Students anywhere can watch my old friend Ben Polak teach his famous Yale class. They can’t get a Yale grade for the class but that possibility is coming ever closer: A professor at Stanford is teaching a robotics class and everyone can sign up, do the assignments, take the exams and get a certificate of “accomplishment. Prospective employers do not know whether your friend took the exam for you. This means the certificate has little value. But surely it is only a matter of time before some verification mechanism is set up and this problem is dealt with.
The implications of this change are multifold but I just want to focus on one: the impact on the research university. Universities produce research as well as teaching and this other dimension is often forgotten in all the discussion of virtual teaching. Here is one possible sequence of events:
1. Virtual teaching cannibalizes face-to-face teaching. Tuition goes down and courses become quite cheap.
2. This destroys tuition-based universities which turn into vast teaching factories. A few universities try an “elite” approach with tiny classes taught by excellent teachers.
3. Endowment based universities continue to survive. Researchers become concentrated in these universities. They compete for government funding and do mainly PhD teaching.
4. A “top heavy” university structure emerges with a handful of research universities and a number of vast teaching universities.
This analysis assumes there is weak complementarity between research and teaching. If there is strong complementarity, the teachers have to be researchers to keep courses up to date, exciting etc. This will make step 2 above more difficult and leave a structure like today’s but with universities having virtual counterparts and huge scale.
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October 4, 2011 at 1:02 pm
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October 6, 2011 at 6:22 am
Heski
Is it obviously efficient to bundle these teaching and research? If society values research maybe it’s best to fund it directly? My (limited) understanding is that at least in medicine that’s how it seems to work for the most part …
I guess that the current model is useful in providing long-term research funding without (too?) strong incentives to work on particular topics and that may have its advantages, and hard to practically implement in other ways?
January 2, 2012 at 9:47 am
betterschool
This is an uninformed and amateurish analysis.
A: Prospective employers do not know whether your friend took the exam for you. This means the certificate has little value.
R: This assertion goes to assessment and validation. A variety of valid assessment mechanisms have been developed and refined since the 1980’s, when fully online degree programs first began to appear. I can appreciate that not everyone is aware of this field but posting such silliness is another matter.
A: Virtual teaching cannibalizes face-to-face teaching.
R: This claim first began surfacing in 1989. Every empirical study of the relationship in question demonstrates that online courses and programs extend the universities geographic reach and result in a net increase in students and credit hours undertaken. Level II Blended learning (within courses) or higher results in the best balance of the relevant academic and institutional considerations.
A: Tuition goes down and courses become quite cheap.
R: Spoken like someone who has never developed or managed a budget for an online course. Nationwide, the average size of online classes is about 15 students. Anyone who has taught online for several years can explain to you why optimal class size is a little bit smaller than optimal class size for F2F classes. The Stanford “classes” to which you refer are not online classes; they are online correspondence classes. The budgets of online courses and programs are not materially different than their F2F counterparts, although the internal allocations are different.
A: This (Stanford correspondence courses) destroys tuition-based universities which turn into vast teaching factories.
R: Have you ever taken an online correspondence course? If students would prefer a Stanford correspondence course to your teaching, you need to work on your teaching skills. Focus on engagement, authentic and horizontal learning, responsiveness. The Stanford project, while worthwhile and commendatory, is not teaching.
A: Endowment based universities continue to survive. Researchers become concentrated in these universities. They compete for government funding and do mainly PhD teaching.
R: There is merit in this issue but it is too complex to discuss here and you need to do considerable homework before tackling it. Taxpayers pay an average of $38,000 per student per year in invisible support to elite endowment-based independent universities. The situation would not have become so lopsided were the public and the professoriate not so ignorant of higher education economics.
A: A “top heavy” university structure emerges with a handful of research universities and a number of vast teaching universities.
R: I disagree with your analysis of market forces. That said, it is appropriate that we place greater emphasis on teaching than research. The overemphasis on monetary and status rewards based on research productivity began getting out of control in the 1970’s. It has produced a glut of absolutely worthless research and worthless journals in which to publish the research to earn tenure, etc.