The Virtual University: Today, boys and girls, let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that a young woman - let’s call her Rachel - gets into her automobile and drives ten miles to a “commuter” university. The school has few on-campus dormitory residents; most drive from elsewhere to attend a day’s classes. Rachel parks her car in a large parking lot, slips on her backpack of books and laptop computer, and begins the half-mile (about 800 meters) trek to her classroom building. Notice, if you will, the absurdity of locating a parking lot that far away from the building. Many would ask, “Whatever were those architects thinking?”
Rachel enters a large lecture hall and takes a seat along with several hundred other students. The lecture hall is shaped like an amphitheater, and the lecturer is seen by Rachel as a very tiny dot way down there at the bottom of the room. The lecturer is nearly invisible. And if it weren’t for the projected image of the lecturer on the adjacent wall, Rachel would hardly be able to see the person. Moreover, the voice of the lecturer must be amplified to be heard by others at the higher end of the lecture hall.
When the lecture begins, Rachel notices that many of the students around her are chatting with one another about things that have nothing to do with the content of the lecture. Their gossip is a major distraction to her. The lecturer, too, is a chirrupy little bird who can hardly be understood. Rachel strains to hear and comprehend the lecture. All in all, it is a very frustrating experience for Rachel.
After the lecture, Rachel retraces her half-mile walk back to the parking lot. It is now raining and Rachel is getting soaked. She utters soft blasphemies with each step, generally aimed at the deranged miscreants who laid out the parking lots, but audible to anyone else who might be listening. She gets into her car and drives ten miles back to her home. She is absolutely furious.
Well, what’s wrong with this picture? In a word: everything.
It may have been useful to arrange a lecture hall like Rachel’s back in the nineteenth-century. But surely the internet-connected twenty-first-century has no need for brick-n-mortar lecture halls and all the attendant paraphernalia necessary to sustain that obsolete model of education. Today, a well-produced lecture could be recorded in a sound studio, edited and packaged in an attractive video. Such a video could be viewed from the comfort of the student’s home via the internet, at any time she so chose to view the video (and as often as she chose to view the video again), without the attendant driving time and mileage, or distractions of gossiping fellow students. Since the amphitheater lecture does not provide for any interaction between the lecturer and the students, why is it necessary to travel to a specific location to hear the lecture? And why is it necessary to burden the student with the fixed costs of support personnel when technology exists to present an exactly similar video lecture without all those lawn-mowing, parking lot-plowing, food-service folks?
It may have been useful to arrange a lecture hall like Rachel’s back in the nineteenth-century. But surely the internet-connected twenty-first-century has no need for brick-n-mortar lecture halls and all the attendant paraphernalia necessary to sustain that obsolete model of education. Today, a well-produced lecture could be recorded in a sound studio, edited and packaged in an attractive video. Such a video could be viewed from the comfort of the student’s home via the internet, at any time she so chose to view the video (and as often as she chose to view the video again), without the attendant driving time and mileage, or distractions of gossiping fellow students. Since the amphitheater lecture does not provide for any interaction between the lecturer and the students, why is it necessary to travel to a specific location to hear the lecture? And why is it necessary to burden the student with the fixed costs of support personnel when technology exists to present an exactly similar video lecture without all those lawn-mowing, parking lot-plowing, food-service folks?
Am I suggesting that internet videos replace all university lectures? Hardly. Many university-level courses are not conducive to video broadcasting. Laboratory courses in the sciences, for example, require brick-n-mortar facilities. But the same is not true of many other areas of study.
Nonetheless, I await your “Yeah-Buts.”
2 comments:
And here's the "yeah,but" :). I agree- having spent enough time in those halls listening to mediocre lecturers, it is often much more fun to play a good talk online instead. But I also think the other parts of going to an institution- ambience, classmates, dialogues with peers, etc.- are worth some part of the experience. I think of it as paying for a dinner cruise- personally, it's as much about the ship and the river as it is about the food.
Your point is well-taken. There are institutional amenities that make the college experience very worthwhile. I remember attending many music recitals at the university, for example, where “music majors” were required to exhibit their skills in instrumental or voice performance. After a few of those recitals, attending those recitals became a regular after-supper event for a handful of us who attended almost every night. In particular, I enjoyed those voice students who collaborated to stage a scene from an opera; those performances generally ran for three to five nights. We often attended every performance.
My fear, one the other hand, is that spiraling fixed costs at the university will make those institutional amenities rather impossible in the future. Except for universities with ample endowments, public schools may face funding cuts tomorrow that will force them to offer Baccalaureate Degrees by DVDs.
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