Online education provides an unprecedented opportunity to transform higher education from an intuitive art to a data-driven science.
By increasing transparency and integrating continuous and systematic quality assessment into a process that once took place behind closed classroom doors at the discretion of independent-operator professors, we have new opportunities to improve outcomes for students who have been underserved or excluded by traditional higher-education providers.
Online Learning: The Chronicle‘s 2011 Special Report
BROWSE THE FULL ISSUE: News, Commentary, and Data
BUY A COPY: Digital and Print Editions at the Chronicle Store
As we see in Complete College America’s 2011 report, “Time Is the Enemy,” the challenges of working with nontraditional students are universal. Even among the nation’s best public four-year institutions, where large cohorts of traditional students post impressive graduation rates, lurking in the shadows are vast numbers of nontraditional students whose outcomes tell a very different story.
It is highly unlikely that institutional quality in the traditional sense is at fault for the poor outcomes of part-time students at these institutions, since presumably the strong-finishing traditional students are in the same classes as those who fare less well. The problem is that what makes for a prestigious institution doesn’t necessarily make for an effective educational environment for students who have a multitude of challenges.
For example, the number of tenured professors with terminal degrees may be meaningless for the part-time student who depends upon the kindness of neighbors to babysit her children while she takes three buses to attend an evening class. For her, fewer trips to campus each week, or having instructors who have practical experience, as opposed to those who have spent a lifetime focused on scholarly pursuits, might be critical to her success. Campus-based clubs and better residential facilities are unlikely to make this student feel a greater attachment to her college community. And on-time graduation may be the last thing this student cares about in setting goals for her future.
Old proxies for quality don’t matter for students who symbolize what the authors of “Time Is the Enemy” call the “new majority.”
Online programs and institutions are positioned to develop new models for serving and evaluating the quality of education for these nontraditional students. At the core of the new models is a systematic, long-term approach to quality assurance, coupled with an increasing reliance on advanced data-mining techniques. Those tools will also allow online institutions to measure quality directly and continuously rather than relying on a set of proxies that measure inputs and outcomes but nothing in between. In other words, rather than see the student go in one side of the college box and then come out the other, either by graduating or by dropping out, we can open the box and monitor how well each gear is turning to help the student progress.
High-quality online providers rely on teams—experts in the field, pedagogy specialists, and technologists—to determine what skills are required for careers in particular areas, to develop learning objectives aligned with those skills, and to create content that enables all students to meet those learning objectives. Many produce standardized curricula to ensure consistency across a program, while others rely on adaptive technologies to provide options for learners based on their individual learning style and learning pace. Of primary importance is the opportunity for all students to benefit from the collective wisdom of an experienced team and to have access to the full complement of learning resources, many of which are available at the touch of a smartphone.
An example of such an adaptive learning environment is the award-winning My Unique Student Experience, or M.U.S.E., platform, an online content-delivery system created by the company for which I work, that allows students to learn in the way that best supports their preferred learning style. Students can elect to experience course content in multiple ways by clicking the “watch it,” “hear it,” “read it,” or “explore it” buttons.
Alternatively, the online technology can automatically sequence the presentation of materials to best support the individual student’s learning style based on the preferences that student has indicated. It is not the professor in the front of the room who decides how a particular piece of content will be delivered, but instead the student at the computer, or the technology itself, that determines the sequence and methodology of content delivery. Some students may want to try an “explore it” activity first and then go back to read text or listen to a lecture to improve performance in places where gaps were obvious. Other students may wish to master the content first, through reading or listening to lectures, and then test their new knowledge through an “explore it” application.
To make adaptive learning effective, teams of faculty and instructional designers must come together, on the basis of their collective experience, to anticipate where students may need additional help or greater challenge, and to develop the content to support the watch-it, hear-it, read-it, and explore-it choices. Faculty and practitioners in the field understand what students need to know, but pedagogy specialists and technologists can help break information into more manageable parts and enhance content delivery through sophisticated simulations, the use of avatars, or the integration of material from other sources, which may be beyond the skill set of an individual professor.
Faculty remain critically important, but their focus moves from preparing lectures to monitoring data about student participation and performance, engaging in rich dialogue with individuals and groups of students, embellishing curricula where appropriate, introducing supplemental resources, and developing new content modules to replace those that are generating less than optimal results.
Feedback on the success of each content module is almost immediate, as opposed to the traditional setting, where months might go by before the professor recognizes that students did not understand a concept. By then it may be too late to figure out where the curricular weaknesses are, or to help students fill the gaps in their knowledge base. And some faculty may just blame the failure on this year’s crop of students and continue to deliver the same material, in the same way, to next semester’s class.
The quality of online curricula is increasingly being examined through sophisticated, systematic processes that include routine “classroom” observations by third-party specialists as well as constant monitoring of students’ activity in all of their courses. In the online environment, instructors can see the amount of time a student spends learning content each day, can observe the student’s patterns of participation, and can identify at a more granular level changes in student behavior that may serve as a warning sign of trouble ahead.
With each student engaged in chat-room discussions, as opposed to a classroom environment in which some students may dominate the conversation and others rarely participate, instructors have ample opportunity to evaluate the quality and frequency of each student’s participation, and to challenge assumptions and identify errors that will get in the way of progress. The online environment even provides tools that allow instructors to understand what each individual contributed toward a final group project.
Quality-assurance assessments may also include measures of environmental factors, such as instructor responsiveness, availability of online library resources, timeliness of technical support, and ease of accessing student-support services. Those metrics may be far more important to nontraditional learners than is the research productivity of the faculty or the number of volumes in a library they will never visit.
Focused more on competencies than on seat time, some online programs track students’ incremental progress through each content module and learning objective. With the click of a button, any student, his or her adviser, or even a potential employer can see all of the work accomplished toward a single learning objective. Students can use this feature to review prior work or archived class materials, and a student’s intellectual growth and accomplishments can be evaluated on the basis of an assessment of his or her entire portfolio. These portfolios are far more informative than a cumulative GPA, which may be an imprecise reflection of the sum of potentially unrelated parts.
For the first time in education history, evaluations of faculty performance and content quality can routinely include an assessment of student performance in subsequent courses and even on the job.
We are still early in this transformation, in which data trump opinion and impression and anecdote. But already it’s clear that these technologies offer tremendous potential for ensuring that students who do graduate have mastered the requisite skills, and that those who withdraw do so for reasons unrelated to quality of instruction or the availability of student-support services.