NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues…
The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses…
Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming… (more)
EDITOR: It takes a real autodidact to compete by simply monitoring lectures. Nevertheless, there is ample number of these around the world for whom it is of considerable value.
But it is the “hybrid classes” that should be a major part of the universities of the future, with college and graduate years divided between several weeks on campus and the rest via the Internet and at local college labs.
