 posts per day on the forums. Exams usually were proctored at a local CC (or similar). All the classes required for a degree could be taken online, and I believe the degree was the same one on campus students received; so again employers would not know the difference and would respect it like other UW degrees.