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Although all of the material on IE’s Web site is free for individual use, he said, the school “avoided developing material for self-learning” because “we think class discussion is essential.”

“If you don’t ‘close’ education in certain ways then you are out of business.”

“The completion rates for students in purely online programs are very low,” he said. “If a program is too open, too flexible, too ‘on demand,’ students won’t ever finish.”

Mr. Mulder also warned against viewing O.E.R. as a panacea. “O.E.R. is not education,” he said. “It’s only content. It becomes learning when you have good teaching.”

When these learners complete the program, they have competencies relevant to 21c life-- they can communicate, collaborate, access and integrate information from diverse sources using electronic libraries. It is an exciting way to teach and learn and it is the wave of the future so we need to gain the skills needed to make these educational experiences consistently meaningful.

Working with online instruction requires different techniques. An instructor online cannot usually look at a student's face and see that she isn't grasping the point, for example, or when she has fallen asleep. I can see why instructors would miss this type of face-to-face communication; online feedback is both less immediate and in some cases more direct. But a lecture can be truly engaging or enormously incomprehensible even for the student who moves to the front row to try to understand it all. Online learning can also reap huge results or can suffer from another set of equally mind-numbing problems.

I have to agree with jsalmons and bghansel. It's not the fact that a school is online or on-ground that matters. It's the quality of the educator that matters. I, too, have gone to and taught in Ivy League schools and found them to be a mixed bag, just as I've found online schools to be a mixed bag.

Yes, softshellcrab, discussion questions are the backbone of online courses. Are you telling me they don't play a role in on-ground education? Are you telling me that only talking-head lectures educate? Is there something wrong with students doing self-studying? Haven't you seen lecture content in online courses? I'm puzzled as to why you think critical thinking, Socratic reasoning/questioning, and constructivism are bad or can't be done online, but can on-ground.

The most (Stress THE MOST)primary issue with distance education is the degree of affective education taught.

We can use SKYPE, WIMBA or other "video" based education, but what we lose is the subtle differences of students and their interactions with others that makes it difficult to determine their level of character (highest level of affect).

Bill Gates may think we will have less seated instruction in the future (see another Chronicle issue elsewhere), but the backlash against online will be in the form of those who cannot interact and thus not obtain jobs (except in the places where it wont matter because none have any affect in that place).The bottom line is that we are losing a major portion of our education system in a pure online education format. Until we recognize how to better teach affective education with online, and more importantly assess that type of education, we will have major issues not only in higher education, but also in industry/business.And this is an open invitation for Bill Gates to discuss this issue.

"Quality on-line teaching is harder than regular classroom teaching, but poor on-line teaching is easier than regular classroom teaching."

But can I make it more specific - "Quality on-line teaching is harder (taking more time, e.g.)than regular classroom teaching of the same quality (in achieving the same extent of satisfaction in students, e.g.)?"

However, no one has mentioned the preparation required for quality online instruction. Some building blocks of good online programs are high quality/targeted content, flexible tools for development and delivery, engaging and interactive design, attentive and responsive instructors during the class, self motivated learners, and as always outcomes-based curriculum.

This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.

Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).

A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.

It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable

In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.

All three require talented faculty members with scholarly training.  These things are (1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) preserving the discoveries of the past, and (3) personally mentoring students in ways that allow them to participate in (1) and (2).  Doing these things well takes special training.  It is inherently expensive, because the processes involved are hard to automate or even systematize very much. 

Harvard and BYU-Idaho involve their students in teaching one another.  They also have general education courses, created in the last five years, that cut across academic disciplines and engage students in applying principles and theories to real-world problems.  These instructional approaches challenge students to frame inquiries, rather than merely respond to questions posed by their professors.

Harvard and other elite institutions are in a paradoxical position.  Their students and alumni are satisfied with their current offerings; in fact, they have a huge surplus of qualified applicants.

We’re likely to significant change in the next decade, the net effect of which will be more students served at a lower average cost.  However, the nature of the evolution will differ among institutions.  The elite schools will hybridize their courses not primarily to reduce cost or grow enrollments, but to better serve the rising generation of “digital natives” and to make the most of learning-enhancing computer-adaptive technology.  By contrast, schools without the benefit of high prestige and large endowments will hybridize and offer fully online courses mainly so that they can keep tuition affordable, admit more students, and use the incremental revenues to plug the hole left by rising operating costs and declining state support.  In all cases, students will benefit.

Most professors will need to spend the majority of their time teaching.  A school that generates the bulk of its revenues via tuition will be able to afford some time for faculty research.  However, that research will need to have relevance to the student learning experience, and it won’t be the driving factor in tenure decisions; teaching quality will be.  Tenure based primarily on publications isn’t a sustainable model for most institutions.