What’s an Online Ivy League Degree Worth? Who Knows?

Dawid Ryski for The Chronicle

On the first day of class, no matter what I’m teaching, I begin with the same question: Why are we in the same room?

We certainly don’t have to be. And we got another reminder of that last week, when my own employer — the University of Pennsylvania — announced the Ivy League’s first fully online undergraduate degree. It will be aimed at working adults and other nontraditional students, who often can’t get to campus.

And they often can’t afford Penn’s enormous sticker price, either, which is why the online degree will be less expensive than our regular B.A. That’s a good thing, because it will allow more students, from a wider array of backgrounds, to matriculate here.

But what will they be getting from us, besides our Ivy League imprimatur? And will it be as good — in every sense — as our regular undergraduate instruction?

It’s hard to know, because most colleges have refrained from making a rigorous or sophisticated effort to evaluate classroom instruction. I taught for 20 years at New York University, and I was observed in my classroom by a colleague exactly once, during my first semester. Since coming to Penn two years ago, I haven’t been observed at all. What does that tell you about the value we attach to judging and improving our teaching?

Sure, my students fill out rating forms about me each semester. But colleges are supposed to be about generating and disseminating knowledge, and the best knowledge says that students aren’t very effective judges of how much they have learned. Their evaluations can tell you whether the professor is engaged and available, and that surely matters. But the evaluations can’t indicate whether the students are obtaining “strong communication skills, understanding of different cultures and perspectives, and the ability to apply their knowledge to nuanced, complex scenarios with insight, perspective, and empathy.”

That’s what our new online degree promises. And of course I support those goals, for any undergraduate program. Indeed, I can’t imagine a reasonable argument against them.

But I’m troubled that we don’t seem to be applying these same skills, abilities, and capacities to the question of teaching itself. So we really have no idea whether our online degree will have the same quality as our regular courses. We are all flying by the seat of our pants.

That’s also why I find the debate about online learning so dissatisfying. One team says it will make things better, and the other says it will make things worse. But to sustain either claim, you have to know what’s happening now — and in most cases, we don’t.

The best thing that could come out of the online revolution is a renewed focus on teaching, no matter what the medium. Everyone at the university should have to address the same question I ask at the start of class: Why are we in the same room? What do the students in my classes get from the experience that they couldn’t get online? And what might an online course provide that my face-to-face classes can’t?

Alas, this isn’t a line of inquiry that most colleges seem in a hurry to engage. Marshall McLuhan famously said that the medium is the message, but our own institutional messaging pretends that the medium doesn’t matter. For example, the website for Penn’s new online degree calls it “an Ivy League education, without an asterisk.”

We doth protest too much, don’t you think? If there was no need for an asterisk, why are we calling attention to it? To me, the slogan communicates the opposite of what it claims. Surely there will be some difference between online and regular degrees. We just don’t know what it is, and, worst of all, we don’t want to know.

When I put the question about why we are in the same room to my students, they often reply that online classes are “impersonal.” That echoes a long history of undergraduate critiques of college instruction, going back more than a century.

In the 1920s, when prosperity fueled a huge jump in enrollments, students complained about crowding into enormous lecture halls to hear the stray mumblings of incoherent (and often inaudible) professors. Institutions responded by creating honors programs, where select students received instruction in smaller seminars.

Forty years later, amid the upheavals of the 1960s, students again charged that their classes were too large and impersonal. They also objected to the use of “programmed instruction” and other new teaching technologies, which threatened to separate them still further from faculty, and from each other.

“Colleges develop teaching machines, mass-class techniques, and TV education to replace teachers, to cut costs in education and make the academic community more efficient and less wasteful,” warned the 1962 Port Huron Statement, which triggered a decade of student protest. The statement’s italics punctuated its critique of so-called corporate values at the university, which had abandoned the “liberating heritage of higher learning” for the almighty dollar.

Yet online learning is different from earlier technologies, its advocates say, because it is “personalized” rather than impersonal. It can be tailored to the skills, interests, and needs of each student. It’s the antidote to the gigantic lecture class, where individuality is suppressed or ignored.

Maybe. But that isn’t what we hear from students, who typically praise online classes for their expedience rather than their instruction. “If there is a class you don’t want to take, take it online and get it out of the way,” one student told the sociologist Steven G. Brint, a professor at the University of California at Riverside.

So online classes are “personal” in the sense that they allow students to study whenever and wherever they like. As best we can tell, however, most of them have not provided the transformative personal experience that a truly liberal education promises.

But neither have most of our face-to-face classes, which is the real elephant in the room. And we all need to own up to that, whether we’re in the same room or not.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He writing a history of college teaching in the United States since 1890.