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The Information Revolution Has Not Improved Off-Campus Education The Information Revolution, 2004

Education that occurs outside of schools, often referred to as "distance learning," cannot replace that which takes place in traditional classrooms, Dave Wilson asserts in the following viewpoint. Wilson maintains that students who take online courses are unable to connect with their professors on a personal level and therefore miss out on a vital educational benefit. In addition, he claims that virtual campuses are developed for economic, rather than educational, purposes and do not guarantee to their students a quality education or respected degree. Wilson is a technology reporter and former columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

As you read, consider the following questions:

How does technology benefit busy students, in Wilson's opinion?1.

According to the author, what distinguishes great educations from adequate ones?2.

Why does Brian P. Copenhaver believe education cannot happen effectively over the3. Web?

Since the dawn of the Internet age, boosters have predicted the end of leafy college campuses as

schools go virtual. The miracle of the Internet was supposed to let great teachers reach any student,

any time, anywhere. People all over the world would get the equivalent of a Harvard degree through a computer and a network connection.

What a crock.

"The people peddling this stuff are suggesting that distance learning offers a bona fide education," said David F. Noble, a history professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. "But it's a con job. This is a scam. Distance education is just a digital diploma mill."

Not a Replacement

Unlike Noble, I believe that new technologies such as the World Wide Web offer enormous benefits to

students. But they work best as an adjunct—not a replacement—to traditional classroom education.

Even tech-heavy institutions such as the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, where students are required to have a laptop, still consider the classroom the core of the educational experience. Technology helps busy students connect with each other outside of class and gives them access to online resources during lectures.

But attending class solely through a computer isn't a whole lot better than the correspondence courses developed in the 19th century. And even the major universities that offer correspondence courses won't give you a degree. It's the same with computer courses.

"Can you get a University of Chicago degree online? No. Stanford? Columbia? No. They'll offer you certificates, a degree with an asterisk, just like a correspondence course," Noble said. "Because they know the difference."

A Loss of Connection

The difference is obvious to anybody who's had the luxury of learning in a classroom with a couple of dozen people. Compare that with trying to get a professor's attention in a cavernous lecture hall surrounded by hundreds of other students. It only gets worse online.

The ability to connect with a knowledgeable instructor on a personal level is largely what distinguishes a great education from a merely adequate one, or even just a rubber-stamped credential for a better- paying job.

Supporters of virtual colleges point to projects such as the Western Governors University as an example of what the future holds. But WGU is a great example of why attempts to develop cyberspace campuses are doomed to failure.

The WGU project sprang out of attempts by 18 western states about five years ago to develop a virtual education system to meet the needs of an expanding college-age population. The public selling point for the WGU was better educations for state residents, but the real motivation for a virtual campus is nearly always purely economic. Lawmakers were desperate to avoid raising taxes to pay for the new campuses to accommodate the kids of baby boomers. Many governors listened to the pitch for the inexpensive, more efficient virtual university and eagerly embraced it.

Well, at least at first.

Eventually, most states came to their senses. Aided by budget surpluses and a booming economy, they made at least some extra investments in traditional educational facilities. California was not involved in WGU but instead set up something that evolved into the California Virtual Campus, which largely offers certificate courses received via TV or the Internet. Today, the WGU has utterly failed to achieve its grandiose plans of building a massive university without walls. It remains active on a low level in Utah, offering a way for highly motivated high-schoolers to get a jump on the college-level curriculum. The Internet can indeed let students "attend" a lecture by a professor on the other side of the world. Such lectures are useful and productive. But anybody who suggests that virtual lectures can completely substitute for a classroom experience is selling something—and it's not a first-class education.

An Unsolvable Problem

"I think the face-to-face, person-to-person relationship between student and teacher is irreducible. So it's hard to imagine simply taking the core act of education and making that happen effectively over

the Web today," said Brian P. Copenhaver, provost of the college of letters and science at UCLA.

Copenhaver said things might change someday with new technologies. He's a smart guy, but I think he might be overestimating what the technology can do for us. Yeah, at a certain point, it becomes possible for one professor to deliver a lecture over the Internet to a billion students. But how does that one guy answer questions from a billion students? That's a problem better gizmos are never going to solve.

Further Readings Books

Janet Abbate. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Alan B. Albarran and David H. Goff. Understanding the Web: The Social, Political, and Economic Dimensions of the Internet. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000.

Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie A. Paul. Digital Democracy: Policy and Politics in the Wired World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Eric Banks. E-Finance: The Electronic Revolution. New York: John Riley & Sons, 2001.

David B. Bolt and Ray Crawford. Digital Divide: Computers and Our Children's Future. New York: TV Books, 2000.

Andrew Calcutt. White Noise: An A-Z of the Contradictions in Cyberculture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Manuel Castells. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Center for Democracy and Technology. Broadband Backgrounder: Public Policy Issues Raised by Broadband Technology. www.cdt.org.

Michael Chesbro. The Complete Guide to E-Security: Using the Internet and E-Mail Without Losing Your Privacy. Boulder, CO: Paladin, 2000.

Benjamin Compaine. The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

James A. Dorn, ed. How the Internet Will Change the Economy. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1999.

Jeanne M. Follman. Getting the Web: Understanding the Nature and Meaning of the Internet. Chicago: Duomo Press, 2001.

Simson Garfinkel. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2001.

Global Internet Liberty Campaign. Regardless of Frontiers: Protecting the Human Right to Freedom of Expression on the Global Internet. www.gilc.org/speech/report.

Mike Godwin. Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. New York: Random House, 1998.

Edward E. Hindson and Lee Frederickson. Future Wave: End Times, Prophecy, and the Technological Explosion. Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2001.

Joshua Migga Kizza. Civilizing the Internet: Global Concerns and Efforts Toward Regulation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Alex Lightman. Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Robert E. Litan and Alice M. Rivlin, eds. The Economic Payoff from the Internet Revolution. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.

William J. Mitchell. E-Topia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Christos J.P. Moschovitis. History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999.

John Naughton. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet. New York: Overlook Press, 2000.

Alan L. Porter and William H. Read. The Information Revolution: Current and Future Consequences. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.

Gene I. Rochlin. Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Dan Schiller. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Andrew L. Shapiro. The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.

Mark J. Stefik. The Internet Edge: Social, Technological, and Legal Challenges for a Networked World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Clifford Stoll. High Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian. New York: Anchor Press, 2000.

Patricia M. Wallace. The Psychology of the Internet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Gary Young, ed. The Internet. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1998.

Periodicals Christian Bourge. "No Hyperlinks to Test Success," Insight on the News, September 30, 2002.

R.W. Burniske. "Avaricious and Envious—Confessions of a Computer-Literate Educator," Phi Delta Kappan, March 2001.

Samuel L. Dunn. "The Webcentric University," Futurist, July 2001.

Chester E. Finn Jr. "Fool U.," American Outlook, Fall 2002.

Thomas L. Friedman. "Next, It's E-ducation," New York Times, December 17, 1999.

Future of Children. Special Issue: "Children and Computer Technology," Fall/Winter 2000.

John N. Hickman. "Cybercheats," New Republic, March 23, 1998.

Issues and Controversies on File. "Distance Learning," March 16, 2001.

John K. Lee. "Ideology and the Web," Social Education, April 2002.

Daniel McGinn. "The Internet's Next Big Thing Might Just Be Going to School," Newsweek, April 24, 2000.

Bonnie Rothman Morris. "A Day in the Life of the Wired School," New York Times, October 5, 2000.

Ed Neal. "Distance Education," Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter 1999.

Neil Ralston. "Copyright in the Classroom," The Quill, July 2001.

Karen G. Schneider. "The Exasperating, Empowering E-Rate," American Libraries, March 1999.

Gwen Solomon. "Digital Equity," Technology & Learning, April 2002.

Royal Van Horn. "Electronic Scholarship," Phi Delta Kappan, November 1999.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Greenhaven Press, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale.

Source Citation Wilson, Dave. "The Information Revolution Has Not Improved Off-Campus Education."

The Information Revolution. Ed. Laura K. Egendorf. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.

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