Quick note since I'm off to Educause tonight. Will Diehl is another student in the Adult Education program who looks at online technologies that are used for distance education. He stopped by class today to talk to us about distance education and open universities (like the Open University of the UK).
A couple of the students in the class had a fairly typical reaction when you talk about the realities of mass distance education programs. How can the courses be as good in comparision to personalized instruction? We think that Penn State has a lot of students, but the China Central TV and Radio University has 2.3 million students who are supported by 85,000 part time and full time staff, so we could be talking about a television-based course with 10,000 people in it. The fact is that higher education as-is isn't very personalized either. When I was an undergraduate, the typical class size during my first two years was 100 to 200 students. In those courses, the professor didn't personalize anything to me and didn't know my name. One course was an exception: English 15 with about 25 students.
Will and I told the other students in class that the typical open university uses a tiered system. Students work with tutors, tutors report to faculty, and the faculty work with a lead faculty member, who is in charge of the course content and revisions. Again, there was a typical reaction: "if I'm taking a course, I want to take it from the faculty member, not a susbstitute". The exception that I mentioned above (English 15) is also a tiered system. The course is developed centrally and then coordinated with a group of instructors and graduate students who teach students.
If we're thinking big (2.3 million students!), we need to think about some very different organizational structures and teaching/assessment methods that can actually get us there. I'm not saying that we should replace all types of education with this kind of centralized and industrialized mass education, but we also shouldn't romanticize on-campus higher educational practices either.
A couple of the students in the class had a fairly typical reaction when you talk about the realities of mass distance education programs. How can the courses be as good in comparision to personalized instruction? We think that Penn State has a lot of students, but the China Central TV and Radio University has 2.3 million students who are supported by 85,000 part time and full time staff, so we could be talking about a television-based course with 10,000 people in it. The fact is that higher education as-is isn't very personalized either. When I was an undergraduate, the typical class size during my first two years was 100 to 200 students. In those courses, the professor didn't personalize anything to me and didn't know my name. One course was an exception: English 15 with about 25 students.
Will and I told the other students in class that the typical open university uses a tiered system. Students work with tutors, tutors report to faculty, and the faculty work with a lead faculty member, who is in charge of the course content and revisions. Again, there was a typical reaction: "if I'm taking a course, I want to take it from the faculty member, not a susbstitute". The exception that I mentioned above (English 15) is also a tiered system. The course is developed centrally and then coordinated with a group of instructors and graduate students who teach students.
If we're thinking big (2.3 million students!), we need to think about some very different organizational structures and teaching/assessment methods that can actually get us there. I'm not saying that we should replace all types of education with this kind of centralized and industrialized mass education, but we also shouldn't romanticize on-campus higher educational practices either.
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