Online Education's Net Worth

E-Learning is starting to take off at NYC universities, but are all the bugs worked out?

By Patrick Arden Wednesday, Aug 10 2011, Village Voice

Taking classes by computer has become common at many community colleges, and today, most universities offer some online courses. Elite schools like NYU and Columbia have remained reluctant to award online bachelor's degrees, but that has started to change during hard times: Online courses can be more cheaply produced than traditional classroom offerings.

But knotty problems remain for online education. Dropout rates are higher than in traditional courses, and educators have struggled to ensure that long-distance students don't cheat on exams. Students have raised other concerns, from fair tuition costs to the perceived inferior quality of online coursework.

At Pace University, students can choose from nearly 600 online offerings; more than half of Pace students have taken an online course, compared to about a quarter of college students nationwide. Undergraduates can currently satisfy all their liberal arts requirements—60 credits, or half their degree hours—with online courses. A decade ago, Pace started an online degree program expressly for telecommunications workers, but this fall, the school will offer its first online bachelors' programs for the general public, in business and computer science.

"We were starting to get inquiries from former Pace students who wanted to finish their degrees, and we decided to help them," explains Christine Shakespeare, special advisor for strategic initiatives. To be accepted into either degree program, students must have already completed 56 credit hours at an accredited institution and maintained a GPA of at least 2.5.

The online degrees cost much less per credit hour than Pace's traditional degree programs: $535 per credit as opposed to $937 per credit for a part-time student. (Full-time undergraduates pay a flat $16,328 for 12 to 18 credits.) "The price is competitive with what the online institutions are offering," Shakespeare says. "We have the resources and the history of a traditional nonprofit institution, so we'd like to attract the students who have been turning to the online schools with some dubious results."

Worse than face-to-face?

Pace's measured approach to awarding online degrees is typical, as universities are attracted by the promises of lower costs and larger audiences but struggle with the paucity of research into whether students learn as well in an online setting.

A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education collected 99 studies and concluded that online instruction is slightly more effective. Yet in an upcoming study in the Journal of Labor Economics, researchers criticize the government's conclusion, claiming it isn't supported by "apples-to-apples comparisons" and charging that the rush to online education may come at a cost.

The new study looked at two groups of students: those who sat through live lectures in an introductory economics course and those who watched the lectures online. Hispanics, males, and low achievers scored worse online even though the lectures were delivered before large classes.

"We need to have a lot more studies, because the train is leaving the station, and we don't have a solid knowledge of the consequences," says one of the paper's authors, David Figlio, an education economist at Northwestern University. "Online courses are cheaper to operate, so they may still pass a cost-benefit analysis. But it's just not a free lunch."

Educators appear afraid to raise any questions when their institutions offer classes on the Internet, says Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College. In a recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jenkins called online learning "the third rail in American higher-education politics: Step on it and you're toast."

The biggest problem with online courses, says Jenkins, is their high dropout rates compared to those of face-to-face classes. He points to studies finding completion rates in online courses of only 50 percent as opposed to 70 to 75 percent for comparable classes where the students must physically show up.

"When I was a department chair and a dean, I saw the numbers on a quarterly basis, and there were problems," says Jenkins. "I brought it up at the time, and nobody wanted to talk about it. Looking at the current numbers nationally, it doesn't appear that things are getting much better."

Jenkins's doubts are backed up by two recent studies from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College. One report, following 51,000 community-college students in Washington State from 2004 to 2009, found an 8 percentage-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses. A previous report on Virginia community colleges showed completion-rate gaps of 13 percentage points.

"You must do everything you can to offer the classes students need within a budget," Jenkins says. "But at some point, you've got to look at these numbers and ask why the overall success rates are so low. What can we do to help students succeed?"

Hope for hybrids?

The Columbia studies did find one bright spot: Hybrid classes, which mix learning on the Web with some classroom time, have much better success rates than online-only courses, though they still fall a bit short of complete face-to-face instruction. "You can't teach everything fully online," Jenkins says. "Being one-on-one with my students adds something to the class. Over the next two to three years, my plan is to move to hybrids, roughly half online, half face-to-face."

This fall, New York University will roll out at least one freshman introductory course as an online hybrid model. Such courses as "Introduction to Sociology" and "American Literature I" are usually conducted in large lecture halls. But by putting the lectures online, NYU Social Sciences Dean Dalton Conley argues, professors can free up class time to dedicate to discussion and their students.

The pilot program grew out of NYU's Open Education project, which last year began posting videos of lectures on its website and YouTube channel. Conley proposed open courseware as a "marketing strategy" to attract new students and play catch-up to what's happening at other important research universities such as MIT and Carnegie Mellon. "We're a private university in the public service—that's our motto—and this is no-brainer public service."

Conley also pitched the project as part of a long-term business strategy. For paying students, the online lectures and slides could be enhanced with pop-up definitions, interactive quizzes, and links to primary sources. Without having to repeat lectures, professors could restructure classes for small-group meetings and more personalized instruction.

"I teach 'Intro to Sociology'," says Conley. "With 300 students in a class, there's not a whole lot of interaction. Instead of my standing in front of this class twice a week for an hour, I would do a polished video with closed captioning. The captions would have hyperlinks in them, so if I mentioned Marx's four forms of alienation in capitalism, you would have a link to definitions or the original text or supplementary readings." Students wouldn't lose face time with the professor, Conley says, because they would still have to come to class.

The open courseware is also being translated into Chinese and Arabic to serve communities around NYU's new overseas campuses, says Conley. "Students in Abu Dhabi could be getting this—my lectures—and then we could have a local instructor do the class and have me come in to conduct intensive weeklong discussions."

When the open courseware initiative was announced, the student newspaper Washington Square News asked in an editorial why the university was giving away materials for free that students had "paid dearly" to access. It also wondered whether students would stay "cooped up in their dorm rooms and not actually attend classes." While an op-ed by Conley made clear the intent was to change "how class time [is] spent," the editorial's second question touched on one possible reason for low success rates in online courses elsewhere.

"Online courses require a level of maturity," Jenkins says. "Most students initially try online because they think it's going to be easier, it's going to be more convenient, it's not going to be as time-consuming. And then they discover it's not easier—it's harder, with a lot of reading—so they drop."

Crackdown on cheaters

Another concern is cheating: If students are cooped up in their dorm rooms, how can you tell whether they're doing their own work? The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires that schools implement procedures to ensure students registered in online offerings are the ones actually doing the work.

Pace University computer scientist Charles Tappert just returned from an online-learning conference where cheating was a major topic of discussion. Every high-tech solution seemed to contain an escape hatch. One school used Web-cams to identify test takers. "But what if someone else feeds the answers to the student at the keyboard?" Tappert asks.

Keystroke-recognition software tracks how long people hold down keys as they type, but it's been most effective in identifying users entering short blocks of text, such as passwords. Tappert is trying to deploy keystroke recognition on longer writing samples to verify student identities, but once again, he says, someone else could be supplying answers to the typing student.

Tappert and his graduate students are now experimenting with "stylometrics," which would detect a student's favored syntax, vocabulary, and even misspellings. "If someone is feeding you the answers, they would use their own words, not yours," Tappert says. By combining stylometrics with keystroke biometrics, schools might be able to identify both the cheater and the person taking the test. But that solution, cautions Tappert, is years away.

While the recession has sent many people back to school for online degrees, longtime prejudices remain. Almost half of hiring managers still view an online degree less favorably than a traditional one, according to a poll conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management.

Navila Abbas won't take an online course when she enters John Jay College this fall for a degree in forensic psychology. She took a hybrid class in American literature at Kingsborough Community College and found relief in having to attend fewer classes. "But if it pertains to my career, I'd rather have the person-to-person interaction," she says. "I would get more out of it."

The Need for Religion

What purposes does religion serve? Does that question leave you cold?

What we do, including what we think, always serves purposes, for better or worse. We don't just do things for no reason. We don't just believe things for no reason. In the final analysis, virtually everything we do and think and feel is connected to survival. Our brains evolved to be prolifically adaptive so that we might survive more easily than many, but not all, animals. And of course, all behaviors simultaneously serve more than one purpose.

The answer to why we have beliefs in the supernatural is complicated by the complexities that are sequellae to our neocortex and its abilities. We can imagine, we can reflect, and we can hypothesize: all skills that apparently no other animal can do in any great amount, although I may be guilty of gross oversimplification as well as species centrism.

Survival, of course, is not solely a function of a thicker cortex. If anything, higher brain functions tend to diminish survival behaviors. The cockroach will persist long after we are gone.

But we have much in the way of pathologies that exist because of this neocortex and its skills. One of these is narcissism. In and of itself, narcissism has gotten a bad reputation. We are all narcissistic, or should be. There is a continuum of self-interest from healthy look-after-yourself and do what's best to survive and flourish, all the way to malignant and destructive narcissism, wherein everything is done to get one's needs met at the expense of everyone else's, a kind of "f**k you" disorder (there are a few others; another is antisocial personality disorder.)

Very psychologically and socially healthy people do things that allow them to not just survive, but also flourish in a socially relativistic fashion: they usually do things that not only don't hinder or harm others, but they are also mindful to assist others in reaching their goals whenever possible. At the highest frequency of these exhibited behaviors, few are in this category. Do "religious" people exhibit more pro social behaviors? I bet not.

What about religion itself? In some ways it's a narcissistic product. In other ways, it is a natural byproduct of ignorance and fear. Yet another explanation is that religion is at its core a way to pretend we won't simply become worm food when we die; an existential anxiety reduction method. As I see it religion serves many purposes:

1. to affiliate with others socially and cognitively
2. to bring about certainty and therefore hope and optimism in the face of certain demise

3. to justify behaviors

4. to obtain gratification and esteem by others

5. to clarify and organize one's cognitions

6. to reduce the need to be self-determined (an inconvenient position)

7. to explain the unanswerable; to satisfy curiosity

So, I want to look at these.

Social, Asocial, Alone

I am not a social person. At least, not in the traditional sense. I suspect you don't care; and why should you?

I would rather be alone, sitting in my tall and fat man's chair, reading or watching a movie, or listening to music, than almost anything else. To this picture add dogs on my lap, and I am at my apex of social interest. I was not like this during the seventies; the question must be asked: what the hell happened?

Well, I've never been particularly social. As a child I would recoil from loud and boisterous people or groups, avoid more socially adroit people, preferring to spend my time looking at rocks, drawing the wings of a dragonfly, or peering at wee beasties in pond water through a microscope. I would hike around the woods, looking at the fauna and flora, hoping to never run into a human being. But I sure can pretend well.

When I am in a classroom, I light up. I channel the hidden part of me that yearns for social connection. I become the down home-but-erudite professor. I genuinely like interacting with students. I like helping them solve both academic and personal problems. I like even the camaraderie with other professors. But then I can't wait to be alone. I want to read the latest CNN story, ponder the cosmos, and wish I owned Necker Island. Is this pathological? I certainly hope not.

I think this has something to do with not just my inherent temperament, but how I was raised, and the various ways that others have ruined my trust of human beings. It's my fault that I allow those things to color and direct my world view and social connections. Somehow, it seems way easier to be disconnected.

Don't get me wrong. I love my wife, and I even sometimes enjoy being around my step-daughter, when she's not in one of her old testament moods. But at my core I am asocial.

What Teaching Really Is

I am a teacher, and I always have been, just like all of you. We teach whether we intend to or not, and one could argue that all cultures and all humans require teaching and learning in order to survive. We pass culture to future generations through teaching.

When we think of what teachers do, we typically imagine the classroom and someone up front, in command, engaged in particular rituals that are designed to impart knowledge. That's actually not what teaching, not what great teaching, is about. Teaching is not about the classroom, and it is not about how much anybody knows. I think great teaching is substantially about the relationship between the "teacher" and the "student." More often than you may think, these roles reverse themselves: the teacher becomes the student, often when we least expect it.

I am officially labeled by society as a teacher, and I "teach" at a community college. The very first time I formally taught was at a private university in 1974 when I was "in charge" of a Physical Geology laboratory section. I also moonlighted as a physics substitute teacher and an Algebra tutor. Strangely, I was never really good at those subjects. Then I taught Geology at Vanderbilt University as a teaching fellow, then again at a big North Carolina University, and finally at the University of Georgia. I taught Psychology at a community college in the 80s, and now I again teach at a similar college, my last leg of a strange and circuitous journey.

In the classroom setting, I still struggle with what it means to be an effective teacher: what one does specifically. What are the mechanisms for self-awareness, what are the measures for effectiveness, and what can one do to improve? I have an idea born of experience and a load of self-reflection, but I am woefully short on answers to most of these questions.

I do think that we must, as teachers, refrain from sitting on any arrogant, pedantic ivory stool. I think we must engage students at a personal level. I think we must challenge ourselves to be every bit the learner that we want our students to be.

And I think you must love your subject. If you don't like teaching, get the hell out of the classroom.

Items to Ponder

I awoke this AM with thoughts to convey:

1.  A theory is a well-organized, extremely well-tested system that explains observed phenomena. We use the word extremely casually, and I am sure the average person has no idea that when you are confronted with a true theory, you are in the midst of a very sophisticated collection of hypotheses and explanations. A theory is high level; it is not just what you think at the moment about something, which is its most common mis-usage. We ought to be using the word "hypothesis" instead.

There are "big" theories and there are "little" ones. Most are small, specific and not necessarily connected to bigger pictures. Big ones include Einstein's relativity theories, Freud's theory of mind, and the theory of Evolution. Most of the big theories are well-tested by perhaps tens of thousands of experiments, although Freud's is unable to be directly tested using scientific experimentation. The theory of evolution, despite what those who would deny it, is so well-tested that it is incontrovertible in most of it's parts. Good theories predict well and are widely applicable: the theory of evolution is a good theory.

Evolution, while officially labeled a theory, is actually so consistently shown to be predictive and accurate at all levels of investigation, that most scientists refer to it as fact.  Even the last pope stated he believed that evolution and the "bible" are not contradictory. How could they be? Seems to me the bible is a theory about the beginnings and procession of life. But it is an unreliable one, not more than  Freud's, because it is not in any way testable or predictive. Faith is not science.

Science is a system of knowing, and religion is about conjuring faith and belief. If science was about faith, we would have none of the gadgets, conveniences, many of the necessities (like vaccines), and few of the fun things we enjoy. If faith was science, we could test it in ways other than simply deciding that our faith is measured in our withstanding trials and tribulations.

2.   Well, anyway, I am glad that some people have more positive energy because of religion. I think some people need a system of rules to be productive, to live a good life, to treat others fairly and justly. I have no desire to take that from them. The world would soon descend into chaos! Religion, as with anything else, can be an agent of good or far less. Sometimes religion is about control and the greed of church leaders. It's also sometimes about the need for nations to justify their horrific treatment of their citizens or of other nations.

What would the world be like if the money spent of church edifices and "missions" and the lining of leaders' pockets all went to helping the poor and disadvantaged directly? Isn't that what God (if you believe in her) would want?

More Irrelevant Rantings...

1. It should be obvious to anyone and everyone that Sarah Palin is interested in two things and two things only: make you fear that America is going down the tubes, and blame Democrats for it. Unfortunately, not everyone has understood her clear mission. The question is why?

Palin continues to suck at the teat of certain American people, seeking any and all ways to make herself a tidy sum from the sweat of those who really don't understand what she's up to. They see her message as one which echos their fundamental discontent. The money she gets from her "speaking engagements" and "books" are all skimmed from folks who feel helpless and unempowered and broken financially. How ironic. Secondarily, she loves the artificial limelight she has created for herself. She is and always will be a "beauty queen."  It's easy to be critical and angry, I know from personal experience, but it takes a special person to show up with a game plan to fix problems.

She has never, not once mind you, offered a single idea to help us as a country to make things better. She has consistently shown she is not a team player: she quit her governorship (of a state with around 500,000 people) two years in so she could make money. She has alienated many of her own staff with her ranting and railing, and she has shown time and time again that she is not politically or historically knowledgeable or savvy. And that's putting it mildly.

In the end, Palin is just another in a long line of narcissists who inhabit both the core and perimeter of Washington. The more she basks in the limelight and is protected by the shade created by ever-taller  stacks of cash, the less she gives a damn about anyone but herself. The rich really are different than the rest of us, the research tells us, because they have an impaired ability to understand what those without must do to survive, and they don't understand that altruistic action, based on empathy, is the true measure of caring.

You watch: she will shrink, even disappear whenever anything concrete is required of her in terms of real leading (she will never run for office again), but she will always sound off to fuel the coals that feed her cash engine. Until the public unravels the mirage, that is.

2. I've been thinking a lot about the etiology of paraphilias. I teach the Psychology of Human Sexuality along with some other courses that touch on this and this is a topic that has piqued my interest for years.  I am presenting at a conference this Fall on this very topic, and I've clinically treated exhibitionists, voyeurs, fetishists, S&M couples, and a host of other paraphilias.

Behaviorists and Freudians, Social Learning folks, and the rest have lots of ideas about where these things come from and how these are maintained. I want to propose an idea that I think has some merit.

I have noticed through clinical observation that men with paraphilias (the vast majority are men, and that's another story) almost always display a social/emotional maturation level consistent with their degree of paraphilia: the more severe the paraphilia, the less socially adept and connected they are (the poorer their social skills, the more they are having trouble interpersonally, etc.)

Here's what I think is happening: since paraphilias represent an objectification of sex and bodies (a dehumanizing process), paraphilia development is actually a safety clutch for those who fear true emotional intimacy (well beyond what we all are fearful of; to most men with severe paraphilias intimacy is outright painful!) As a paraphilia becomes more severe in an individual, he is actually rewarded for increasing its intensity because it distances him from the pain of connecting with others; it gives him a measure of emotional safety. The further they get into their paraphilia(s), the less practice and reward they get from mature social/emotional interaction; their skills get worse. Never mind the Dopamine that surges when they act out.

3. OK, so another year starts for me in a week. Five classes to teach, around 150 students in total. I want to be the best I've ever been. I want to speak with precision, impact, and relevancy. I want to change lives. I want to inspire, to promote well-being and success. Nothing like easy to reach goals.