The financial crisis started a long time before anyone really took notice. I can remember hearing students complaining about how difficult it was to get a college loan starting at least 15-18 months ago. I didn’t pay too much attention and dismissed most of it as simply more students returning to college to finish their degrees and a fixed amount of that lovely green stuff to go around. I did start to connect the dots late this past August when enrollment figures began to come in and there was a slight decline in the enrollment at the hypothetical ‘average’ community college.
A week ago, I started my usual daily scan of news sites across the Internet and ran across this: Survey reveals economy’s impact on schools and one I had missed from last Friday: Why some of the best and brightest skip college. I picked up another one: Tough times strain colleges rich and poor. Things are pretty bleak and aren’t likely to get dramatically better anytime soon.
For the most part we’ve been on a national vacation from history for far too long already. If there is any ’silver lining’ in this recession it would have to be the golden opportunity for everyone to review what it is they’re doing, where they’d really like to go, and exactly how much they’re willing to trade off for that renewed chance.
Case in point, I think, is the article today With students flocking online, will faculty follow? My contention is that they are and have been for some time, but with some major impediments too often ignored.
First and foremost, is the same annoying time-sink for any writing: it takes three to five times as long to keyboard anything in than it does to just blurt it out. For transcripts of lectures, syllabuses, study guides and other learning resources, you simply cannot go with the first cut – that’s not good enough for distance learning. My own experience with this in corporate training (where I don’t have Miss Thistlebottom, PhD breathing down my neck or the board of directors having fits of hysteria that their reputation might be inadvertently damaged) is that it takes me six to eight hours to adequately prepare for an hour of contact with the troops. My guesstimate is that it would take two or three semesters to realistically replace live lectures with an equivalent online course – and that’s with 100% of the teaching load devoted exclusively to preparing it; not too many institutions are going to be able to do that. (The only ‘jump start’ is that many of the younger instructors grew up with PCs and routinely use digital formats; older instructors who grew up with typewriters and Xerox copiers or commercial offset print shops (even if it was done in-house) will have to duplicate the final product into digital format. At best, these courses would be a third or a quarter of the time required for a new course to be developed from scratch. (Again, that’s only my guesstimate.)
Second, like you and me, the would-be online instructors have to somehow squeeze in this time within their existing schedule and other commitments.
One example of what can be done is in the wildly popular and ever growing Open Course Ware that has been popping up on university websites around the globe! This is NOT distance education, and you won’t get college credit for it; indeed, most people won’t actually get very far beyond downloading the zip files and exploding it on their local PC.
