Can Online Courses Improve Learning – and Save Money?

From the Marshall Memo #448

In this thoughtful Chronicle of Higher Education article, UCLA philosophy professor Pamela Hieronymi says she is worried about the surge of free online courses offered by universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley. We’re told that educators need to adapt to the Internet as have journalists and publishing houses, but that’s a conceptual error, Hieronymi believes: “Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less… A set of podcasts is the 21^st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21^st-century equivalent of a teacher.” True, some students can use such materials to learn on their own, but that’s not the norm. If we assume that ability, schools and colleges will be ineffective for the majority of students. 

Educators are “personal trainers in intellectual fitness,” Hieronymi continues. “The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves. Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.” 

To be sure, there are things computers do wonderfully well: they present information clearly; they can correct assignments that have clearly delineated standards, especially in multiple-choice formats; they can assign drills to remedy specific errors; they can even correct grammar. “These capacities should be celebrated,” says Hieronymi. “But they should not be confused with the training provided by one mind interacting with another – when, for example, a teacher discerns what is on a student’s mind (even though the thought may be novel and half-formed); sees how it relates to the material; and knows how to question, encourage, challenge, or otherwise prompt the student to find his or her own way out of confusion, to a clearer expression of thought or a more powerful argument or analysis.” 

The one thing Hieronymi is sure won’t work is getting students to chat about complex ideas online. This rewards glibness, catchy phrases, and false confidence and is a cop-out from real teaching, she believes. What we need to do in the years ahead, she says, is figure out what technology does well and what only face-to-face teaching can do. In the process, we’ll realize some cost savings. “But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive,” she concludes. “It requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals… And so, I am afraid, we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.” 

“Don’t Confuse Technology with College Teaching” by Pamela Hieronymi in The Chronicle of Higher Education Aug. 17, 2012 (Vol. LVIII, #44, p. A19), http://bit.ly/QWCS1w; the author can be reached at hieronymi@ucla.edu.