Why the Online Education Craze Will Leave Many Students Behind (1468 hits)
Free classes from elite colleges like Princeton and Harvard have generated a ton of excitement, but they could actually widen the learning gap
By Noliwe M. Rooks | July 30, 2012
You have probably heard some of the hoopla about elite universities offering free online courses through Coursera, a new Silicon Valley start-up founded by Stanford University computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. In just the past few weeks Coursera has added 12 new universities to their lineup, bringing their total to 16, including Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke and Johns Hopkins.
The company’s website says that their goal is to “give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few,” and accordingly, much of the news coverage has focused on how this will democratize learning. Two weeks after Coursera announced its initial round of partnerships, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a plan to invest $60 million in a similar course platform called edX, and then a third company, Udacity, announced that it, too, would be joining the fray.
Despite near universal enthusiasm for such projects, it’s important to take a few steps back. First off, although the content is free for now, it’s unlikely that it will remain that way for long. According to an analysis of one of Coursera’s contracts, both the company and the schools plan to make a profit in the future— they just haven’t quite figured out the best way to do that yet. But more importantly, I am concerned that computer-aided instruction will actually widen the gap between the financially and educationally privileged and everyone else instead of lessen it.
This is what has been happening in K-12 public schools. Over the past 10 years, public school districts have invested millions of dollars into various types of online and computer-aided learning and instruction programs, yet few are able to show the educational benefit of their expenditures for a majority of students. Those who benefitted most are those who are already well organized and highly motivated. Other students struggle, and may even lose ground.
In terms of learning on the college level, the Department of Education has looked at thousands of research studies from 1996 to 2008 and found that in higher education, students rarely learned as much from online courses as they did in traditional classes. In fact, the report found that the biggest benefit of online instruction came from a blended learning environment that combined technology with traditional methods but warned that the uptick had more to do with the increased amount of individualized instruction students got in that environment, not the presence of technology. For all but the brightest, the more time students spend with traditional instruction, the better they seem to do.
I read an article at EPIC 2020 that tends to feel online education should always be free. Standford University along with Harvard are included along with several other major colleges. The article was stating online badges would keep the student up to date and be much more favorable to employers than a degree on it's own. The authors seem to feel this global strategy would replace traditional college options.
Tuesday, July 31st 2012 at 3:37PM
Alvin Johnson
