Online learning: it is what it is
4/22/2014

I'm eager to join the online education revolution -or perhaps I should say, the online education "revolution." It’s not that I think MOOCs are so great; I just slogged through weeks of an EdX course put on by my alma mater Harvard, sampling the hottest MOOC personalities they could front, and boy, did it suck.  Watching tweedy intellectuals try to comport themselves gracefully on film and reading inane comments on message boards just made me want to get back to my Game of Thrones fan site.

So why am I so bullish on online learning resources?  Because they will have a major role in education in this country, especially for the working class.  They will do this because they are cheap enough to motivate lawmakers, sexy enough to win over the public, and potentially profitable enough to get backing from wealthy elites.  There are concise summaries of the evidence for all of these assertions in last winter’s edition of AFT’s Magazine, On Campus.

Of course, there are also a lot of people on the other side of this issue; hardworking educators like yours truly who have found, again and again and again, that in the living experience of education human contact is the key, especially for disadvantaged students.  Online resources have their place, we allow, but only as part of a rich tapestry of resources that must be augmented, not pared down.  Folks like us appeal to common ideals, to common sense, to common decency.

We appeal in vain, not because people are evil but because education suffers from what Bill Bowen calls "the cost disease." Over the last several decades, most industries have seen huge gains in efficiency, but not education.  Human contact is expensive, more and more expensive, and that's why tuitions at my old school site have gone up about 7% a year for the last dozen years.  It’s also the reason why college costs have risen so quickly.  In the long run, the choice for many educational institutions will be to cut costs drastically or close their doors, and most of them will choose the former.  Online learning offers them a financially and politically palatable way to do that.

There will still be schools where people walk through leafy quads and hang out with their teachers.  They will simply be available to a smaller and smaller proportion of students.  These institutions, which were always elite, will become downright aristocratic again, reversing the changes in college admissions that were introduced in the 1960s at places like Harvard.  For the rest of us there will be online courses, and it is time to roll up our sleeves and prepare to capitalize on whatever opportunities we can find or create.  Tune in next time for some speculations about what skills will be of use not only to the students of this brave new world, but to the instructors, families and institutions that support them.