A critique of online education heard in the recent past was, “It’s just cheap education, but has little value compared to traditional, brick-and-mortar education.”
But, in 2009, the U.S. Department of Education published a review of 44 studies evaluating post-secondary students. The Department report concluded that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” Online learning’s benefits consist, first and foremost, in the greater flexibility and customization offered. In addition, students have a far-wider range of choices of teachers and subjects than they do with traditional brick -and-mortar education.
No less revolutionary, as the Goldwater Institute’s Dan Lips recently documented, online education has the capacity to alter the criteria by which students ascend to higher grade-levels, “shifting the focus from ‘seat-time’ to a competency or mastery-based approach.” Because of the capacity of online education to customize learning on a scale never before possible, students can “proceed to higher levels as they master subjects,” rather than be inhibited through being forced to proceed at the same pace of the rest of the class. Also, “customized learning programs can allow for real-time monitoring and tracking” of progress, which allows for timely interventions in those instances when a student falls behind”.
In light of these studies, online education’s critics have proved only half-right: Yes, online education’s greater efficiency makes it “cheaper” than traditional, brick-and-mortar education. As Terry Moe and John Chubb state it in their 2009 book, Liberated Learning, through the use of online learning, “schools can be operated at lower cost, relying more on technology (which is relatively cheap) and less on labor (which is relatively expensive).”
The good news of online learning’s benefits could not come at a better time; for, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, 57 percent of potential students say that the higher education system fails to provide good value for the cost, and 75 percent say college is unaffordable.
According to the Babson Survey Research Group, thirty-one percent of higher education students currently are enrolled in one or more online courses. Over six million students enrolled in at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.
We can expect these numbers to grow-and rapidly. We can expect also that higher education in America will, in a short time, look very different from its current form.
-Thomas K. Lindsay