Now that the MOOC hype has died down and almost no one is arguing that those free online courses will upend the traditional university, are we instead entering a period where online education is having a real impact on the core of higher education? Not just for the for-profit outliers and not just for distance-education titans like Rio Salado College and Liberty University, but for the mainstream? While I would not argue that fundamental change has already occurred, there are some signs of a turning point.
The Babson Survey Research Group, which has tracked online college enrollment for the past 12 years, reports growth from 9 percent of U.S. students taking at least one course online in the fall of 2002 to more than 28 percent in the fall of 2014. The overall growth has slowed recently, but the drastic decrease in for-profit enrollment masks two very interesting numbers:
- Sixty-seven percent of students taking online courses do so at public institutions.
- The number of students at public and private nonprofit colleges who took at least one online course rose by 26 percent in just two years (2012-2014).
Online education is no longer the province of a small subset of colleges and professors. We are well above the 16-to-20-percent level in Everett Rogers’s technology-adoption curve that indicates a shift into the mainstream. As I described in a previous article, the characteristics of people trying out a new approach (primarily professors in this discussion) change significantly after the technology moves beyond the innovators and early adopters. You start getting people who are more cautious and even skeptical about the outcomes and who need more holistic support to make the jump. We are seeing signs that more and more professors accept that online education is inevitable, even in traditional institutions, and is appropriate for a growing number of nontraditional students and a growing number of disciplines.
We see this dynamic at play in the emerging genre of faculty narratives about their explorations of online education. Greg Semenza wrote in December in Vitae about his movement from critique to exploration:
“Believe it or not, debates about the merits of online teaching are more than two decades old. That fact shocked me only because, until this past summer, I’d been so far behind the curve in teaching online courses. I mean actually teaching them — as opposed to weighing in on the practice, regardless of experience. Like so many others, I’d done plenty of the latter.”
Despite his skepticism and spurred on by financial motivations, Mr. Semenza discovered the value of designing a course for the online medium by working in a team. His main takeaway was that online education need not be “intrinsically, and irredeemably, more impersonal than the face-to-face version.” In fact:
“Now that I’ve completed this first course, I feel strongly that Edmundson and other critics — however well-intended — are simply misguided about online learning being too impersonal. I got to know my group of 30 online students as well as, or better, than any undergraduate course I’ve taught in recent years.”
Jonathan Rees, recognizing that online education is here to stay, declared also in Vitae that “somebody’s gotta do it” and committed to start teaching online in the fall of 2016. He also went into the challenge with skepticism, worried about course quality and faculty labor issues. Rather than sit on the sidelines, however, he is taking action, as he describes in his post:
“Unfortunately, complaining about the quality of online courses or citing reasons why they have exploded in recent years will do nothing to change the fact that online education is growing and that its overall quality could certainly stand improvement.…
“My plan is to create a rigorous and engaging online U.S. history survey course while I’m still in a position to dictate terms. After all, if I create a respectable, popular class that takes advantage of the Internet to do things that can’t be done in person, then it will be harder for future online courses at my university (or elsewhere for that matter) to fail to live up to that example.”
We also see this dynamic at play with Penn State World Campus seeing overwhelming demand for its “how to teach online” certificate program. Launched in the fall of 2015, the program expected to enroll 30 students but instead has more than 300.
There is a popular notion of mainstream faculty members’ not accepting online education as legitimate, but the data behind this perception can be misleading. The latest Babson survey notes that skepticism among professors still runs high, and that only a small portion of academic leaders report that their faculty “accept the value and legitimacy of online education.”
The report shows this metric hovering between 27 percent and 33 percent for the past 13 years. But there are two important aspects to interpreting this finding accurately. The first is that it is the perception of academic leaders. The second is that professors can be skeptical but still willing to jump into the fray to discover what is possible, and then play a direct role in improving the quality of online courses.
We also see this dynamic in institutional data. In a broad-based survey I conducted recently of professors at a large research university, only 32 percent agreed or strongly agreed that online learning can achieve outcomes equivalent to face-to-face courses, yet 75 percent have taught online or would be willing to teach an online course.
I believe we are seeing signs that the mainstream of higher education — including professors at traditional colleges and universities who are too often seen as simply against online education — are increasingly willing to teach online courses. And this is true despite their skepticism, or in some cases because of their skepticism. They recognize the need for time to design or redesign courses to adapt them to the online medium, the need for technical and instructional-design support, and the willingness to look at the outcomes and learn.
None of this should indicate that online learning will or should replace face-to-face learning as was claimed with the advent of commercial MOOCs. But it does show that online education is here to stay in higher education and that we might be seeing a turning point in faculty engagement with it.
Faculty skepticism should not be treated as simple resistance to change. Skepticism can be healthy when professors participate in improving online education.
Phil Hill is a partner at MindWires Consulting, co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, and co-producer of e-Literate TV.