Can it succeed?

New learning ways

The basic model of university education has remained the same since the days of Socrates. The students would sit in front of the professor who would lecture and answer queries. The essence of the model is the face-to-face interaction between the teacher and the taught.

The correspondence course model started by some universities (specially the so-called open universities) was a change.  But the quality of education imparted through such courses is generally considered much inferior to that provided by the traditional universities. The students get a degree which is not valued highly by the prospective employers.

The advent of the World Wide Web and the rapidly expanding access to internet all over the world is now making possible another model which has the potential to take away a large chunk of the business of the traditional universities. The very high tuition and other costs of attending a traditional university – specially in the developed countries -- is another factor going in favour of the new model.

Now one can register for some courses offered by professors in top-rated universities like MIT or Stanford which are being made available on the internet free or at a cost which is a fraction of what the students have to pay if they wanted to physically attend the same courses at the campus. The course can be taken by thousands of students from different parts of the world at the same time. That is why such a course is being called a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The student also saves the cost of moving and living near the campus.

It has the additional advantage that the student can take the course at a convenient time (when it is offered in multiple time slots) while still working or looking after the household. But what about the quality of knowledge and the value that prospective employers (the market) would place on this kind of education? 

Some believe that there can never be a substitute for face-to-face interaction in the classroom. The students learn from the fellow students as well as the teacher which can not be replicated in a virtual classroom. The students who would opt for such courses on the internet would be mostly those who do not have the qualifications to get admitted to such universities.

Moreover, since the cost is low, many would take the course more casually than otherwise.  The evaluation of thousands of students would not be rigorous. Either there will be no grades or the grading will be by peer review or through some automated objective tests. The employers, therefore, would value this education and the grades obtained by these internet students much less, relative to regular residential students taking similar courses in the campus.

Available information

The other view is that the world has changed. Unlike in the earlier times, there is no need to go to a classroom or even a top university for information gathering. A Google search or Wikipedia can supply the required information. What counts is the ability to make use of available information to solve problems.  So, the employer would not care how the person has learnt; the employer’s concern would be what the employee can do with his learning.

In addition, the lecture itself can be recorded and the student can listen to the lecture as many times as he likes for better absorption at his own pace which is not possible in a physical classroom. The questions and comments by students from all over the world with diverse backgrounds and experiences can be displayed on the computer screen which should be a more valuable tool of interactive learning than the standard classroom interaction between a small number of students from similar backgrounds.

The employers do not have to take the grade at its face value. They can devise their own tests to check the problem solving skills of these students. In other words, the employer would gain by being able to choose from a much bigger universe of students.

What do we conclude from the ongoing debate? Basically, the motivation of the student is the key to education. There are students with different degrees of motivation even in the same class in conventional universities. However, since the screening process of admissions is tougher and the cost is more, the chances of having students with better IQs and motivation are higher in higher ranked universities.

Therefore, the employers would have a bias towards regular students of such universities. Devising their own tests to filter out a few most-suited among thousands of job applicants is not easy, not to speak of the costs involved. Hence the students taking online courses offered by even top-rated universities would have a built-in bias against them.

What is likely to happen in future is that the brick-and-mortar universities would not go out of business but the design and delivery of many of the courses will have to undergo substantial changes, as a result of competition from cheaper and better designed online courses. The focus in the classroom would be more on problem solving, applications of information and questions-answers  instead of lecturing  (no matter whether using the old-fashioned chalk-and-talk method or the more tech savvy power point and laptop) and note-taking on the material  contained in the textbooks.

(The author is a former professor of economics, IIM, Calcutta)