Why Online Education Won't Replace College—Yet by David Youngberg

Photo: David Youngberg

David Youngberg, assistant professor of economics at Bethany College writes, "When I decided to become a professor, I was comforted by its employment projections. Professors hired to teach the baby boomers are retiring: It'll be a seller's market. Now I'm told Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC's, threaten that rosy future."

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One person can teach the whole world with a cheap Webcam and an Internet connection. Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University research professor and co-founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, told Wired that in 50 years there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education.

I was scared. So in early 2012 I joined 90,000 other students who enrolled in one or both of Udacity's first two courses. I selected CS101: Building a Search Engine. What with video lectures, online discussion boards, and learning from the field's top minds, it was easy to believe that online education was the beginning of the end for the ivory tower. But I came to realize that MOOC's have five fundamental problems.

1. It's too easy to cheat. While Udacity encouraged students to help one another on the discussion boards, we weren't allowed to post answers. The honor code worked, but only because we couldn't get college credit. The incentive to cheat was very weak.
Make the class count for credit, or serve as the first step to a good job, and phantom forums and answer keys will follow. Despite our best efforts, the proliferation of cheating is higher education's dirty little secret. Take away the classroom and you've made a bad situation much worse.

2. Star students can't shine. It became immediately clear to me that even if I excelled at this course, no one would know who I was. Networking, either with my fellow students or with the professors, was virtually impossible.
In traditional academe, I know my best students well enough to write recommendations describing their personalities and accomplishments in detail. Online anonymity results in references that mean virtually nothing. The best Udacity can offer is to pass on résumés of top students to interested employers. If just 1 percent of students in Udacity's two courses were exceptional, that's 900 recommendations to write. And none of them would be worth reading.
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Source: Chronicle of Higher Education