Working on What Works Best
Fran McCall didn't want to talk to anyone. When she started her pursuit of a bachelor's degree at the University of the District of Columbia at 44, she had no patience for the less-than-brilliant comments of her fellow students during class discussions. So after eight semesters--over the course of four years--she finally gave up and transferred to the University of Maryland-University College, where she hoped to learn from her professors without the distraction of empty-headed remarks.
But instead of less conversation, she got more. And while the students at UMUC do like to talk, their comments on academic subjects such as business ethics are as thought provoking as those of her instructors, says McCall, now 52 and a program officer at the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit education organization that administers the Fulbright Scholarship program. And perhaps the biggest surprise is that it all happens online: McCall enrolled in the school's Web-based division. It's the typing, she says, that often forces mature discussions. "When people write their comments, they pay more attention to detail and get to the meat of the subject," she adds. "It's even honed my ability to agree to disagree."
Students like McCall are driving the phenomenal growth of online education. Enrollment has shot up by almost 20 percent this year; 11 percent of postsecondary students will take at least one course online. And those students have plenty of classes to choose from: Over 90 percent of public colleges offer at least one online course. By 2005, the E-learning market will top $4 billion, predicts Eduventures, a Boston-based educational research firm. With Congress considering removing the last obstacle preventing online students from qualifying for the same federal financial aid dollars as students at traditional universities, the boom in E-learning is likely to continue.
Indeed, almost a third of all academic leaders polled believe that online education will be more effective than traditional classes in three years, according to a survey released last month by the Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges from Johns Hopkins University to San Diego State dedicated to improving the quality of online education. But online student dropout rates are still higher than those for the classroom set. Which leads to the question: What, exactly, works online?
In the beginning--a mere decade ago--early adopters made wide-eyed proclamations about how the Internet would change the nature of education as we know it. Universities and new for-profit schools would rake in millions of dollars by having megastar lecturers create techno-lessons that would reach thousands of tuition-paying students and render the lumpen professoriate obsolete.
It didn't work.
Instead of downloading cash, respected schools pulled the shutters on their E-learning shops, while new online schools went bankrupt. The now defunct Fathom.com, Columbia University's for-profit arm, struggled to attract students to courses created by its own professors as well as experts from the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics and Political Science. The fantasy of instructor-less education soon faded as courses with little or no personal interaction--sometimes just the contents of books plunked onto Web sites--posted dropout rates as high as 60 percent.
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