I teach at a residential liberal-arts college on the western side of Michigan, with about 3,300 students and 300 faculty members. Unique among the institutions in our regional consortium, and unusual among liberal-arts colleges in general, we have developed an entirely online summer program that is limited to our own students.
It runs only in May, June, and July. I was a member of the committee that developed it eight years ago, chaired by our director of academic computing and made up of representatives from across the college. Every summer since the program’s inception, I have taught a general-education course in it called “Banned Books: Freedom and Censorship in the Age of Print.”
We started with 10 online courses and 105 students in 2006 and have grown to 35 courses and 340 students as of last summer. About 75 percent of those students reported that they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the experience; only about 8 percent were “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied.” The content of the courses, the assignments, and the means of evaluation are monitored and assessed in the same way as the rest of our curriculum is.
A major reason we created the program was to assist students in completing their degrees within four years. Several of our preprofessional programs have demanding sequences that do not mesh easily with the schedules of courses in our core curriculum. In addition, a growing proportion of our students want to spend a semester off-campus, which places even greater constraints on their academic schedules.
Students typically offset those scheduling difficulties by taking a few summer courses, sometimes at our college, but more often at community colleges in their hometowns. When we started the online program, the question of transferring online credits from other institutions was already being raised. Obviously, our college does not want its students taking courses elsewhere. Transfer credits represent a significant loss of tuition.
Also we have no way of regulating courses they take at other colleges. Some are roughly equivalent to ours, but others are radically different (and possibly chosen because they are reputedly easier than our versions).
Accepting those transfer credits seems
particularly troubling when students replace core courses such as our interdisciplinary “Cultural Heritage” sequence—the cornerstone of the curriculum—with loosely related “Western civilization” courses from other colleges. But our college has been reluctant to prohibit such substitutions, because doing so would only add to the growing numbers of fifth-year “super seniors.”
If we had limited ourselves to traditional methods of course delivery, we would have been faced with choices from an unappealing menu: Permit the softening of our mission? Regulate the scheduling of classes on multiyear cycles? Require students to commit to preprofessional programs early on? Restrict the number of students eligible to study off-campus? Refuse to accept most transfer credits? Disallow multiple majors?
Any one of those choices presents problematic trade-offs, and so we began experimenting with the online program. It has been a success by any measure that could reasonably be applied to it.
Nevertheless, there remains some strong faculty resistance to the notion of online education. We often see it in anonymous surveys, and no doubt some of the objections are justified. It is undeniable that students and teachers learn from each other through personal interaction. A class is more than the dissemination of material followed by testing and grading. And a transcript of a class is only a partial representation of a complex, interactive performance—even when the teacher is the only one who speaks.
In every class, there is also the important element of unplanned, extracurricular interaction. How much time do we spend meeting with students in our offices, eating with them in the cafeteria, walking with them between buildings? I know I remember those encounters with my professors more than almost any of the lectures I attended. What about the relations of students with one another, the informal conversations that continue after class?
The human dynamic—one of the primary attractions of a liberal-arts education—seems impossible to replicate fully online. And that is one major area in which our online courses have struggled to deliver: 80 percent of our students agree that “traditional courses offer more opportunities to discuss ideas one-on-one.”
And yet students who never speak voluntarily in a classroom sometimes become the stars of online discussion. Perhaps in online courses, students who prefer the classroom learn new skills, such as the diplomacy that writing requires in the absence of nonverbal cues. Perhaps faculty members discover skills they did not know they possessed as they explore the possibilities of technology. And our online program has been successful at motivating professors to adopt course-management software, podcasting, social media, and a range of tools that are generally regarded as the digital humanities.
Lots of faculty members find it hard to think of themselves as teachers without the physical trappings. Are we really professors if we run a class in our pajamas using a home computer? But think about all of the time and resources that are spent just getting 30 people into a room at roughly the same time in a reasonably presentable state. What does it cost to house all of us nearby, transport us, and maintain the rooms in which we meet? What about the inefficiency caused by variable rates of learning? Some students need more time, others less; almost no one is provided with exactly the right amount of instruction at just the right moment. Multiply that expenditure by millions for all the classes that take place every year. Could those trillions of dollars and eons of opportunity cost be spent more effectively elsewhere in education? Who gets excluded from higher education by limitations of cost, time, and location?
Online courses in a liberal-arts context also raise the question of why a student would want to pay the college’s price for a course that may not include access to the full range of personalized experiences. Why not take a cheaper online course from a for-profit provider? Doesn’t introducing online education at a traditional college legitimize the services of those online competitors? Is that what we want to become, if it is profitable?
In any case, how can we compete with those for-profit institutions without hiring or training an entirely new faculty? As our tenured professors retire, they could be replaced by part-time “facilitators,” “content providers,” and “evaluators” at a fraction of the cost. Maybe most of the work of teaching could be outsourced, and evaluation entirely automated. Eventually we could disband the entire brick-and-mortar operation and go purely online. Aren’t we standing on the verge of a slippery slope that will lead to the abandonment of our values as we try to compete in markets that we never should have entered in the first place?
See how easy it is to panic on this issue?
We have continued to believe that the effectiveness of traditional versus online courses depends on who is teaching, who is learning, and how it is done. For my college, that has meant a commitment to small classes online, capped at 12 or 16 students, so that they can receive individual attention. It means that online courses should have a personal dimension, which requires professors to be just as accessible (in person, by telephone, by email or video chat) as those teaching traditional courses are. We also limit the percentage of a student’s overall education that can be completed entirely online: the equivalent of one full-time semester.
Perhaps most important, online courses should be taught by the regular, full-time, tenured faculty members who are familiar with the college’s mission, are part of the governance system, and have taught the traditional course for some time. None of our online classes are taught by adjuncts or contract workers. Online education should not be used as a means of unbundling the teaching functions and deprofessionalizing the faculty. And the content of an online course should remain under the faculty member’s control. It should not be allowed to become a slick, corporate product with no relation to the values of the institution.
Adopted cautiously, in a critical, evolutionary, decentralized way, a variety of online approaches to learning—beyond what we already have—can allow faculty members to improve their teaching by placing lecture content online and using classes for high-impact experiences, allowing professors and students to become more interactive with each other. And—by making it less necessary for students to transfer credit for entire courses from outside parties—online courses developed within an institutional context can preserve rather than undermine our unique missions as liberal-arts colleges.
