Big Troubles Ahead for Online Learning

I
recently wrote here about the unwarranted optimism that the dawn of distance
learning brought to higher education in the 1990s. That trip down memory lane
might–and probably should–throw cold water on the enthusiasm about online
education today. Arguably, the troubles with online education now are no
different from those of the old distance learning approach, beginning with the
fact that virtual instruction is still a far more costly proposition than most
people suppose.

To be sure, employing the Internet as a
transmission medium eliminates a bevy of costs associated with 1990s-style
distance education, but these were just the tip of the iceberg. Still required
are expensive and dedicated broadcast facilities, trained technicians, and
camera operators. To the former costs, we must add those of programming,
maintaining, and securing a school’s online presence at a level comparable to a
leading e-commerce site. Worse, today’s “customers” are the product of an
entertainment media explosion that has heightened their expectations of
hypermedia quality. Most universities do not possess the needed expertise – and
it doesn’t come cheap. 

Yet
the very fact that dissemination is now possible via the Internet can be seen,
surprisingly, as a factor in the steadily mounting cost of university
education, online or otherwise. As  Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman explain in their
2010 book Why
Does College Cost So Much?, advances in technology have made
many manufacturing and agricultural products cheaper and easier to produce,
ship, and store. However, these very same changes have made college education
more expensive because, to learn how these technologies work, students must
have access to sophisticated equipment and software, most of which is costly
and not particularly user friendly. Requiring an entering class of 500
engineering freshmen to learn MATLAB is a formidable challenge for a university’s support
staff; to provide adequate support for an entering class of 5,000, and remotely
to boot, is a challenge that would stretch the resources and talent of today’s
best private-sector firms. And every one of these students would need not only
an up-to-date home computer, but one capable of running advanced,
processor-intensive applications, as well as a speedy Internet connection. It
doesn’t help that the U.S. lags far behind in the international broadband
sweepstakes.

                                                                                The Medieval Model

The
technology factor helps to explain why the most successful experiments in
online instruction involve computer science courses, in which most of the tech-savvy
students already possess the needed at-home horsepower, much of the software
they will need, and the skills needed to solve hardware and software problems
without the university’s assistance. It’s as if they bring their own
laboratories with them. The same cannot be said, however, for students in most
other majors. A biology student cannot do lab work on breeding fruit flies at
home, unless she wants to convert her kitchen or basement. An architecture
student cannot have her scale models adequately graded through a grainy webcam
built into a laptop. As a result, the university cannot discard the campus or
the expensive buildings; to add online instruction means adding to existing
expenses, not replacing them. And the expenses will keep on coming, given
technology’s rapid evolution.

According
to its proponents, the challenges facing online education will be swept aside
by an online university tsunami that is well underway, as evidenced by a raft
of new offerings involving some of the nation’s top universities, a new type of
course (called the massive open online
course or “MOOC”) and a new genre of mediating, for-profit services,
including Coursera, Udacity, and Khan University. Because the likes of MIT,
Stanford, and (soon) Virginia are offering such courses, proponents say, these
new ventures will solve the “diploma mill” problem.

                                                                          Money Won’t Go to Universities

What’s
more, these mediating ventures will supply the technological and
content-creation expertise that universities lack, removing the barriers to
success. But seldom acknowledged is that offering these courses does absolutely
nothing for the involved institutions’ bottom line — nor, indeed, does it lower
tuition costs for on-campus students. The business model is still developing,
but it appears likely that the course-providing services will make the money,
not the universities, which not only provide the content for free but pay substantial
service fees to boot.

Do
these courses represent the beginning of a genuine revolution, one that is
destined to lower the costs of a university education? There is little in the
evolving business model to suggest such an outcome. On the contrary, it is far
more likely that leading universities conceptualize their involvement with the
likes of Coursera as a means of increasing their “brand” as on the cutting
edge, as well as showcase their best teaching talent by painting the mill in
varsity colors.

There is a crying need to come to grips with
the astonishing fact that, amidst all the achievements of American democracy
and egalitarianism, a fundamentally aristocratic institution — the research
university — has not only survived, but flourished. As with all puzzles
involving contradictions between American democracy and the persistence of
aristocratic values, one makes a good start by turning, not to Turing, but to Alexis de Tocqueville.

                                                                           The Uses of Uselessness

Fueling
the online education movement proponents is not only a drive to lower the costs
of instruction, but far more profoundly, a mission to pry knowledge away from
elitist institutions and make it directly available to the American
people.  The problem with universities,
they say, is the faculty – the “higher education cartel” who are much given to reflection on utterly
useless matters, even as they maintain a stranglehold on the curriculum,
blocking innovations capable of producing more useful knowledge and making it
more broadly available.

Film,
television, and literature provide many characters that personify the faculty’s
uselessness, such as Dr. Talc from John Kennedy Toole’s A
Confederacy of Dunces, Dave Jennings (played by Donald
Sutherland) in National
Lampoon’s Animal House,
and nearly every Oxford University professor found in the novels of Colin Dexter. These characters
serve as butts for jokes (or, in Dexter’s case, murderers and the murdered)
even as they console the consciences of those who root for the demise of the
university. As Megan McArdle at the Atlantic
Monthly speculates, if online education
takes off, then nearly all tenure-track professors will lose their jobs, and,
eventually, all non-elite universities will close, since only MOOCs from elite
universities will be worth taking. If McArdle is right and an entire workforce
disappears from the marketplace, then one can take consolation that at least
those tweedy, scotch-soaked Lotharios of campus freshmen naifs had it coming.

None
of this would have surprised Tocqueville. In spite of his evident sympathy for
American democracy, he saw signs of a coming cultural conflict, one that would
inevitably arise from Americans’ preference for practical, useful knowledge
capable of benefitting the People, as against the useless, elitist, and
time-wasting “meditations” upon “first causes” of university dons, who could
not be bothered with real-world applications. 
To be sure, Tocqueville concedes that the knowledge produced by universities
is “haughty” and “sterile.”

Such seemingly harmless activities might be
tolerated in Europe, Tocqueville believed, but they ran up against the grain of
American practicality.  Abetting the
early nineteenth century American distaste for such “meditations” is not only
that they seemed utterly useless, but also because they were fundamentally
aristocratic. They were produced by the “few,” Tocqueville observed, and
comprehensible to even fewer.  In place
of the theoretical meditations and quests for “first causes” characteristic of
English and European thought, the American intellectual agenda might be set by
a “crowd” characterized by a “selfish, mercenary taste for the discoveries of
the mind” – a very different matter indeed from the “disinterested passion that
lights up the hearts of the few.”

The
Conflict Tocqueville Foresaw

Yet
there would be a price to pay, Tocqueville believed, if Americans rejected
forms of knowledge that ran so strongly against their egalitarian, practical
values.  However useless and “haughty”
theoretical meditations might appear to those of a practical and egalitarian
mind, the social origins of such ideas imbues them with a kind of back-handed
virtue. Mindful of their own greatness, aristocrats could hardly help but to
conceive of “very vast ideas” concerning the “dignity, power, and greatness of
man” – and what is more, they had the leisure time to ponder the underlying
causes of the phenomena surrounding us. 
Such ideas “facilitate the natural spark of the mind toward the highest
regions of thought and naturally dispose it to conceive a sublime and almost
divine love of truth.” A society’s governors must never forget these ideas, nor
the habits of mind that produced them, lest they open the floodgates to ruin.
Tocqueville reminds the reader that empires do not always fall the way Rome
did; he looks to early 19^th Century China as an example of an empire
that fell by ceasing to innovate. The Chinese developed new ideas but made them
traditional and inviolable, so that meaning to honor them meant to repeat them
rather than improve on them. The democratic impulse in America demanded the
same thing–to produce on the basis of existing ideas rather than do the hard,
slow work of the few to innovate on them. And if Americans wished to be their
own governors, it follows that, despite their commitment to democracy and
egalitarian values, their bold experiment’s survival might well depend on their
capacity to think like aristocrats.

The
cultural conflict Tocqueville foresaw did not happen in the nineteenth or
twentieth centuries, thanks to a development that reconciled the aristocratic
values of universities with America’s practical, egalitarian values: the rise
of the professions in the mid- to late nineteenth century, a period which saw the
founding of nearly all existing professional societies. Professionals could lay
claim to high social status and monetary compensation on the strength not only
of their prolonged, arduous education, but also their preliminary studies in
the liberal arts – studies that “detain the mind in theory,” as Tocqueville put
it, producing a “disinterested passion” for the truth as well as the capacity
to deal ethically with a client.

                                                                      What the
Campus Layout Tells Us

The
layout of today’s research universities attests to the success of this
development. At their center is a small section characterized by quaint, older
buildings – the remnant of the university as it stood in the early nineteenth
century – in which one is likely to find liberal arts departments. But ringed
round this architectural and philosophical survival are the professional
schools, inhabiting much newer (and, at most universities, far more luxurious)
facilities. It is no accident that the products of these schools–engineers,
MBAs, nurses–see in their fields the greatest benefits of new technologies
(yet, as students, see little of the costs). With the rise of the professional
schools, we now see the larger cultural conflict Tocqueville anticipated on a
small scale: the old aristocratic schools, armed with prestige, tradition, and
legitimacy against the new democratic schools, armed with patents, profit, and
donors.

The
result is not war but a stable, mutually beneficial detente. The benefits are
obvious. Most faculty in the “useless arts” such as philosophy, art, political
science, and abstract mathematics actually produce great work. The application
of their work, however, is not immediate and always subject to long, tedious,
and often inscrutable debate. Successful ideas diffuse from specialists into
the general academic world, where business schools pick up on the works of
Friedman, Keynes, and Hayek. Computer science and engineering can take
advantage of advanced mathematics and physics. Law schools, leadership schools,
and public policy professionals benefit from discussions coming out of
philosophy, political science, and sociology.

Critics
of American universities look at the aristocratic schools through eyes of the
democratic ones, imagining that the realm of liberal arts professors – the
likes of Talc and Jennings – characterizes the lot. However quaint,
inefficient, aristocratic, impractical schools of liberal studies might appear
to their critics, they are by no means perpetuated by the tenure system,
mindless custom, radical politics, or the self-interest of liberal studies
faculty themselves. At most universities, the reality is simply this: the
professional schools call the shots because they have the money. And because
the professions rely upon intact schools of liberal studies for their societal
legitimacy, these schools are likely to survive the coming “tsunami” unscathed
– and quite likely, unaltered. The arrangement is much like the one the
Founders wanted between the Senate and the House, which is a sufficient reason
alone to support it.

The Future of More of the Same

Throughout
the 1990s, distance learning served one purpose very well–providing education
over long distances to people who had no access to it otherwise. Today, these
courses still help teachers and professionals acquire advanced degrees, police
officers pick up required college credits, and for others to take particular
courses that piqued their interest. Professional schools succeeded with
distance learning because of high student motivation. Law enforcement and
continuing education succeeded, when it succeeded, because of the high
accessibility and low intensity of the coursework. In either case, the courses
added another purpose to the university in America rather than replace the
university altogether.

Online
education will do the same. Universities will offer online courses, MOOCs and
more conventional varieties. They will serve the existing purpose of marketing
the university “brand” as tech-savvy, relevant, and engaged in student
learning. It is no accident that “How Things Work” is one of the
three courses the University of Virginia has opted to include in its Coursera package. Lou Bloomfield, the course instructor, has
a gift from dramatizing scientific principles behind technology. His course is
sure to be a hit, but “How Things Work” is also known at UVA as “Science for
Humanities Majors” because of its relatively simple concepts and light
workload. “How Things Work” will fall into a “continuing education” model for
courses. The more advanced computer science courses already coming out of
Stanford and MIT fall into the “highly motivated professionals” category, as
most who take the course are already students, instructors, or working in the
field.

These
courses, and other like them, are great for serving the purposes they already
serve. However, we should be careful not to become too consumed with their
novelty, or, to paraphrase Tocqueville, the spark of a superficial idea. These
sparks are too dim to keep civilization enlightened, but they may ignite a few
new flames on the way. They will do so with a financial cost to protect
existing prestige.

More
fundamentally, Americans cannot mistake new technology as a replacement for
slow, hard work of thinking about the fundamental principles of meaning and
matter, and they cannot give in to the resentement
for university professors as an undifferentiated class of latte-sucking,
Chablis-guzzling, Prius-driving, Diane Rehm-praising, “you-did-not-build-that”
nodding academic types. As a democratic people, Americans are most prone to
running roughshod over useless ideas and those who think them; and, because we
are a democratic people, Americans have the most to lose if they do.