The Future of Online Education: Three Competing Perspectives

How superior is “on-line education” to the “correspondence courses” that have been around for generations? In Evelyn Waugh novels, naive lower middle class dweebs are always taking correspondence courses, while the rich go to Oxford and Cambridge.

In my own (fairly exotic) country, France, universities are weakened by the socalled “grandes écoles”, which enjoy a high reputation under the Status and the Signaling models. Now the thing is that some positions in the public service are legal monopolies for people coming from the grandes écoles, and then under a system of mutual parasitism, some of the top civil servants become managers of big companies. So competition is considerably distorted. I predict the staus quo in favour of brick-and-mortar grandes écoles.

Technology gives us many more choices and alternatives that don’t necessarily result in wholesale replacement of institutions, processes, traditions, methodologies, etc. The hand wringing over the “the future of A” and “the future of B” is misplaced energy. Most changes will be incremental and we will integrate those changes…and when an innovation is indeed revolutionary, it is obvious to all of us.

At a certain point in the future, we will start to see a small number of managers and executives that have an “on-line” educational background: they will not be biased against job candidates with a similar education, and will hire them if they fit the job.

At that point the dam breaks, people do the math and go with the low-cost, high quality on-line solution.

Would the accelerated (one-course-a-month) format of the for-profit universities (National, Phoenix, etc.) be categorized closer to bricks-and-mortar or to on-line?

They would seem to have the main feature of the Human Capital Model in that they concentrate on marketable skills building in a classroom setting but without all the time (and money) spent on socializing as in a traditional campus university. They would also seem to meet the requirements of the Signaling Model in that completion of a degree program tells a potential employer something about the graduate’s intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity.

There would not seem to be any Status Good value from completion of a for-profit university degree but then there is probably not much from most public and private non-profit universities either.

Except for the protection and subsidies provided to traditional public and non-profit universities by governments it would seem the for-profit accelerated university would endure over either of the other formats.

Somewhere in this analysis you should talk about brick and mortar colleges killing the golden goose.

Employers aren’t actually getting the traits that are supposedly being signalled by brick and mortar graduates. Students, at least some of them, aren’t going to get the wage premium they were expecting when they took on a six figure debt load.

Not only is there attractive competition on the online side, but the deal, on both sides, is getting steadily worse on the brick and mortar side.

I think Arnold is right about us hitting a tipping point . . . eventually.

I think you are ignoring the importance of self-regulation and discipline in online learning. Provided the summative learning assessments are rigorous, online learning success should be an excellent signal for highly motivated, highly disciplined individuals who can excel in a 21st century knowledge economy. If you want someone who can take on a task and be trusted to plan it and carry through, pick people who have demonstrated the capability.

Matt C. wrote:

Employers aren’t actually getting the traits that are supposedly being signalled by brick and mortar graduates…

That is true, but unfortunately employers and professional organizations are not pushing for more rigor in undergraduate studies. Instead, they are pushing for more schooling. Certifications that required associate degrees now require bachelor degrees. Professions that required bachelor degrees now require master degrees. But, in some fields advanced degree coursework is no more rigorous than undergraduate coursework. The declining quality of higher education eventually will trigger a collapse, but that may be decades away (especially as more and more grads will be employed by governments that believe our higher education system works well).

I wonder about the quality of online classes that teach “useless knowledge” like most of my college level language classes were for me. To get decent grades in those classes, I actually needed external discipline and work ethic. For my STEM classes, I needed much less external discipline and work ethic since the opportunity costs of those classes were either very low or I could very easily relate what I was learning to my future paycheck.

In response to Philo:
Online and signaling – cull the herd – provide honest and complete assessment and grading of students in the institution – no more grade inflation and external (parental – legal) interference. Period. If you are afraid of true assessment – and bad grades will “hurt the brand” – then your school fails to gain influence.
If the Ivies gain status by their acceptance of the best – the onlines must seek to produce the best by superior training.
Off topic, but: The Feds only demonstrate their idiocy by looking at passing rates in the JC world and elsewhere; let all in – and fail those who do not meet the standard. No harm, no foul – nice try, come again.

One point that doesn’t seem to have been covered is the quality of the degree. If I was setting up an online college I think I would be trying to create a credible signal that graduates would be required to meet higher standards.

I don’t think people realize that you can use online education that is selective, to signal intelligence and conscientiousness. Some research shows students learn on average about as much in online approaches as classroom approaches currently. The interesting part is that the same studies also show conscientiousness being a better predictor of outcomes in online approaches. Those who lack it do worse, those who don’t do better than in the classroom.

But leaving that aside, surely they top 5% of a Googleversity would have more than nearly any average student of a regular universities and at the same time there are far too many in those 5% for the Ivy Leagues to absorb them. This is especially true since Googleversity would be global.

Unlike traditional education, the power of big data will be easy to apply to optimize the online experience. Imagine what data mining wizards or even automated systems could do to optimize the learning experience once they have a good data. What could you learn from every click, every solved exercise and every question of say 20 million students that have learned about Statistics. How much better could it get?

Udacity run by the Google researcher Sebastian Thrun seems rather close to that and there are signs they know this and are counting on it.

Online education suffers from a severe adverse selection problem, because the students most eager to avoid traditional education tend to be deficient in one or more of these traits – especially conformity to the established social norm that young people should go to a traditional college.

You’re ignoring the possibility of different signals by those completing online educations. Online students will signal the ability for self-motivation & independent work — and a lack of need for the spoon-feeding and hand-holding that happens in the traditional model. Also, online degrees will probably offer a much more objective measures of performance (vs the grade inflation endemic in traditional institutions). At least some employers in some fields may come to prefer these signals.

Given your model, online will completely replace community colleges. Which will be a pretty significant impact.

Employers will ‘get the signal’ when one of their competitors begins running circles around them.

It’s really hard to explain this to someone who hasn’t taken an in depth class through Stanford (coursera) or Udacity (spinoff from Stanford). It’s like trying to explain the internet to someone who’s never used a PC with a mouse.

Meanwhile, MIT and Harvard are busy playing catch up.

Some commenters above suggest that it will depend on the type of studies. I think that’s partly right. But the best way to consider the problem is: what powerful existing groups could push things online:

1. How much of online education will be driven by big state universities as a way to slow/stop the increase in tuition?

For example, say that Michigan State says you can either wait until next term to take [name an oversubscribed class] in person, or you can take the online version. Either way your transcript will show the same class taken. In very little time, the school can convert a big group of people to the largely-online option. The school can avoid increasing classroom space etc… from the first year, then in a few years it can start saving on needing to charge most students room and board. And the state universities could also say that you can get a degree from the main university even if you only ‘attend’ a local version of the school near your home town.

Within a few years, tuition can be spent almost solely on administrators for year-abroad programs!)

2. When do big reputable employers start to pay for their existing employees to do the _____ Academy or ____ University in [name your science/other technical field] online instead of night school or spending a year going back to school? Not secretarial or administrative school, but substantive work. When Intel and Amgen are vouching for an online program by ‘sending’ their graduates there, that will brand the program as a place for success.

3. How could a large enough number of highly capable and not-too-weird 17-18 year olds be gathered together to form some kind of class that could, if done ten years in a row, help to develop a positive reputation for a new branded online program? I’d guess that it would be by an already-prestigious university (maybe a state school system like UC, Wisc., Mich., SUNY…) creating a largely online degree program with exams still taken in person though largely graded by computer. The state buys participation by offering free education to top high-school graduates who accept the online school degree.

Online education may not work for education dealing with the traditional engineering disciplines (read non-IT engineers) and medicine. You will have do the practicals with microprocessors, oscillators, furnaces and cadavers in brick and mortar labs.

I would not be sanguine about the prospects of the current institutional arrangement of higher education.

I think the most likely course is that higher Ed will be disaggregated. The educational parts will quickly be siphoned off by the likes of Udacity, Khan Academy or “competency based” models like Western Governors. This will significantly reduce the value proposition of standard University, as only signalling and status would remain. Those also could be achieved by other means, and without the “overhead” associated with education, such provision will be more cost efficient.

Heck, simple work experience is a good signal in my mind. Holding down a job for four years (with maybe a promotion thrown in during that time) is a very strong signal.