How the Internet is Changing Education

Written by Steve Kaufmann - 19 Comments
Categories: self education

Internet Education

The word “university” would seem to imply the universe, infinity, no limitations. The reality of today’s universities is quite different.

Limitations of the Traditional System

University today is an institution with severe limitations. There are limitations on who gets in, limitations on who is teaching courses, limitations on what courses are offered, limitations on which courses you can enroll in, limitations on when courses are offered and on and on.

What’s more, universities are tremendously expensive. The average cost in North America is in excess of $25,000 per year per student, or around $5,000 for an 8 month course of study in one subject. In Canada, for example, 6.1% of GDP is spent on “higher education”.

The Potential of Online Education

The Internet is a much more promising model. The possible methods of delivery of educational content include video, audio, text, web conferences, blogs, podcasts, forums, and other forms of interactive learning.

Face to face meetings can also be efficiently organized through the web. Age, nationality and language need not restrict this interaction. And the web is accessible 24/7, 12 months of the year, and anyone can access the Internet from anywhere.

Professors, experts, coaches, and facilitators who make their skills and knowledge available on the Internet can choose what to charge, how to charge, or what to make available free of charge. The cost of these services will certainly be much less than the cost of courses at a university.

Interactive functionality and methods of searching for, storing and then reviewing bits of knowledge can make this environment a more effective learning space than the University lecture hall.

If the Internet takes a larger and larger share of education space, governments and other third party funders may well pay for some or most of these costs, just as they do for established educational institutions today. And the cost will be much lower, and the reach much broader, than the model of maintaining students at college.

Self Motivated Learning

The argument against “e-learning” is that learners soon lose motivation. However, e-learning methodology is improving just as a new generation of learners is more comfortable connected electronically than sitting in a class room.

What is more, we are not talking about elementary school children here. The mature life-long learner, whether 18 or 80, should be interested in what he or she is learning or else do something else. I know a large company in France that will pay for formal language classes for its employees, only if the employee spends 6 months on an inexpensive self-study program.

In other words, why should they pay for a learner who is not motivated. The same question needs to be asked by third party funders of college students, namely parents, tax-payers, foundations, alumni, corporations etc..

But there is another piece which will go a long way to help with motivation, accreditation or evaluation; the ticket that everyone goes to university to get.

Independent Evaluation

Society (and the learner) needs that “proof” of what the student really knows. I foresee an evaluation system developing via the web that will be independent of the providers of educational content.

These independent evaluators can include private coaches, or organizations administering various forms of essay and test correction. Test results, and correctors’ and coaches’ comments, can accumulate on a digital education profile (or portfolio) of the learner’s activities, which would also include records of written and oral presentations.

Details such as evaluation, verification and standards for the testers and coaches will have to be addressed. I am, however, confident that the economic cost and fairness of such a system would be superior to the university system that exists today.

Finally, if a truly universal “University” can be created on the web, this will provide peer inspired motivation. Perhaps we will achieve the vision of Ivan Illitch of world-wide, interlocking, learning “convivia “, communities of learning communities.

Steve Kaufmann is a former Canadian diplomat, who has had his own company in the international trade of forest products for over 20 years. Steve founded The Linguist Institute Ltd. in 2002 to develop a new approach to language learning using the web. The new LingQ system for learning multiple languages is now available in Beta. Steve speaks nine languages fluently and is currently learning Russian using LingQ. Steve maintains a blog on language learning.

  • http://www.darksociologist.com Dark Sociologist

    The real question is what is the motivation for students to enter university in the first place? Is it the experience? Is it to get away from parents? Is it to get a piece of paper that says you’ve accomplished something?

    One of the drawbacks of online universities is that it exists in a virtual world. It is not tangible and the alumni may have difficulty having someone accept his accreditation.

    On the other hand, online education is an excellent way for the average individual to simply improve his knowledge base, without having to necessarily prove it to anyone.

    As online education progresses in the future, the main focus will be creating a new method for education and not simply an electronic version of existing methods.

  • http://www.pickthebrain.com John Wesley

    I agree with your point. For many people the most important part of University is getting away from home and breaking out on your own.

    Clearly this can’t be solved online, but for the many people who would like the knowledge without having to incur a great expense, online education could be a great substitute.

  • mollyc

    There is a flaw…

    “And the web is accessible 24/7, 12 months of the year, and anyone can access the Internet from anywhere.”

    Only if you are lucky enough to both have a computer and live in a place with reliable internet access, which is certainly not true for parts of the world that may be able to benefit most from this online education model.

  • http://www.thelinguist.blogs.com Steve Kaufmann

    Obviously the internet cannot provide the partying and social interaction of the university.

    Who should pay for this? Right now it is largely not paid for by the students. Need it cost $25,000 for young people to go off and enjoy extended adolescence.

    Should future success in life be so largely determined by whether a person got to spend 4-6 years at a university. Should all of this learning be limited to this small cohort of people?

    By all means have universities for those who want to pay. Or if it is paid for by public funds, there should be an obligation to make all of the learning content available to a broader group via the Internet.

    As to the issue of Internet and computer availability, we are comparing an expensive, restrictive model, the university, with a less expensive and more widely accessible model, the Internet. If the learning were available I suspect that many villagers in India or elsewhere would figure out how to share Internet access, computers and MP3 payers.

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  • http://www.varsityblah.com/about Eugene (Editor, Varsity Blah)

    Very interesting. I suppose some might feel that an online degree might not be as “robust” as one from an traditional institution. But I guess the whole point is about engaging the passion to learn.

    There’s been too much focus on going to the best schools, getting good grades, and teaching for the test, instead of instilling a desire to learn. This might be a way to correct that.

    http://www.varsityblah.com/who-needs-good-grades

  • http://varsityblah.com/switch-on-your-brain/ Varsity Blah

    Switch On Your Brain…

    They say the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Well, I think there’s a third…STUDYING! This inescapable fact applies to all of us at some point or another. And even after that final bell has rung or we’ve been awarded a degree, th…

  • http://www.betterparentinguniversity.com Mary Olsten

    Online university education is not just a replacement for traditional college education. We have embraced the “online university” model to reach parents who are often struggling with particular issues in the family. Our approach at Better Parenting University is simple – provide quality course content and expert instructors to teach that content. Parents gain the knowledge that they are seeking to fill a gap in their own parenting skills.

    This online university model is one that parents understand and seem to be more comfortable with than other traditional or online approaches to obtaining parenting support and advice.

    I think we will see an increase in other learning topics as technology increases to become more sophisticated, people’s schedules become even more filled, and the convenience of anytime, anywhere access becomes a necessity.

  • ontilogical sacrifice

    Experiments done in the 1960′s with Fred Keller’s (Keller was a psychologist and friend of BF Skinner) teaching system, PSI (Personalized System of Instruction) showed that it was dramatically more efficient for most learners (the downside being that it required more work on the part of the instructor). It also showed that PSI based learning held up over time better (follow up tests given 2 years after a class showed retention by PSI students much better than standard methods).
    A short summary of PSI is this: learning is broken up into modules (a couple days to a week of learning), after each module a student is tested on their retention, they can only go on to the next module when they’ve reached a level of “mastery”. This changes the variable of learning from a grade (bad grades are punitive) to (potentially) a number of credits.
    The problem I see in this system is that it would work well for reading comprehension, arithmetic through calculus, basic psychology, chemistry, physics etc, it would be hard to teach art classes this way. (I was going to add music classes, but it occurred to me that I’ve used computer based learning for piano and it worked well).
    This model seems like it would work particularly well for a knowledge based economy (I should confess that I believe that our existing school system is designed to create good factory workers).
    It seems like it would be well worth the investment to create several multimedia(suited for different learning styles) k-16 level (18 grades * 4 variants * 20 different tracks * 10 (combined teacher & web master) years per subject at 100k year = $36,000,000 to cover 90%+ of what’s in US schools ) classes in PSI of every common subject (reading, composition, mathematics, geography etc).
    Now, how to get that done?

  • ontilogical sacrifice

    mollyc
    You are quite correct regarding this …Only if you are lucky enough to both have a computer and live in a place with reliable internet access, which is certainly not true for parts of the world that may be able to benefit most from this online education model.”
    However, given the cost of a traditional education ($25,000 per year, a small group of students in a remote location can be served FAR less expensively with online learning. The OLPC (one laptop per child,http://laptop.org/) is aimed at allowing learning where there isn’t regular power or wired internet.

    As for people learning to use the computer in the first place, I think they’ll work it out http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1502820.stm

  • Waldo

    Why not the best of both worlds?
    Go party for 2 years, er…I mean,learn those social skills. Come home and sober up for the final 2 years online, and pocket $50,000 if you pass the final.

    Facebook and the like will allow you to retain the very best of education in your first 2 years.

    Florida already experiments with this online education.
    Travel to Waldo, Florida near Gainesville. You may ask “Where’s Waldo?”, but do NOT ask the locals. This is the speed trap capital of the universe. They especially hate out of state plates.

    Imagine a 65 MPH sign on a 4 lane road (2 lanes each direction and a wide median for the sole cop). In one block, speed is 55 MPH; next block 45 MPH; next block 35 MPH; next block 45 MPH (you are leaving Waldo); next block 55; and finally, a block later, 65 MPH again. You just did all of Waldo and the sole fruit stand.
    You also went 23 MPH over the speed limit if you went thru the 35MRH zone at 68 …
    (tho, it would be a no ticket speed before and after Waldo.

    Here is the online part. You can go to Florida Driving School (MUST be an approved site) and take a 5 hour exam. (It can be done in 20 minutes but you are penalized and have to start over if you do a block of test too fast (like the outdoor drivers do).

    This fine education experiment will reduce your fine 30%, or the exact amount of fee to take the test. It will eliminate 4 points. And, the insurance folks are not allowed to consider you as evil as Saddam.
    (Best of luck there). Upon graduation, you get an official certificate. The original MUST be returned to the county (in this case Alachua for Waldo –that sounds almost as funny as saying Managua Nicaragua fast,
    try it…Waldo Alachua…Managua Nicaragua, :) ).
    If the clerk does not get the original and official paper in the right time period, all bets are off, you forfeit 1 of your 5 lifetime chances to do this, and Jeb Bush gives you the death penalty personally.

    After this fine education experiment on the Internet, who could argue that the system does not “pay off”?

    The only hassle you will have over Internet education is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs arguing over which system to use, and Sony supplying horrendous laptops. Kids will just text message each other the answers anyway.

  • Waldo

    Spring forward. Fall back.
    You did not Fall Back your clock.
    If it is 4:25 pm, I am in the ocean.
    This information service was provided at no charge
    by Waldo.

  • http://www.instantdegrees.com Roy

    You forgot to mention how the Mill Universities are beginning to dominate advertising in Education.

  • http://www.wisdomgettingloaded.com/ tracy ho

    what a good idea , maybe new era will learn more daily.
    to your success always
    Tracy Ho
    http://www.wisdomgettingloaded.com/

  • http://varsityblah.com/schools-of-thought/ Varsity Blah

    Schools of Thought…

    Technology is amazing. More recently, it’s opened up the possibility of global education and e-learning. Naturally, there are several implications. Does this mean traditional institutions are losing their power or will they always remain relevant? An…

  • http://www.buyinstantdegrees.com Mike got a degree

    Well: In other words, why should they pay for a learner who is not motivated. The same question needs to be asked by third party funders of college students…

  • http://www.yoursmartmedia.com/ Web Development Gainesville

    Education online is a great form of learning. For me, I did better in college with online classes. Classrooms can be very distracting and this eliminates those distractions.

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    i think internet really change a lot of education!

  • http://www.educationoninternet.info educationoninternet.info

    that was good work! Great job done!