Many of you (if not most) have probably heard of The Teaching Company. They make contracts with distinguished professors (many from Ivy Leagues) to develop audio lecture courses. I've listened to dozens of these courses over the years and always found them absolutely excellent. Indeed, I've learned more from some of these courses than I ever did in college. The professors are always wonderfully articulate and excited about their course material--it's not hard to see why they have received so many teaching awards. About a year ago I emailed the teaching company and asked why they didn't make their courses available for MP3 download. After all, lots of us like to listen to these in our portable MP3 players and really don't want CDs or tapes. The Teaching Company said they were looking into it--but, they did more than "look into it." They now have almost all of their courses available for download at rates that really surprised me. We're talking $34 for a course instead of the $200 they were charging for CDs and tapes. What's more, you can choose to download a single lecture or two at the time to see if it's something you're interested in. No DRM here. These are straight MP3s that you can put on as many computers or iPods that you want.
What I've been wondering about is to what extent a distance-ed course could integrate these audio lectures and outsource the paper grading and such. Imagine this scenario--you listen to the lectures on your iPod (the "professor in your pocket). If you don't want to listen, you can either read transcripts or full-length books (which might be integrated anyway, though audiobooks would also be available). If you really want to see the professor, the Teaching Company has DVDs of their talking head available (not very exciting to me, really). My idea here is to try to get as much of the course as possible "done on the road," either while jogging, driving, or at night before you go to sleep.
Then you get online and either respond to prompts, talk in a forum, or write brief essays. These get sent to Bangalore where trained people who probably know English better than many American English grad students read them carefully, offer comments, and send them back (generally overnight, since it's day there when it's night here). Likewise, you could put a call through to a "personal tutor" anytime you want via phone. The idea is to combine the interactive possibilities of telecommunication with the "canned" great lecturers. The students could also talk to each other on a message board system, though the idea here is that the courses are completely self-paced. I'd like to make the online part as unobtrusive as possible, so that students don't have to spend hours and hours staring at a monitor.
The whole project could be managed by a couple folks in a basement. "Get a degree in the bathtub" could be a advertising slogan. The hard part would most likely be getting an accreditation board to take it seriously, but that's the breaks. None of this is really new. However, I'm seeing a much, much cheaper alternative to the likes of the University of Phoenix, with more bang for your buck. Some universities are slowing insourcing parts of their programs to this kind of setup, though many are missing the point about what's really exciting about all this--you don't have to listen to tenured Joe Prof who got his degree in 1962 and hasn't done any research since--or Joe Adjunct who doesn't know your name because he's teaching on six different campuses just to make ends meet. You don't have to settle for a less-than-outstanding professor. Sure, you don't get to interact with him/her directly, but you wouldn't get to in a "cattle class" anyway.
the death of education
But I just can't get my head wrapped around the idea that I would never have the remotest possibility of interacting with my prof. Even in the cattle classes, if you sat down front and were bold, you could ask a question. I never did, but some folks did. I wouldn't consider this "real" interaction, but it was to some degree. The scenario you lay out makes me wonder, would we/educators be simply abandoning a pretext, a deception, and getting honest with courses such as those offered by TLC? These classes remind me of some I've watched on PBS channels. The video presentations are engaging, but I've always thought of it as more high-brow entertainment rather than education, but I was already done with my schooling. I don't like the idea of education going in this way, in a way that doesn't allow for interaction with the "horse's mouth," but God knows I can't stop a train of that sort.
bradley
bleckblog.org
Online education
Bradley
My wife and I are veteran teachers--decades in the classroom and people say good things about our teaching. We have recently been involved in designing online courses and teaching online for several universities. From our point of view, the community that is created among motivated students by a strong teacher can be every bit as rich and compelling as the class a student experiences in person. Especially if the sense of the "live" class is that participation is actually discouraged--either the prof is off-putting, or people are exhausted and simply passive, or there are just too many people there for input to matter--then the online class can actually offer a superior experience where the relative anonymity of the classmates allows honesty, open exchange, dropping one's guard. It can work. Believe me, as teachers of history and especially with my wife's experience as a very gifted Humanities teacher, the whole essence of the experience SHOULD be teacher and students "in the flesh." But the wide dispersion of students (some of ours are in Iraq!), the fact that so many students work for a living, sometimes with odd hours, that so many students can't easily make it to a campus--all of these facts make online classes a good alternative which technological advances may make much better.
I do think the Teaching Company should consider having their canned lectures used for online courses. It's a great idea and I think I will ask them.
Funny you should bring up
Funny you should bring up TTC. I left school in 1991, and never went on to college. For me, TTC has been a Godsend, a preventative for brain-atrophy from years at home with children. The idea of being able to get credit for the material I want to learn is tantalizing. But I don't see it happening in the near future; too much of academia is wrapped up in the university experience. Maybe as more of the tenured professorial class dies off, it could happen. But until some very real changes happen at the upper levels of administration in colleges worldwide, I think that accredited online learning will remain the domain of fly-by-night "colleges" such as University of Phoenix online. Which is too bad; if the ideal is to educate the masses, then making such education cheap and readily available should be the goal.