GinandTacos, by far one of my favoritest and cleverest writers in the blogoverse, has this interesting screed on Online Education:
When I first read DIY U, with its “Are you shitting me? Jesus, you’re serious, aren’t you?” subtitle Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, I knew nothing of author Anya Kamenetz but I was willing to put my life savings on her being affiliated with either Cato or Fast Company. Sure enough she turned out to be a Fast Company Imagineer or whatever they call their practitioners of this brand of sycophantic free market leg humping:
There’s something about “leg humping” that just starts me giggling, even when it’s my leg under the hump. Tell me honestly that it isn’t just gigglefest hysterical when some rat poodle decides that your ankle makes a fine motel room.
More seriously though, some administrators seem to like the idea of online education. They see it as a panacea. Some are so enamored with it that they’ll cut core departments. (Not sure if that’s actually the reason that the Middlesex philosophy department is under the knife, but you should probably read more about it and head over to this petition if you feel strongly enough.)
At Colorado, we’ve had a discussion in the philosophy department about our own online offerings, and to my surprise, a substantial number of my colleagues seem to acknowledge that there’s role and a space for online courses. I’ll confess to wildly tempered agreement. My wife, for instance, in prepping to retrain and enter a new grad program, took a few online classes to fulfill some undergraduate prerequisites. She seems to have been a model student. Not to boast, her virtual professors were all glowing about her performance. I think she even learned a fair amount. So I’ve seen online courses work and I believe that, in a few circumstances, they can work relatively well. I do think there’s a role for online education. But I can’t believe, as G&T rightly notes, that it will work very well in most circumstances. It certainly does not provide an education to the student. At best, it only offers the resources for a student to do better by themselves. But these resources have been in our libraries for centuries.
Online courses are, for lack of a better term, shit. No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. When the author of DIY U describes a model of students “cobbling” together a self-guided degree consisting of “course materials readily available online,” I cannot convince myself that the Yale-educated author believes that even as she is paid handsomely to type it. Perhaps 1/10 of a percent of undergraduates are mature and motivated enough to effectively direct their own course of study. What Kamenetz describes feels more like replacing the 12-course tasting menu at El Bulli with a trip to Old Country Buffet and calling it a wash. The idea that anything meeting her description would qualify as an education is prima facie ridiculous and requires no further discussion.
Sounds about right to me.
I haven’t yet peeked at this book by Martha Nussbaum, but it does seem that it may offer a counterbalance to the current absurdity afflicting the humanities.
Cruel Mistress 