Online courses, instructional quality, and economics: a conceptual  (Page 5/8)

Current expenditure and its effects on learning

The next question, of course, is what are institutions of higher education spending on online instruction? Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) reviewed the literature and concluded that the per student cost for distance learning was not statistically significantly different from the cost of on-campus instruction. In other words, rather than being willing to spend what it takes, institutions of higher education are only willing to spend the same amount of money as they spend for the same course on campus. Thus, most online courses really involve using 21st Century technology to offer little more than 19th Century correspondence courses with a discussion board. All that has really changed is the speed of communication (e.g., using e-mail instead of snail mail). Although technology has the power to improve education, the power of new technologies is not being harnessed for online instruction. Instead, technology is simply being used to do what we have always done. Administrators, we argue, must be willing to expend the money to involve ID experts and technology specialists in the development of online courses rather than leaving this process solely to the SMEs.

The information dump has long been the preferred teaching method in higher education. In the past, it occurred through a combination of textbooks and classroom lectures. As such, information dumps left students to sink or swim based on their individual learning skills and, perhaps, the help they could obtain from other students. An argument can be made that at one time it was an appropriate approach to college teaching. Higher education is now at a time of increased access (resulting in increased student diversity) and skyrocketing tuitions. Indeed, many online students are nontraditional learners. They have weaker learning skills and weaker technological skills than do traditional students. Online learners also tend to engage in online lessons at the worse possible time, that is, after fulfilling all their other life obligations (Dierkmann, 2001). For most “working mothers” this situation means they will sit down to their online lessons after 40 hours of employed work and 72 hours of household work. Society will simply no longer accept sink or swim teaching methods that result in high student attrition (Burke&Associates, 2005). Dressing up the information dump with electronic technology is unlikely to fool the public for very long.

Given the current low level of investment in the development of online courses, what is the effect of these courses on student learning? The data are not particularly heartening. Although Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) reported that students in distance education appear to learn as much course content as do students on campus, serious methodological flaws are present in this research. The main flaw is that the distance learning students are self-selected through both enrollment and attrition. Thus, the results of research to date are best translated as, given every possible advantage, online courses seem to produce about the same level of learning at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as standard lectures. Given that 50% of college graduates now lack college level skills (Pascarella&Terenzini, 2005), this level of learning certainly will not meet the needs of the information age in which people must be able to process information rather than simply memorize it. Nor will it meet the growing demands to improve the quality of higher education.