In today's Chicago Tribune, I read an article on how the University of Illinois, the collegic academic home to both my wife Paula and my brother in law Dan was looking to expand their campus beyond the hallowed halls traversed by some of this century's greatest leaders and thinkers into the profitable arena of remote e-learning. I have mixed feelings about that.
On one hand, if ever there was a brick and mortar institution of higher learning that can jump the technological fence into the online arena, it's U of I. On or about 1992, about the time I was perfecting my beer slamming skills at Western Illinois University a couple of hours away,
two students -- Marc Andressen and Eric Bina created the first web browser there. They named it Mosaic, and released it to the public in 1993. Before Mosaic, people didn't have a good way to get to the internet; Marc and Eric provided the vehicle to point and click your way anywhere you wanted to be online. Mosaic eventually led to the development of Microsoft's Internet Explorer; I'm sure you've all heard of that. You're probably using it right now. Of all the accomplishments that have risen from the minds of students attending school on the beloved Champaign campus, this one may be in the top five that have truly changed the world.Incidentally, Marc and Eric didn't really amount to much after that. They went on to form a little known company called Netscape, which after years of standalone competition with Microsoft is now the browser used when you surf the net with America Online. Netscape also spun off Mozilla, which is used by many of you NOT using Internet Explorer right now. Andreesen has since launched a couple of other web related and thoroughly brilliant ideas. Slacker. I bet he can't even slam a beer half as fast as I can.
I wonder, what would Marc and Eric...or any of the other notable Illini Alumni think of their alma mater stepping into the online learning industry? How does it differ from classroom learning? What would this mean for incoming students who will never have the chance to walk the Quad in mid October as the leaves are turning, or attend a live stage performance at Krannert? Was it possible to learn remotely? Or does a real live geographical campus of learning offer some intangible, indefinable texture of sights, sounds, and a plethora of interpersonal relationships that when woven together better defines the human condition?
I might be able to offer some first hand insight to the discussion. About the time I was perfecting my beer slamming skills at Western, I somehow got the misguided notion that I didn't need to finish college to have a great paying career someday, I would just get by on my experience rather than my book smarts (or lack thereof) I never went back to complete my senior year. Not the brightest move I've ever made. Fast forward twelve years, and the career roadblocks I had been barely able to dodge up to that point without a degree eventually became insurmountable -- my debauchery and shortsightedness had finally caught up to me, and I finally embraced (after twelve years of fierce resistance!) the grim reality of the corner I had painted myself into -- I needed to go back to college. Since my career was already full swing on the East Coast with Heineken at the time, I couldn't afford to step away and go to school full time while climbing the corporate ladder. This left me with precious few options: I could go to night school, but then that would mean spending hours a week sitting in a classroom with other students trying to absorb lectures. Or better yet, I thought, I could enroll at one of those online universities and get the same degree, and attend class from my home, on my terms and according to my schedule.
Online learning was all the rage back in 2003/2004 -- and leading the charge was the University of Phoenix Online. Sounds like a great place, huh? My pride swelled as I attended my first class from my home computer connected to my fellow students through broadband fiber optics -- "I'm a student at the University of Phoenix!". At first, the classes seemed challenging and communication between my classmates was robust and filled with brain nurturing dialog. I was hooked! I felt like I was part of a wave that would change the world. Imagine the possibilities, I thought as my mind drifted during one "class" on a random Tuesday night. "People all over the world can sit in the same virtual classroom, read the same virtual lecture the same professor copied and pasted onto our screens remotely. We can all chat together in the chat room about the same topics, and best yet -- we can archive those fruitful conversations for later reference!". Ah, academic life was grand.
That is, before I started noticing that the lectures the instructor posted, often times dozens of pages long a night, were all perfectly formatted -- not one grammatical, spelling, or punctuation error. Not one fat fingered snap of the wrong key as he surely toiled away day after day preparing lectures. Either I had the most precise and articulate writer as an instructor, or these 'lectures' were written some time ago, for a class long since graduated, and copied/pasted into browser windows night after night by an instructor that hasn't written anything new in God knew how long. I pushed the negative thoughts back as far as I could and focused hard on how wonderful it was to be learning...online!
But the thoughts began to creep back again and again....how different was this from just sending us an electronic Microsoft Word document text book at the beginning of the semester, telling us to read it on our own, and giving us a preformatted pre-typed test at the end of the class, while the 'instructor' kicked back and collected paychecks while watching his favorite TV programs listenging to a nearby laptop for the occasional blip or chirp that indicated a student had just posted a question to him? I began carefully scrutinizing the syntax he used in his pasted lectures, vs. the syntax used when we as a class would post questions live in the chat room to one another, with the prof occasionally chiming in with guidance or words of wisdom. To my astonishment, they were the same. When I asked a fellow classmate a question about the recent lesson, a response would pop up from him or her on my screen within a couple of minutes, often times with the occasional grammatical error or accidentally, unintentionally bumped key. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in chat rooms, discussion forums, or online learning classrooms learns quickly to look past this sort of noise to get to the meat of the poster's words. But our instructor never made mistakes when he replied to us. Again, I thought, he is either a phenomenally hyper-accurate typist, or he's pasting preformatted answers. One night, I tested my theory. I asked a specific question about the lecture, not unlike every other night, and when he responded in full I timed him. My one sentence question took about ten seconds to write. His six sentence response took less time, with fewer errors. Zero, to be exact. I may not be the fastest typist alive, but I'm definitely not the slowest. Also, I noticed all of his answers were irritatingly ambiguous; they never answered a specific question, they simply turned the question back around to the OP (original poster). He was answering questions with questions. The same few questions repeated. Was it possible he had a bunch of preformatted answers (reply-questions) developed over many classes that he would simply regurgitate again and again? I dug deeper into his answer and came up with a question I knew he couldn't have a preformatted reply-question ready for. His response, one sentence, took about twenty seconds to pop up, and had one or two minor grammatical errors as I recall. He also forgot to capitalize the first word. After a couple of weeks in his class, there were more errors in this sentence than all his lectures and previous answers combined. My heart sank.
How was online learning any better than picking up a $100 textbook on my own and teaching myself? The bright light of my enthusiasm and passion for technology dimmed ever so slightly. I knew....knew people could learn effectively online, but only if they could truly interact with one another, and the leader/instructor/professor/guru/you name it. But two way, live, organic communication was the key, not regurgitation of data and information.
I had no choice but to drop out of UoP Online and immediately enrolled in a traditional classroom environment at Concordia College near our home in New York. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." I thought with a sigh. Surprisingly, the whole experience really opened my eyes to the value of face to face learning. The structure of the advanced degree program was tailored for career individuals like me -- a full liberal arts degree for students who already have a strong foundation of previous credits from other schools. I earned my Bachelor's degree in one intense year of night school. It may not have been the idyllic environment young late teen college students are immersed in 24/7 for four years, but it was by far the next best thing. Not only was I engaged in the classroom with instructors who taught me a wide, varied curriculum, I made wonderful friends with the six others who were in the same class as I was.
As fruitful as my previous online conversations were, nothing compared to chatting it up before class begun with Angel, Rich, Diane, Jillian, Ed, and Claudia. The seven of us attended all the classes together as a group for one whole year. We emailed notes to anyone who may have missed a class due to illness, we hung out at each other's houses, we studied together, and in times of crisis and personal loss we were there for each other with hugs or even just a kind word.
I would never trade my experiences at Concordia for online learning. That's not to say that one cannot learn online if the curriculum was properly designed and the instructors adequate, it just means that I think there's something to be said for walking the hallowed halls, greeting friends and fellow learners with a smile, late night study sessions over pizza with a few classmates, and most importantly of all -- memories and friendships that last a lifetime, borne from the fruits of the most human experience of all -- the desire and accomplishment of higher learning.
6 comments:
I was so proud of you that day! (your graduation day). I have to also make the point that actually going to class took far less of your time, yet was more effective learning. With U of P, you were constantly on the computer, day and night. At Concordia, your Saturdays were taken up, but you learned more and spent less time doing busy work.
After working at CTU, I realized that online learning has a long way to go. I'm glad you got to have a traditional college experience.
So this begs the same question asked by Palmer Joss in the movie Contact. He asked whether technology has genuinely made us happier than we were 100 years ago.
He points out that the internet was intended to bring people together, but suggests that it is little more than a way for people to communicate on a shallow level with one another while fully isolating themselves from actual human contact.
It would appear that your experience suggests that the internet is capable of a lot of things, but it is not a replacement for actual human contact. There is a chemistry present between people that cannot be duplicated by zeroes and ones.
In law school I was once up on my feet in front of the hardest, meanest law professor in the entire school. We were barking back and forth at each other over the scope of "time, place and manner" restrictions on free speech regarding a case out of Madison, WI. He drilled me so hard on the facts and analysis of that case, literally shouting at me as I disagreed with and challenged his assessment of the dissenting opinion. I pounded back with every detail of every sentence he was looking for, for no other reason than to simply prove to him that I knew the case 10 times better than he thought I did. My heart was racing, my knees were weak.
It was intense, I was on my feet for nearly 45 minutes going head to head with the law school equivalent of a pit bull. (I tend to be a little competitive with my professors in case you didn't notice.)
In many ways, online education is no different than traditional. Professor Cutandpaste is no different than the irritating professor that does nothing but read from the book in front of a half-dozed class answering questions from notes he's used for the past 15 years.
In both situations, the value of the education is determined more by the commitment of the student than that of the professor. I've taught myself more than a handful of subjects in law school from professors who would clearly rather be on a golf course. I still wan't my $980 per credit hour back for those classes, by the way.
So I think you can produce technically proficient students via the internet. You can learn enough about accounting to do a P&L, you can learn enough about marketing to contribute to a meeting at work.
But an online institution will never produce excellence. Excellence arises from an immersion into education that can only take place when surrounded by people competing against you for the highest grade on the one hand, and helping you through your failures and challenges on the other. We only realize our true potential when we THINK we've pushed ourselves to our limit, only to look to your left and right and see people who pushed even harder than you. It is inspiring and infuriating at the same time. But it requires the adrenaline of human contact to become a reality.
The internet, for all its wonders, will never reproduce that no matter how hard it tries.
@ watersoul: Thanks babe. :) Your encouragement and support is a big part of why I was able to finish!
@ Jim: You bring up a great point (and a great movie!) -- are we happier? The challenge with technology is keeping up with it while maintaining the human element, I think. It was probably a lot easier before we had all this great stuff: radio and TV was one way communication. It spoke, we listened. Telephones introduced the general public to two way communication with others, but never really cleared the obstacle of replacing face to face interaction. Yet, they're still trying with gadgets like video conferencing and phone conferences. Believe me, I'm using either or both of these many times a month -- they're cool, and often a cheaper, more efficient alternative than flying halfway around the world to meet in person with a few others in a big room, but in my experience teleconferences and video conferences are thought of as more of a "plan B" than a true replacement for the good old fashioned meeting. In a perfect world, where Scotty would beam us around to where we needed to be, we'd absolutely choose face to face for these meetings. Reality is, though, that it's costly, time consuming, and horribly inefficient time wise to do this. Until they perfect the Star Trek beaming dohicky, plan B will have to suffice.
The internet (aka "ARPANET" 30 years ago) began at its core as two or even many way text only communication between people decades ago, but offered so much more than the telephone because it connected not just one or a few people, but in theory connected many dozens or even hundreds of people. Back then only a small number of scientists and military groups were really using it, but the seeds were sewn.
Fast forward to today, where millions can communicate to the world with a click of a mouse, and millions of those people can respond, it's staggering the level of communication that can take place. The internet allows a couple of things like that which seems on the surface to be a better mousetrap: archiving of text 'conversations', visuals (charts and graphs, etc.), and true interaction with massive amounts of people at once. We even try to crudely mimick human emotions and reactions to what people say through the use of emoticons ( :-), ;-), etc.) and internet slang (LOL, WTF? etc.) One big thing that's missing, though, is what is basic to us humans: the sound of the human voice on the other end of the conversation.
On a smaller scale, we all experience this phenomenon every day. Blogs, emails and discussion forums are great fun and we spend probably way too much time on them, but nevertheless there's something missing. Why? Because there's nothing like hearing the voice of a loved one over the phone when we need it most. All the carefully worded, supportive, articulate typed words in the world can't heal quite like hearing that voice. Jim, you and I chatted on the phone yesterday for a few minutes, and as insightful and inspiring as your posts are on your blogs and here on mine, that call was somehow...warmer, more "real" than all the typed words we've shared, as valuable as they are. I often re-read your posts and replies and emails I've archived, and they're very important to me and something I always want to keep.
Now, compare that to having me stop by, hang out and have some laughs with Lisa and Becca, give each of you a hug. Exponentially better yet!
Conversely, the farther away we as a society get (subtracting proximity, then sight, then sound from the humanity equation) and we become separate, alone, and we lose a piece of what makes us who we are.
Technology is (or at least should be) a great addition or enhancement to the human condition, not a replacement of the vitality of our mutual real-world contact. The moment we lose 1:1, face to face contact is the moment we lose a piece of what makes us human.
At least, that's what I think.
>8 ^ )
Here's a thought: How inclined would be each be to move massive distances from home, away from family, if there were no technology that would allow us to stay in touch with one another? You could say that technology has made it possible for families to spread out all over the nation, even the world, and still stay in touch with one another.
But then you have to ask the question: Is that a good thing? Are we suffering from a disconnectedness that occurs when families are separated by states instead of miles? Are we better off today than we were when three generations lived together in a house?
Remember, we wanted more than anything to live in New York, which we did for a few years. But despite all the phone calls, emails, and frequent flights home we finally concluded that we just missed you all too much to remain out there so far away, and we moved home. It was also very hard for us to watch Rebecca and Alex grow up remotely...every time we got to see them they seemed twice as big as the last time, and we were very conscious of their childhood slipping by while we watched from afar.
New York was a great adventure, but it simply can't hold a candle to casually dropping by to hang out with our families, borrow your minivan to pick up a bedroom set after a pizza dinner, or putting my feet up on your boat as we bore our wives with incessant Fletch/Blues Brothers/Airplane/Caddyshack quotes.
An emoticon can never replace a warm handshake, a wave from a porch swing, or a tight hug. You know this better than anyone, you've seen the difference. It was a big enough deal for you that you walked away from a good career and relocated thousands of miles to put things back the way you felt they should be.
I only worry that there are many out there who are forgetting that, or worse, never expecting it or experiencing it as a priority in their lives in the first place.
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