The rhetoric of the dot-com era about ways online education could help improve access to college while lowering its cost hasn’t proved accurate, according to one expert in the field who spoke at a conference in Boston this morning. "To date it hasn’t really produced significant cost savings," at least to students, said Richard Garrett, a senior research analyst at Eduventures Inc., a consulting company that tracks trends and investments across the education industry. The company sponsored the conference.
And while now nearly 7 percent of all students — about 1.2 million people — receive their college education through fully online programs, it is unclear whether these are students who would have otherwise attended a bricks-and-mortar institution or whether they come from populations that have been historically underrepresented in higher education, he said.
For most students, the core "value proposition" of online education is convenience, not the "wonders of technology," he said. This is so, said Mr. Garrett, because most of the online education offered today does little more than "replicate the campus experience" via electronic means. "It’s not revolutionary in the sense that it has changed the pedagogy."
New forms of technology that have managed to engage students outside the classroom — iPods, sophisticated cell phones, PDAs, and the like — could change that paradigm, Mr. Garrett said, but challenges remain. "Education demands more of technology" than entertainment.
Mr. Garrett’s dose of reality notwithstanding, an advocate for online education who appeared with him at the conference predicted that higher education will nonetheless flourish.
The same societal trends that have helped spur growth of 20 percent a year in online enrollments — workers’ need for lifelong education and their desire for convenience — will create "a tremendously enhanced demand" for this kind of education, said A. Frank Mayadas, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s grant program for online education. Online education "will be the learning standard within the next 25 years."–Goldie Blumenstyk
The Chronicle of Higher Education The Lost Opportunities of Online Education?