ISI Faculty Resource Center

I think you could make distributed commuter campuses, each with a small but vital campus culture, work. The challenge is preserving academic equivalence at all of them, and to do this without enervating automation of content will mean having (1) well-trained (2) disciplinary (3) scholars (4) frequently meeting (5) and sharing their individual approaches (6) and accepting critiques (7) and working out agreed-upon demonstrations of academic quality and equivalence. This cannot be done with the current model of downgrading "professor" to "facilitator" in order to justify using underpaid adjuncts who cannot possibly be responsible for the meaning of the grades they give in courses they do not design.

I like the suggestions that have been outlined above. I think what is fundamentally required to make online education suitable for liberal education is to treat it as an independent study or tutorial course rather than a classroom course. Of course, this runs contrary to the reason why most schools have adopted online education: to save money. It would be more expensive for schools to compensate professors for online courses were taught as tutorials than as a normal class, but it would be more likely to produce a liberal education result.

I disagree with your assumptions and view of what distance education can be if well designed and properly deployed. Newman's Oxford existed because a location was essential for university. Scholars gathered and cohabitated with students who could access the people, discussions, libraries, and events of learning. The context of a town in central England did not make Oxford. The gathering of people and resources, in a time of limited travel and communication resources, made Oxford the institution it became and stayed over the period between 1170 and 1914.

The destruction of society and the emergence of electronic media made the fixed-place university less important. Today, after 100 years of media development, we are just beginning to see the emergence of personal information environments that support the kind of contextual learning that required a train ticket and lodging for three years.

I will not respond to your dichotomy between study and party (and the risk of irony would be too great based on my limited, but real ale-fueled time at Oxford). The questions you raised earlier about Newman and the approach to learning as a community activity are far better to examine. We now live in a time when the study of Spanish literature need not be in a room in Iowa or Idaho but online through Madrid or Guadalajara. We no longer need frequent meetings, but frequent contact. Wireless is more important than ivy covered.

Having taught both in the classroom and on line, I believe that only certain subjects are suitable for on line learning. Further, while some subjects can be taught that way, there is a costly trade-off between the classroom and on line. In an on line course, most of the input has to go through a keyboard, and is transmitted electronically at so many bits per second. The limiting factor is not the bandwidth of the transmission line but the bandwidth of the keyboard. The more that must be communicated, the longer it takes. Personal contact that does not go through the keyboard (video and audio) requires much more bandwidth if it is to be transmitted and received in anything approaching real time, and still capture enough of the nuances of facial, oral, and positional "language" -- instantaneous when people are face-to-face -- as to enable a teacher to "read" not just one student but a class. I have a fast connection with an upload speed having an upper limit of 5 megabits per second. If we could somehow measure the bandwidth of a classroom, my guess is that it would be hundreds or thousands of times that. Perhaps more to the point, a residential college is 24x7 for the student. If it is a decent school, and sometimes even if it is just a factory, even the partying is often learning. How will we reproduce on line, or even be able to capture, the heated argument among three buddies, over pizza and beer, about the conduct of Odysseus when he returned home?

I agree that online education does seem more conducive to some subjects or type of courses than others. I would be interested in what others thought which type of courses is best suitable for online and why?

Prof. Gasper's comments are spot on. It is obvious that certain sorts of information are now communicable over long distances, and can even be done in something that imitates(still very imperfectly) an in-person group setting.

Even assuming, though, that technology will someday allow us to imitate a physical classroom almost perfectly, there will still be a great deal missing from an online educational experience. I can say, without hesitation, that I learned as much from intimate conversations with friends over dinner or huddled in dorm rooms studying late into the night as I ever learned in the classroom—though of course the two were mutually dependent. Importantly, these were friends that were having the same basic daily experiences as me: learning from the same professors, reading the same books, sharing the same experience of a place. This sort of friendship is inimitable in the ethereal online environment, and anyone who thinks otherwise must, I think, undervalue the peculiarly embodied nature of human experience, especially human friendship.

So the experience of college outside the classroom seems to be a critical part of at least one kind—albeit not the only kind—of education. So while online education may someday be sufficient and even preferable for some (perhaps most?) students—especially those who are primarily concerned with obtaining a degree to advance their careers to the next stage—a complete liberal arts education, one that gives one a glimpse of the genuinely transcendent, will never be possible save within a real, embodied human community rooted in a real place.

Granted that face-to-face interaction is a different type of learning and in some aspects may be superior to online education, I also would argue that there are aspects of online education that are superior to traditional education. Now whether these advantages can be translated into a liberal education remains to be seen.

I would support the suggestion that second/other language learning--especially if we combine online/offline tools for reinforcing vocabulary, grammar, etc. with aggressive promotion of immersion programs for socialization and communicative/direct instruction--is a natural place for online instruction.

My own institution is considering what role technology will play in our curricula in the coming years, as we look at long-range planning for the College. I am coming to the conclusion that many who are currently most sanguine about on-line learning lack a real sense of what is envisioned in authentic Liberal Arts education. Increasingly in conversations, I have colleagues referring to education at the "delivery of content." This assertion, I think, implicitly suggests that the "learner" is merely a brain, and that education is just about piping information into the grey matter.

If we are to form a person, however, it seems to me that a combination of on-site experiences would have to be combined with electronic resources, at the very least. I am no Luddite, and use technology in the delivery of my own classes. I believe that almost every course has some elements that could be delivered as "canned" content--Powerpoint, PDF, digital video, etc., but I know that I most often rely on body language and facial expressions to know if my students understand these materials when we discuss them in class. Those cues enable me to adjust my analogies as necessary if it seems I am "losing" the class. All of this is to say that I think technology is a good supplement for almost every course, but a poor substitute for almost any of them. I am grateful for many of the comments in this discussion.

Mark, your comments almost exactly reflect my own experience, practice, and conclusions.