Comments on: UC, CSU profs don’t grasp threat they face from online ed

By: Hondo

Hondo — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:20:19 +0000

I say, shut down the campuses, go to Khan Academy.com and just take the tests to graduate. Everything free but for the few classes that need labs. Save billions on pensions and labor costs, just fire all the teachers and hire test administrators. Free text books online and save the trees. No more going to the free kill zones that are public schools. Save the planet because we don’t drive cars or take the buses to school and spend fossil fuels to heat and cool all the classes. Less traffic jams and accidents and traffic deaths.
This is Al Gores dream but he opposes it. As does every liberal green teacher.
Someone tell me whats wrong with this picture.
Hondo….

By: econprof

econprof — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 02:41:08 +0000

Comfortably tenured professors may not want to admit it, but online courses can offer a superior educational experience compared to the giant classes using the old-fashioned lecture approach. Online lets the student hear the world’s best professors, permits them to review their weak areas, allows better give-and-take between students and teacher, and with proper feedback mechanisms, can tell the teacher what topics they need to explain better. At the end of the class, a properly designed and monitored test can prove proficiency, and a certificate attesting mastery of the subject can be part of one’s resume. Plenty of employers rightly no longer trust “college graduates” and instead yearn for better measures of accomplishment.
Voila…better education, vastly lower cost.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:10:30 +0000

As a parent, I’m glad that there will be more supply to take the wind out of the demand-driven cost inflation trend.

As a hiring manager, I frankly wouldn’t give much credibility to a fully online degree, though. I have already seen other state schools “launder” low-tier public school offerings as more prestigious state school degrees. It’s like CSU offering UC degrees without any more affiliation than being the same state. That’s how I characterize the “IUPUI” system in IN, anyway, and it doesn’t impress me on a resume. There is some potential for fully online education to be branded with UC imprimatur, but I doubt I’m the only one to not trust the outcome.

More likely, though, online ed will emphasize core prerequisite courses in the short term. These are the ones the profs don’t want to teach anyway, and the new profs get stuck with. The “fun” upper level courses won’t go online soon if at all. Online might be a good way to “educate” non-majors in the first 2 years of college (e.g., chemistry 101, etc.). Packaged as such, I can see profs going along with this for a long time without complaints. If anything, it might even make their current club more exclusive, which they do love. Anyway, they prefer to focus on their research, and federal grants still make that lucrative for large universities, and big earning profs may only need to teach one course a semester as is.