Invitation to an open debate about DL

Not the debate I want to have use other threads for that conversation…(however I do agree with your point)

 

Oy Vey, .. here we go..

 

It's a misnomer and the meaning is far from "exact". Degrees are conferred by organizations not the "internet". You don't need my permission to use this inaccurate term if you like, you have the freedom of speech to do so! I personally believe by doing so, you contribute to the diploma millish attitude surrounding the concept of "online degrees". Better said, degrees through distant learning.

 

Using examples from Degreeinfo:
Risk could be negative or small ROI – Michael
Rick could be the frustration to graduate students– Dave
Risk could be overpriced and undervalued – Dlady
Risk could be bad customer service – Okydd
Risk could be the perception of inferiority in academia – Rvalve
Rick could be the lack of transferability
Risk could be losing accreditation
Risk could be bad reputation – media

I am sure that there are a lot more. Anyway students will try to minimize those risks at the same time getting the best education. That is why Aspen is looking good for many students. It is same concept of investing; seeking the highest return at the lowest risk. A CFA can explain this much better.

 

What do you call a degree earned from the big 3?

Tens of thousands of us have graduated these schools without taking one single course online! However, we did it through distant learning, challenge exams, transfer credit, portfolio, etc. Yet, people lump these schools and graduates into "online degrees" which is completely inaccurate! Online is just one of the platforms used for delivery of distant learning. Even many of the completely online schools require numerous hours of hands on internships and accept previous transfer college credits, have proctored exams, etc. This is a debate about moving forward "distant education".....not "online degrees".

 

Your constant correcting of people is becoming irritating. Please stick to the original topic.

 

I think this is a straw man argument, that somehow because there are bad actors all schools are tainted. How many stories have you heard (or told) about partying your freshman year on campus, never going to class, and then cramming for 10 hours and getting a B+ on the final and in the class. Not the place for this debate but quality doesn’t have much to do with the argument (in my opinion)… Red Hearing…[/QUOTE]

A few bad apples in for profit online schools are a big deal; whereas, a few bad apples in B&M schools may not taint all B&M schools. In Accounting the term is materiality. Online for profit schools are trying shake off the perception of accredited diploma mills not B&Ms.

 

Welcome to the world of debate. I believe this is part of the original topic or debate! Moving distance education forward not "online degrees". What better place than Degreeinfo to get this message out there? I am not picking on you personally!

 

I'm not interested in engaging in nitpicking here, so I will allow you to have the last word on this. Hopefully that will end this branch of the discussion.

 

Mt last word

Amen........

 

Agreed. Students aren't customers, they're the product.

 

I like that! "Students are the product"

Successful business persons ask themselves the question, "Who's the customer?"

 

Upon seeing that title, my first thought was that I don't know what "moving distance education forward" means in practice. Probably more than half of American colleges and universities already offer some DL, so it's already pretty forward. But obviously there are areas where it could do better.

I can't argue with 'overpriced'. Unfortuately, I don't really understand the economics of DL programs and don't know what kind of costs they face and what the small details are. What is fluff and what is truly essential?

Turning to 'undervalued', I'm even less sure. Undervalued by whom, in what situations? I might be guilty of it myself. I don't believe that DL is equally appropriate for all majors and just in general, I think that full-time B&M education at strong schools is probably superior to existing DL in most cases. That doesn't mean that DL is worthless, but I do think that oftentimes it's sub-optimal.

My own belief is that in order to receive full acceptance in the academic (and professional) worlds, DL will have to recognize that it will inevitably be judged by precisely the same criteria that B&M universities are already judged by. At the doctoral level, that's going to be faculty strength, research productivity, intellectual excitement, grants and awards, collaborations, and so on. At this point, few if any DL programs seem prepared to (or even interested in) playing that game.

That obviously generates a lot of griping in the faculty clubs, which probably lowers academics' opinion of DL. But I'm a student, and my perspective isn't that of the professors. I'm far less interested in their labor issues than they are. One of the problems with the professional literature on DL is that it's written by academics and their professorial labor issues are often pushed front and center, receiving more attention than they perhaps deserve. I'm more interested in the quality of individual programs and in how well they are delivered to me, the student.

On the other hand... many of the things that "satisfy" professors might also be very good for students. Professors are educators after all and most of them probably enjoy teaching and mentoring students. If the reason for their dissatisfaction is that they don't have the opportunity to teach as they believe they should, students need to sit up and pay more attention.

In some cases, professors are eliminated entirely and all we are left with are independent study and exams.

I don't think that this is necessarily a DL-specific problem though. But DL can make it a lot worse. There's resistance to huge class-sizes on campus when lecture-hall classes start to resemble the crowds at football games. But with DL that problem's hidden from sight, and each remote student kind of feels like he or she is communicating with the professor one-on-one. The amount of attention that each student receives falls dramatically though, and interactivity suffers. Interactivity, the back-and forth conversational aspect, is one of the most important variables in DL, in my opinion. We end up with students studying on their own with little or no guidance, skimming study-guides and taking overly-easy exams, and that's minimal higher education.

By whom? My own skepticism about DL is because I don't think that it's typically as good, academically speaking, as strong full-time B&M programs. There's less guidance and mentoring, and less intellectual excitement and research productivity. I expect that many employers share similar concerns.

To some extent that overlaps with my concerns, I guess, viewed from the professorial angle. If professors are replaced with and reduced to poorly-qualified adjuncts, hired as temps to teach (however minimally) huge classes, the whole thing will end up second-rate, at best.

I'm largely unmoved by professorial labor issues qua labor issues. But I pay closer attention when they impact the education that students receive. If online doctoral programs don't have permanent faculty and don't host any significant scholarly or research activity, then you have won't just have unhappy faculty, it will be a crappy doctoral program for its students as well. If professors in undergraduate programs don't get the opportunity to interact with students and to teach them as they think they should, the students are going to suffer.

Right. I couldn't agree more.

It isn't just the hated (by professors) 'for-profits' doing this. Many non-profit and state B&M universities run their DL programs as if they were money engines, trying to generate additional revenue with which to fund other programs. We even see the 'for-profit/non-profit' distinction breaking down, as public and non-profit schools actually contract out their DL programs to for-profit providers to teach, essentially selling the right to use the university's name.

 

We might even need to tinker with the definition of an online school. Isn't the definition of an online school just one that provides most of its instruction online?

On the other hand, one could nearly complete an associates degree from the local community college through the online modality. What we are really talking about here is blended modality instruction... is the online modality valid? Most certainly. Nearly every brick and mortar school allows its professors to send email, launch course websites, and administer quizzes online. Some also host video versions of their lectures, etc.

So, really, what the heck is an online school, if brick and mortar schools deliver the bulk of their content online anyway? Electronic texts and hardcopy books are used by both types of schools. Once higher bandwidth Internet is available everywhere and video conferencing is incorporated across the curriculum, what will an online school be?

If the professors in a brick and mortar school interact with all their students online, are they not part of an online campus delivering online degrees at that school already?

 

Looks like you and Delta are forming a new facet of DI. We'll call you the Semantics Police.

 

I agree. Rather than compete with the traditional B&M doctoral degrees, it appears that many of the schools offering online degrees are attempting to create a different sort of doctoral degree. Because of the lack of "faculty strength, research productivity, intellectual excitement, grants and awards, collaborations, and so on" the degrees may not be as prestigious as a traditional doctorate. Would you agree that they are a sort of "doctorate light"? Tastes great, less filling.

 

Well Dlady, I believe you hit the nail on the head. The current DL model is seething with individuals whom treat DL as a business opportunity. Many DL universities remind me of many career colleges that charge ungodly tuition rates for training in a career barely earning minimum wage. (Like those seen on TV)

 

Yes, and the commercials make it appear that the student becomes affluent after graduating. They are portrayed as enjoying the "good life" because of their degree. It's often a case of deceptive advertising and borderline fraud.

 

This is apparently a more difficult conversation than I had thought. One of my weaknesses is that once I research something and think I understand it, I assume everyone else does also.

One item that doesn’t seem to be common experience is separating “distance education” from “schools that provide only distance education”. Since that distinction seems muddled, I can’t really respond to a lot of the above posts because it would take more time than I have available to untangle the different concepts as presented. My intention was to focus a debate on the format, not the schools.

Another topic that came up is risk, which is interesting, however it seems like the intent is again to focus on the risk of going to a lesser known or smaller school, not the risk of the learning format.

I still believe that the distance education format, more specifically internet based classes, has had a lot of great innovations over the past 10 years, and is currently very good. From a student standpoint I would even say they are a little better than very good; however to continue to move the model forward (I don’t subscribe to the idea that things get pretty good and then just stop evolving), so to continue to move things forward, I, anyway, am going to start working on the faculty experience, where I believe there still remains much opportunity.

I see some of the mentality here in the thread, that we don’t need to concern ourselves with the experience of the faculty, it is no concern, they are workers and if they can’t do it someone else can. This is exactly some of the views that I run into daily, and I don’t think it is the right view.