I once saw Joel Garreau give a talk in which he promised (promised!) that brick-and-mortar stores would soon be gone (gone!) because everybody (everybody!) would be doing all their shopping online. Big boxes, especially, were dinosaurs (dinosaurs!), he claimed. And one of the major challenges facing urbanists would be what to do with the empty shell of the discarded consumer landscape after all of the consumers had moved to Internet. Garreau told his rapt audience that this process of creative destruction would take less than a decade.*
That was eleven years ago. And Davis’s gigantic new Target, a palace to hyper-modern consumer culture, is slated to open in less than a month.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve long had doubts about the idea that online education will spell the death of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. But this article, coupled with the University of California’s decision to try to raise fees by A LOT over the next two years, gives me pause. My sense is that the children of relatively well-off parents will continue to go to traditional colleges and universities for the foreseeable future: to learn, for credentials, to network, for finishing school, etc. What I don’t know, though, is what will happen when some significant chunk of non-traditional students, coupled with the children of not-especially-affluent families, decide that higher education for $99/month sounds pretty darned good. What will that do to the revenue stream that colleges and universities now rely upon for survival? What will it do to the economies of scale that currently make higher education viable? And what will the ripple effects be? I guess I could give Joel Garreau a call and ask him what he thinks.
* Word to the wise: elements of this paragraph may be slightly exaggerated for effect. But only slightly. The talk, by the way, happened at a conference on cultural landscape studies held at the University of New Mexico in 1998. As part of that conference, I got to tour J.B. Jackson‘s house, which was cool.
The Edge of the American West 
46 comments
September 22, 2009 at 11:42 am
rosmar
I haven’t yet had a friend who took an online course after having taken an in-person college course who liked the online course. I know there are exceptions (like the woman interviewed in the article), but I think there is a reason online courses haven’t already become dominant, since they are so much cheaper.
Also, is there any way to avoid significant cheating in any online educational system? How do they ever know who is actually taking the tests or writing the papers?
September 22, 2009 at 11:42 am
rosmar
(I admit I have a horse in this race, since I’m a college professor, too.)
September 22, 2009 at 11:43 am
bsci
I’m writing this based on actually no data, but I suspect the non-traditional students or students from poor families cost most colleges money through scholarships.
It’s the middle or even upper middle class that can’t get significant scholarships, but go into significant college loan debt that would have the most financial reason to leave brick & mortar colleges.
Losing the money from those students would hurt schools and make it harder to give scholarships to others. Thus, the diversity of experiences that is one of the selling points of brick & mortar colleges would weaken.
On a more general note, I think that online education will not be able to replace the huge value of mentored research at many universities, but it is very much going to compete with teaching colleges.
September 22, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Ahistoricality
I don’t think online courses are going to steal away a lot of the non-trad students (especially since most people still go to their local institutions’ online offerings, if they’re available, because of the other resources they get access to), but they do offer flexibility that people with families and full-time jobs need. That said, they also require a great deal more self-motivation and organization, even when it’s not self-paced, and there are significant completion deficits.
As much as I’d like to see us turn into a society of auto-didacts with immense intellectual and professional resources at our fingertips, truly self-directed study without professorial supervision is not going to be effective for large portions of the population.
September 22, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Baaaa
I remember that talk as I was working in web design at the time. Seemed like everyone was talking about how everything was going to change completely because of the internet. I suppose the thought that people wouldn’t go to the market place was about as realistic as the idea that we would all give actual eating and just consume little pills that would satisfy our nutritional needs (I recall seeing this on some ancient film strip in school- technology would change our lives with jet-packs and pill food!). There are some things we just like too much to give up- besides, the models in catalogs are so far from the body type of anyone I know in real life, how on earth can you tell how something fits from a picture?
There’s something about being on a campus with the energy of the other students that I think would be hard to give up. I adored my time at UCD, and there’s a good deal to the college experience that you would miss out on by just sitting in front of a computer. But, if people would rather save $30 a year on their vehicle license fee instead of funding one of the best education systems in the country, I don’t know that many students will have much of a choice.
September 22, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Charlieford
Ahistoricality, you stole my thunder. Everyone reading this blog engages in on-line education everyday, but only in the things that interest us.
Proponents of on-line courses make a major blunder by equating “education” with “information-sharing.” That’s a big part of it, of course, but context is everything, and that involves motivation, direction, discipline (ie, encouraging self-discipline), peers, community, interaction, etc.
(And should we even mention that part of the price parents pay to our institutions is a reward for getting their kids out of the house and into someplace relatively safe where they hopefully can learn something and have space to network and mature and play some sports?)
The percentage of 18-22 year olds able to truly benefit from educational systems that lack those contextual elements is vanishingly small. My guess is that doing on-line education will be somewhat like gym-memberships (especially when the price comes down far enough to remove that motivator, too): lots of good intentions plus the weaknesses of the flesh equals nothing doing.
If that scenario is the most likely–and hey, maybe I’m biased, but I think it is–this will be yet another cash-cow (adult college, anyone?) for schools, a depressant to faculty, a marker of class division among young adults (and beyond), and a useless, if not harmful, moment in Western Civilization.
Just sayin’.
September 22, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Jason B.
My guess is that doing on-line education will be somewhat like gym-memberships (especially when the price comes down far enough to remove that motivator, too): lots of good intentions plus the weaknesses of the flesh equals nothing doing.
I’ve been teaching one or two online courses per semester for the last couple of years, and I have to say there is a lot of that “weakness of the flesh” early every term. I usually start with overfull sections, and within a couple of weeks only two-thirds are doing the work. Some of the students really bust their tails, though. I’m impressed with the quality of the work I’ve seen online–it’s just not for everyone.
September 22, 2009 at 1:03 pm
rosmar
So how do you know whether the people getting the credit are doing the work, Jason B.?
I wonder about partly because it seems in my experience that building personal relationships helps prevent plagiarism, in the small liberal arts college context. And just because of the “you never know who someone is over the internet” idea.
September 22, 2009 at 1:17 pm
arbitrista
I’m doubtful that there will be a major change, because I suspect that at some point the political will to force a solution to cost increases will prove irresistible. Having said that, the negative externalities associated with the collapse of the university system are incalculable.
September 22, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Jason B.
So how do you know whether the people getting the credit are doing the work, Jason B.?
I wish I had an answer that would solve that issue for everyone. I teach English, Humanities, and Philosophy courses, and in every course I teach I require a lot of writing. By the time a major assignment comes due I have a sizeable collection of writing samples from all of my students. I have a pretty good eye for sudden lurches in writing style and thoughtfulness.
It’s not foolproof, but it’s all I can do with what I have.
September 22, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Chris
@Charlieford: On the other hand, if your main institutional experience is in herding 18-22 year olds into a sort of semblance of order long enough to lecture at them, how is that useful to a thirtysomething contemplating a career change? (The rest of the student body isn’t their peers anyway and probably doesn’t want to socialize with them.) I question the implicit assertion that college campuses are “relatively safe” (relative to what?), but even if it’s true it doesn’t seem to me to add much value for adults.
ISTM that the educational and non-educational functions of colleges may be about to diverge.
The financial ability to herd your offspring into a brick-and-mortar college after high school, more or less by default, will remain a class marker (along with the accompanying networking), but from a functional perspective, the very need for self-direction in an online course seems like it would make someone who has completed one *more* valuable – they’ve proved they can accomplish their goals without handholding.
Provided that the online course doesn’t also water down its completion standards in order to cater to its clientele… it seems to me that there’s some parallel between schools paid by their students giving out grades to those same students, and the recent decline and fall of the bond rating agencies. The same perverse incentive to paper over flaws in order to placate the guy with the purse strings applies in both situations.
The model of “I’m going to help you do X, and then when we’re done, you can pay me to tell you how good a job we did” has conflicts of interest written all over it. Any credential that comes from someone with such a business model is going to be suspect.
Maybe we will eventually see a move to testing and certification agencies which are paid by the people making use of the test results to make decisions (in this case mostly employers). The US government and some major corporations already have in-house testing bodies, don’t they? In addition to being able to target the test to what the potential employer is looking for, they also should be resistant to grade inflation – the incentive to please the customer points to accurate assessments, not flattering ones.
September 22, 2009 at 1:33 pm
William Miller
Dear Sir:
Your UNIVERSITY, as you style it, cannot long outlast the innovation of a regular POSTAL SERVICE, through which the citizens of this great republic can acquire learning in their own homes at a fraction of the cost, without exposing themselves to LEVELERS and free-lovers. I hope you have prepared yourself for the impending apocalypse.
Yrs.,
Wm Miller
September 22, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Charlieford
“relative to what?”
Kabul, of course.
September 22, 2009 at 1:48 pm
andrew
Online courses for adults and professionals are already around in fairly large numbers, it seems. I took an online university extension statistics course last year. It wasn’t a great course, but hearing from others about similar intro to statistics courses it didn’t seem much different than what I would have gotten at a generic in-person university course, but probably not as good as one at a flagship university (based on my undergrad experience at one).
They gave me a course login to a website that looked, based on past discussions still on the site, about 6 years old. The instructor had prepared a course pack – sort of like slides + text from lectures, but no video or audio – to accompany the textbook. The problem sets were fairly short and I e-mailed the answers to the instructor. Theoretically, you did about one assignment per week – at your own pace – and took about a term to complete the course. Contact with the instructor was all by e-mail, which could have been an issue if I’d had more questions. But the only requirement was to finish the course within a set time frame of about six months.
I did absolutely no work for about three months, realized after I’d done a few assignments that I couldn’t finish at a pace of 1 per week, e-mailed the instructor to see if I could just send in assignments as I finished rather than wait for them to be returned, and ended up doing the last five assignments – about half the course – in 2-3 weeks.
For the final, you actually had to verify your identity. It had to be at an approved location with an approved proctor. (There was a list of pre-approved people and places, but it was also possible to make other arrangements.) The printed test was mailed to the proctor directly. I showed up at the scheduled time, paid my fee, showed my receipt and ID to the proctor, who then had me leave everything but a couple of pencils, blank scratch paper, and a calculator with no computer functions – no phone either – with her, after which she escorted me to an empty classroom and gave me the test. She then left the room and locked the door so no one would bother me and I couldn’t sneak in and out. She periodically checked in every half-hour or so. In some ways it was a more secure testing environment than a crowded lecture hall.
That’s all a long, and probably not interesting story, of how some programs verify identity in the end. Every courses (of the one’s I looked at) in that extension had the same final exam rules. Some courses also appeared to have set schedules and may have included more interaction with the instructor and other students (discussions, possibly group work, etc.).
September 22, 2009 at 1:54 pm
andrew
I’ll also add that a lot of MLS programs have gone online, either in whole or in part. This is less common in archive specializations, but some places have mandatory online-only courses – even for people who live on/near campus. For people already in jobs looking for a step up the credential/career ladder – especially if there’s no accredited library school nearby, and there aren’t that many relative to total number of colleges – it can be more appealing the going not just back, but away for more school. I might have done something like that, had I been employed.
September 22, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Zora
I can’t remember where — was it here? — that I read about a school that put all its basic math courses online and opened a math learning center, open until late in the evening, staffed by tutors. Students would come to the center for help and to take tests. That let them fit the math courses into their schedules (as in online learning) but still get the benefit of one-on-one interaction with a teacher if they were having problems. Apparently the approach has been very successful.
I could see most college courses being taught this way. One could create a network of participating schools that shared courses in oddball subjects (Sumerian literature, say). Schools would help a specialist set up an online course, and the one or two students at each school who wanted to take it would add up to a large, economically-feasible class. Faculty in related fields could serve as advisers; they wouldn’t necessarily be experts, but they could do the supervising and handholding that could help struggling students through the course. This would allow schools to offer a much larger number of courses.
I don’t think it’s going to be an either-or choice; learning will be ftf AND it will be online.
September 22, 2009 at 2:56 pm
teofilo
My dad did an MLS through U of A that was almost entirely online (it only required one summer in Tucson), since there aren’t any library schools in New Mexico. It seemed to work pretty well.
Speaking of New Mexico, thanks for the Jackson link, ari. Sounds like I should read some of his books.
September 22, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Stephanie
As a non-traditional student receiving a very good and rigorous education, in history no less, online I find the tone of this more than a little maddening. I’m not an instructor so I have no idea how it works from that end, but to say that the quality of education slips because it’s online rather than in a brick and mortar classroom is a non-starter.
As Jason B. says, Some of the students really bust their tails, though. I’m impressed with the quality of the work I’ve seen online–it’s just not for everyone. It isn’t for everyone and I see the difference in attitudes in a general requirement course vs. a core class for the major. Those in the major classes are more engaged offering well thought out responses to ongoing discussions in the classroom forums. The same as in more traditional settings, which I have also experienced.
At this point in my life, I am probably at least twice, if not more, as old as most of my classmates and am probably older than my instructors. I have no interest in driving to the campus, finding a parking place and sitting in a classroom when I could be putting my energy into studying and doing research for my various papers.
My experience with University of Illinois, Springfield is that the quality of education has gone up, not down as some continue to believe will happen with education on the internet. My classes are structured just the same as one in a classroom, complete with syllabus, weekly reading and discussion assignments, tests and papers to turn in, all on a schedule based on a semester system.
It is a truism that one gets what one puts into their education, but it doesn’t matter whether your class is online or in an actual classroom. I get more from taking my class online because it allows me to focus more completely on the task at hand. Taking an online class requires discipline and can be much more rewarding. Don’t lump all online education in with the worst the internet has to offer, education has never been one size fits all.
September 22, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Jonathan Rees
Ultimately, the future of online education depends upon whether employers judge an online course as an adequate substitute for a real live education. If the answer is yes, then a lot of colleges are probably in trouble. My guess, however, would be no, for many of the reasons already outlined above.
September 22, 2009 at 3:35 pm
LoisT
I have turned down the opportunity to take online courses for continuing education credits because I prefer to be able to network in class with the instructors and fellow students. The classroom discussions about our real-life experiences in the field are equally as valuable as the course materials. Perhaps a way to look at it is, online courses are adequate, but you get extra value by actually attending classes.
September 22, 2009 at 3:39 pm
LoisT
As of this moment, the paragraph starting with “Ultimately, the future of online education….” is showing up as part of my comment. I wish I could take credit for it, but it’s actually a part of Jonathan Rees’ comment.
September 22, 2009 at 3:44 pm
ari
You’re reading the site using IE, I’m guessing. If you switch to Firefox, everything’s fine. Seriously, everything. It’s that good.
September 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm
dana
Ultimately, the future of online education depends upon whether employers judge an online course as an adequate substitute for a real live education.
Bingo. And the cases where they have — some MLS program — online learning is attractive.
September 22, 2009 at 4:15 pm
ben
Ari’s jokes are funnier when you read them in firefox.
September 22, 2009 at 4:22 pm
andrew
Only certain versions of IE have that problem, I think.
September 22, 2009 at 4:33 pm
andrew
One more thing to add about online MLS programs: anecdotal evidence suggests that online courses require more work, if not more difficult work, because instructors use it to verify ongoing engagement and participation and have no other way of doing so.
September 22, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Western Dave
Forget the on-line stuff. What was JB Jackson’s house like? My HS seniors just read him last week for my American Environmental History course. Those wishing to hear more can check it out at the Teaching Environmental History panel at ASEH in Portland.
September 22, 2009 at 7:18 pm
ari
It was awesome: beautiful adobe ranch about an hour outside ABQ, now owned by an artist* who keeps horses, decorated with fantastic Western Americana.
* Kind of a funny type: made his mark in LA, where his pop Western paintings seem to have fetched good money (based on the decor and the work he had clearly had done on his rugged face), pretty tickled to own Jackson’s house. Nice guy.
September 22, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Charlieford
Any chance of comparing apples and apples? Traditional students in bachelors programs? On-line vs. in-class?
September 22, 2009 at 7:53 pm
ari
I just remembered that I toured the house with Molly Boren, who’s married to David Boren, former US senator and now president of the University of Oklahoma. Well, Mrs. Boren knew a lot about the furnishings in the house, which furnishings, if I recall correctly, were rather antlery. And the owner of the house was somewhat surprised that this group of tatty academics contained someone who could appreciate the provenance of these antlery and, I later inferred, awesomely expensive pieces of furniture. So he asked Mrs. Boren where she had come by this knowledge. And she, ever so casually, noted that she had often visited some getaway in the American West, a place that, apparently, is reserved only for US senators (though she didn’t note that fact directly, for that would have been gauche). The owner of the house, in turn, suddenly became very interested in Mrs. Boren. But he didn’t ask her precisely how she had come to visit the aforementioned resort reserved for senators. Instead, he casually invited her to see his work, you know, back in the private studio that the rest of us were not permitted to enter. You see, she had transformed herself from a doofus scholar tracking mud through his living room into an important person and potentially a client. It was all rather remarkable to witness: the cultural capital flying to and fro.
September 22, 2009 at 8:42 pm
andrew
So this art isn’t a major part of the vernacular landscape?
September 22, 2009 at 9:32 pm
URK
“I can’t remember where — was it here? — that I read about a school that put all its basic math courses online and opened a math learning center, open until late in the evening, staffed by tutors. Students would come to the center for help and to take tests. That let them fit the math courses into their schedules (as in online learning) but still get the benefit of one-on-one interaction with a teacher if they were having problems. Apparently the approach has been very successful.”
the math class that i had to take to get my aging, math-hating…self out of the University of Alabama was structured like this. it was sucsessful in that it didn’t keep me out of grad school.
September 23, 2009 at 3:57 pm
jim
$99/mo isn’t that cheap. $1200/yr is half community college tuition. Our local community college is $100/credit-hour. Community colleges haven’t driven universities out of business yet.
September 23, 2009 at 7:25 pm
son1
If you switch to Firefox, everything’s fine. Seriously, everything. It’s that good.
Ari, in some situations, Firefox can be a real memory pig. That’s not to say it’s not better-than-IE, but it does have some problems (seriously).
September 23, 2009 at 7:52 pm
ari
I was kidding, son1, being hyperbolic as I noted that IE distorts comment threads here. What I know about software…well, I don’t know much.
September 23, 2009 at 8:35 pm
ben
Express the magnitude of your knowledge via a volumetric metaphor, if you would.
September 23, 2009 at 8:39 pm
ari
My ignorance of technology is vast, ben. Said ignorance could fill the five oceans.
September 23, 2009 at 8:49 pm
ben
I asked you about your knowledge, not your ignorance.
September 23, 2009 at 8:52 pm
ari
It could fit in a thimble? You are going to leave a tip, right?
September 23, 2009 at 9:03 pm
kevin
When did this blog turn into an Abbott and Costello routine?
September 23, 2009 at 9:19 pm
teofilo
A couple weeks before it started.
September 23, 2009 at 9:31 pm
andrew
“When” is actually a personal name. Kevin must have forgotten to put a comma after it.
September 24, 2009 at 3:10 pm
ben
Here’s a tip—get a REAL job!
September 24, 2009 at 3:32 pm
eric
A couple weeks before it started.
Then, it was funny.
September 25, 2009 at 9:50 am
Standpipe Bridgeplate
wokka wokka
September 27, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Laura
I don’t know if I think that online education is “stealing” students away from campuses. I tend to think that rather it extends opportunities to people who may not have otherwise gotten the chance to gain the opportunity, whether because of financial reasons or other obligations (family, etc). Also, it promotes the idea of life-long learning: no matter how old (or young!) you are or where you live, you have the chance to keep learning.
http://www.learn.colostate.edu/blog