This online education thing seems to be picking up steam: Stanford Professors Daphne Koller & Andrew Ng Also Launching a Massive Online Learning Startup. The missing piece is still certification. Once that exists, bricks-and-mortar delivery of higher ed will face some nasty competition … and we’ve seen how people feel about BaM — just ask Best Buy, Borders, or Blockbuster.
Of course, retail shopping is not the same thing as getting educated. There are similarities. For example, BaM is expensive and inconvenient in both cases. Also, in both cases, the younger generations are extremely comfortable with the online technology. Yet, it’s the differences that should be most concerning. Education-on-demand has the potential to solve many problems. This feature will be highly appealing to most potential students. Even more threatening to the traditional model: the price of online education taught by professors from top schools is not just lower by the savings in BaM distribution costs — it’s zero. Think about that – zero.
Most of the colleagues with whom I discuss these developments argue that there is simply no substitute for the real-time, in-person, interactions available in the traditional classroom setting. They believe that this will continue to motivate students to pay a premium for the experience. I wonder. It is not obvious to me that students get some special utility premium from classroom interactions. Ask yourself this: do your students consider “cold-calling” a welcome feature of sitting in your class? In my judgment, most students would actually pay to avoid it.
Besides the assessment problem, there is another hurdle for the online education model. Clearly, no professor can answer the specific questions of 100,000 students. The online institutions are going to have to find a way to staff some form of virtual office hours in which students can get answers to their questions. My sense is that there is plenty of well-trained talent in India to staff office hours for these courses. Heck, in ten years, online course providers will be able to pick up highly experienced, unemployed domestic PhDs to man the chat rooms on the cheap.
UPDATE: Elite Universities’ Online Play (HT: Instapundit)
