Reply about "The Trouble with Online Education"

Marc Edmundson wrote of "The Trouble with Online Education," in a New York Times op-ed column on July 19, 2012. He attempted to make the point that online education is a monologue while a traditional college setting offers more opportunity for dialogue. This is my reply.  

Edmundson's notion that dialogue separates in-person from online education presumes that dialogue is an exclusive characteristic of the in-person educational environment. We all think we know what dialogue is, but it’s a little more elusive when we try to define it. Since the time of Plato, (and maybe before), we have taken dialogue to be a two way exchange of ideas. Read any of Plato’s dialogues, however, and we see a dominance of the conversation by Socrates. Enough utterances are made by Socrates that the dialogues of Plato are given the special name of “Socratic” dialogues. Socrates is the originator, moderator, and gatekeeper governing the flow of ideas. And few since Socrates have handled the combination of tasks better. We do not, in the best of our dialogues, see two-way flows of ideas moving in equal quantities in both directions.

The typical lecture follows the pre-Gutenberg tradition of conveying information from one informed participant to a multitude of listeners. A classroom is made only slightly more democratic by modeling dialogue after the way that Socrates did it. It winds up allocating time for idea flow of maybe 5-10% to the reverse direction for questions of clarification and challenge. Before we agree with Edmundson that online education cannot adequately support dialogue, we need to bear in mind that the dialogue that it is being asked to support is a new form of Socratic dialogue with roughly the same percentages.

From a technological viewpoint, online learning easily supports this level of dialogue. It easily matches the classroom conversation in which 20 people sit quietly while two students ask questions within 10% of the time and the professor responds. It goes beyond this by facilitating the contribution and evaluation of the 20 quiet students by moving their ideas to an online discussion board in written form where they have been able to formulate their thoughts in an editor that is available to them exclusively up until the time of posting. They receive the thoughtful (and formulated) replies of their peers. This is as much or more dialogue than they will receive in a classroom where the use of synchronous time is allocated to only a chosen few. Allocating space for expression to all students makes online learning a more dialogical experience than can be offered in the walled classroom.

Edmundson, M., The Trouble with Online Education, New York Times op-ed page. (July 19, 2012)

It's morning again in America.

This was what Ronald Reagan told us as he ran for re-election in 1984. It is important that it be morning if we are to understand the phenomenon of online higher education. We need to see education in a new light. I suggest in this article that the light in which it is seen is the light of deprivation. For with the coming of Reagan to the presidency, we see a concerted effort to change the financial substructure on which higher education in America depends. Because the systemic attempt to reduce overall education funding, and with it education quality, has been the heart and soul of the American educational decline ever since Reagan came to office.
Beginning with his 1981 inaugural address, within the first few paragraphs, we find statements about how borrowing beyond our means was not sustainable fiscal policy. This would come to mean that something would have to be cut, and the obvious target was higher education.

Cuts made in the Reagan era appear relatively painless when we look at the overall projection of spending on education chart shown below.

Before 1982, the earliest that Reagan administration policies could have produced an effect, the trend of spending on education was upward, more than doubling between the end of the Nixon term and the end of Carter's term. During the Reagan era, spending on education was flat or slightly down. This was replaced by some increases during the George H.W. Bush (Bush 1) administration, and was followed by a general downward trend in education during the Clinton Administration. Following the Clinton administration (2001), the graph shows a huge upward spike that peaks at over $50 billion in loans during 2006. This is a graph anomaly that represents the different way that the G.W. Bush (Bush 2) administration had of describing the money flow. Although the statistic had previously represented money lent - money paid back, the figures from this time represent only money lent. This makes it appear that the Bush 2 administration had been extremely generous with student loans. This accounting anomaly was corrected with the arrival of the Obama administration and appears in the graph as negative lending in 2009. The mark at 2010 is probably more indicative of what actual 2009 results would have been. The projections for 2011-2014 are probably overly optimistic but may reflect the Obama administration's tendency to try to spend its way out of the recession of 2008.
The point of the graph and of the interpretation by administrations is to show that the rise in education spending of the Carter years came to a halt in the Reagan years and has pretty much remained level at near the $20 billion mark. And that is why, with the exception of the unproven Obama projections, we can safely say that growth has been negligible for higher education for around 30 years. The reason for the discussion of money in this "Care and Feeding" book is that money is what colleges eat. And they have been on a 30-year diet of eating only enough to maintain their condition but not enough to grow. The result of this is that the United States system of Higher Education has managed to be effective in educating the public so that approximately 30% of Americans hold bachelors degrees while some other nations have been more effective and have higher percentages of college educated people in their populations. (Mictabor, J.,

U.S. Falls Behind Rest of World in College Degree Attainment,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States). Mictabor notes that Canada, Japan, and Korea are able to bring bachelor level degrees to approximately 55% of their populations.
U.S. universities may find themselves in a quandary over how to provide adequate education to the millions of additional workers who will need it before the first quarter of the 21st century is over. And in the absence of enormous amounts of additional funding, they are undertaking to find ways to achieve these goals. One of these ways being explored is to take education to an online environment. Another is to let private enterprise provide capital that is used to administer educational institution at a profit. Both of these require dramatic change to what college level learning experiences used to be. Attempts to bring college courses to online environments have a low rate of success unless there is sufficient attention paid to the design of learning.

Why Care and Feeding?

There are thousands of colleges in the United States. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Many of them are online and do not have physical presence. And the world is filled with criticism that if college isn't done the old-fashioned way, then it must be something cheapened or made worse. I propose that this is simply not so. If we took the words "online higher education" out of the title and substituted the name of some variety of animal, we would have an idea that although there is a wide variety of such animals, that there is something common about keeping critters of this sort well-nourished, healthy, and able to reach their full potential. I have been a steward of online higher education in several settings. And, with good stewardship, online higher education can reach its potential. When such stewardship is missing, the experience becomes less than desirable. My goal here is to pass along the methods by which one becomes a good steward for this fussy but promising animal.