May 2001 — Features
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Sink or Swim?
Higher Education Online: How Do We Know What Works — And What D'esn’t?
Let’s suppose for a moment that it’s the 1930s. You’re the captain of the luxury liner, the Queen Mary, steaming across the Atlantic to New York. Suddenly, you hear a low drone. You look up and see a Pan Am Clipper, winging its way from London to New York. As you stand on the bridge, gazing up at this remarkable sight, would you realize that the age of steamships is about to end? Would your steamship company understand that its business actually is transportation, not ships? And would the passengers guess that seats at the captain’s table, strolls on the deck, steamship trunks and days at sea are about to become nostalgic memories, replaced by a six-hour flight in row 17?
The Pan Am Clipper did more than herald a historic shift in the way goods and people were transported. Indeed, it forced new ways of thinking about how we work and live. The expansion of inexpensive air travel brought about a societal transformation.
We appear today to be at a similar turning point in the history of education. Learning — not teaching — is the business at hand. The classroom, as we know it today, is our Queen Mary, and computer and information technology may well be our Clipper. Colleges and universities everywhere are moving to exploit the power of the new technologies in education. But in the heady rush into virtual education, we must make sure we know which new approaches actually work. Learning, after all, is not the same as downloading. It’s easy to be dazzled by techno-glitz. It’s time for creative and careful research to ensure that we’re making the most of education in the digital age.
Last spring, the chairman of the House of Representatives science subcommittee on basic research expressed concern about the quality of online college courses. He suggested that students who take courses online may not interact as much as their peers in traditional courses, and that they may walk away with knowledge but not with an understanding of how to think for themselves.
At a hearing designed to gauge how the federal government should respond to this trend, the former president of the University of Michigan, a distinguished MIT professor, and other experts touted several online advantages. Among their assertions were claims that student participation is higher in online courses, and that students have easier access to professors through e-mail.
The committee chairman remained skeptical and said he believed the National Science Foundation should help assess the quality of online education by improving the understanding of how the brain works and by figuring out how humans learn. Well, learning how the brain works is no simple proposition. While we wait for that day to come, there are a lot of insightful educational experiments that can be done to sort out the reality from the sizzle of online education. At Lehigh, we are spending a great deal of time these days doing just that. While arguments can be made both for and against online classes, few are backed by empirical research focused on actual teaching and learning behaviors. We agree strongly with the chairman’s call for high quality educational research.
