Online Education: Why We Need More of It

Many who argue for a return to a more traditional, rigorous curriculum are also critical of online education. In this blog, I make the case that online education can help scholars reach nontraditional audiences, a cliche to be sure, but one that rings true with my personal experience after 15 years of delivering "distance learning" in addition to my "brick-and-mortar" courses. First, it is no accident that online courses aren't full of the trendy postmodern nonsense that dominates campus offerings. Nonsense flourishes where it is not transparent to the larger world. Online education operates by making itself transparent and open to that larger community. Second, many institutions face stiff financial challenges. While I work at a state university, the online education division is entirely self-financed: not a single taxpayer dime, all revenue comes from tuition of students who sign up for courses. It is no accident that this division is the most entrepreneurial of all our divisions, and most no-nonsense with its offerings (Foucault 101 wouldn't "sell" to our students in the military, single parents working during the day, high school teachers expanding their content knowledge, etc.). Online education can be done badly. There is a possible "race to the bottom" in terms of quality but, as the work of the NAS amply demonstrates, this is also a problem on campus. If anything, the market reality provides a test of what people--not tenured radicals--want from a college education. As an advocate for online education at my university, I submitted the following presentation to my college of liberal arts. For those unsure about online education, I also recommend an excellent 20-minute video presentation that I have posted online (with the permission of the professor).