Online Education

  Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, which I discussed in last week's posting, has a single sentence that has haunted me ever since I read it: "Today's young people have grown up … not necessarily tak[ing] simulation to be second best."  That mindset underlies the "alone together" syndrome that is afflicting society, especially our youngest generation.  In our drive to become digitally ever more together, we have paradoxically become ever more alone as we simulate traditional and intimate forms of contact with diluted ones online.

  Our best universities now seem to be on their way to exacerbating that syndrome by heavily adopting online learning.  MIT and Harvard recently jointly launched a nonprofit, online-education venture called edX. Almost simultaneously, Stanford, Princeton, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, California (Berkeley) and Michigan (Ann Arbor) joined a commercial online-education venture, Coursera.  The latest online courses have many technological bells and whistles—computer-mediated testing to provide students with feedback on their progress, social networks to enable discussion among them, automated and/or crowd-sourced grading, and so forth—that simulate the conventional learning environment.

  Both new ventures are stepping over the corpses of previous online efforts such as Fathom (Columbia, et al.), which failed in 2003, and AllLearn (Oxford, Yale and Stanford), which failed in 2006. Despite these failures, the universities involved in edX and Coursera seem mesmerized enough by online learning's possibilities to try again. I hope they are sufficiently aware of its dangers. The dangers are nuanced, depending on the objectives of the students.

  As a tool of continuing education in one's later years, online courses seem relatively benign, although even in this context they feed the "alone together" malaise.  Since edX and Coursera currently offer at most only certificates of completion, not college credits, they are well suited to the needs of this continuing-education audience. All the same, the logistics are unnerving: last fall, over 100,000 students around the world took three free, non-credit Stanford computer science classes online and tens of thousands satisfactorily completed them!

  The situation is much different for younger students seeking degrees. Neither their educational objectives nor their mature selves are fully formed, so interaction only with a screen cannot possibly substitute for the educational and personal maturation a "bricks and mortar" institution offers.  To the extent that complete courses of study leading to degrees are offered online (as the University of Phoenix now does) they cannot help but distort the very nature of education and its impact on such students. 

  Many arguments have been made both in favor of and against online education. The most telling one in favor is the democratization of access to learning, making it available to people around the world who could never otherwise have it. This argument alone can outweigh many of the traditional concerns.  Other less substantial but still important advantages are cited: additional students can enroll in overcrowded, much-sought-after courses at their own colleges; they can benefit from an ability to time-shift their attendance to hours that suit their own schedules and to "rewind" a lecture to review difficult parts; their access to the best teachers online may outweigh closer personal interaction with less talented ones available in a traditional setting. Further, there may be cost savings or income enhancements for struggling educational institutions, although the recent failures noted above call this into question.

  Some questions about possible drawbacks inherent in online courses have been asked by David Brooks in a column in the New York Times published just after edX was announced: Will massive online learning diminish the face-to-face community on which the learning experience has traditionally been based?  Will it elevate professional courses over the humanities?  Will online browsing replace deep reading?  Will star online teachers sideline the rest of the faculty?  Will academic standards drop?  Will the lack of lively face-to-face discussions decrease the passionate, interactive experience that education should be, reducing it to passive absorption of information?

  The many pros and cons are continuingly being parsed by those more expert than I.  However, from my viewpoint a sole desideratum should dominate the discussion: Since adoption of an online option aggravates the already severe "alone together" syndrome, it should be avoided if other options are available.  Using this criterion, an institution's quest for cost savings, productivity increases or income enhancement is insufficient in itself.  Likewise, a student's desire merely to substitute screen time for human interaction as a preferred mode of learning should be discouraged.  Students who must for some reason view a course's lecture component online should be required when possible to attend non-cyberspace support tutorials, seminars or discussion groups.

  The march toward broader adoption of online learning seems unstoppable, supported at both the top and bottom of the academic ladder.  Among its strong supporters in high places is Stanford president John Hennessy (see his article on the subject), who has enthusiastically predicted that this new wave of education will be something of a tsunami—an apt metaphor given the image of destruction it brings to my mind. At the student level, one finds that many students who are anyway always connected to the Internet don't think of online learning as second best.  They are comfortably at home on Facebook, with its billion users, so they find an online class of 100,000 unremarkable, and don't discern additional value in a class of forty in a traditional classroom.

  I am frightened by the likely acceptance of online education as a normal or even preferred mode of learning. Educational institutions may well soon face Hennessy's online tsunami, just as newspapers, book and music publishers, and magazines have.  I hope they, or at least some of them, will seek higher ground rather than scurry lemming-like into the deluge.