In this paper I address several important, pedagogical, issues concerning the offering of college courses over the internet. As I have observed the emergence of on-line education within academia, I have seen some faculty rush in with enthusiasm without seriously considering how on-line courses may lower the quality of education, and I have seen other faculty angrily attack on-line education without realizing its potential to enhance education. I believe that on-line education has the potential to make a significant contribution to higher education. I also believe that without some thought and care it can lead to a lowering of our educational standards. It is my hope that this paper will contribute to the beneficial use of the internet in education.

Metaphors are a useful form of thought for they allow us to understand one thing by equating it with something else that we understand more fully. There are, however, some metaphors that arise in the discussion of on-line education that do more harm than good, as they distort more than they illuminate the essence of education.

a) Education is the delivery of information. This metaphor is usually accompanied by the assertion that the internet is the most efficient method for delivering information, and that—in turn—is followed by the conclusion that more courses should be on-line.

I would like to focus on the primary assertion that education is essentially just the delivery of information. While the delivery of information is an important aspect of a course, it is only one element, and education can not be meaningfully reduced to that element alone. In a following section--where I examine what an on-line education should accomplish--I list what I consider to be the other crucial elements of a course.

b) The student is a consumer. This metaphor reframes education as a typical business, supplying goods to a consumer. While it is important to consider what will attract students to a program, if we let a business metaphor direct our behavior to too great a degree then we will destroy education. If we think of the students as consumers then we direct our thoughts towards what will attract them, for in the market place 'the truth is that which sells'. But do we really want to base the content of our courses on what the students want to hear rather than on what they should know? If we go down this road then we arrive at some disturbing consequences: classes that are as informative, thought provoking, and uplifting as the local television news; a slow escalation of violence, sex, and humor (preferably a combination) in our course content; commercial breaks during lectures; and corporate sponsorship of exams. The only factor that has kept this from happening already is a shared, cultural understanding that education has other priorities: that the truth should be told even if it is unpopular; and that it is more important to get a good education at school than it is to be entertained (though combining the two is nice).

What Is Inevitably Lost In an Online Education.

I believe that no matter how clever we are, there are some aspects of an education that are inevitably lost when the education is provided on-line.

Campus Life: Going away to college is an incredible experience, it matures us and changes us beyond what we learn in our courses. I think it would be a loss to the students, and to our society, if more students stayed at home to learn over the internet. It is relevant to note, however, than many students who take on-line courses also attend on-campus courses; they take on-line courses in place of regular courses that they cannot fit into their schedule. Thus an increase in internet courses does not necessarily lead to fewer students on campus (though lowering the number of students physically on campus is the goal of some of its proponents).

Full Communication: Only a small fraction of the communication between people survives when that communication is reduced to written form. A gesture, a significant pause, a twinkle in the eye, a furrowed brow, a touch on a shoulder, a sympathetic tone of voice all convey crucial information. This nonsyntactic communication is our primary means for conveying our integrity, our concern for the student, our passion for our discipline, and our respect for the pursuit of truth and understanding. It is also the primary means for a student to communicate to the professor during a lecture, information concerning whether the student understands, is confused, is interested, is bored, etc. An internet class will always be a reducing valve to this type of communication.

Empathy and Courage of Commitment: Many students, often those who are reluctant to speak out in a class, find it easier to communicate their views over the internet. This is both good and bad; it is good that over the internet students may be more willing to say what they think, it is bad that they are let off-the-hook of standing up for what they believe, face-to-face, with someone who may disagree. When we don’t have to face to whom we speak then civility of discourse can suffer, as can our appreciation that those who disagree with us are people with whom we can relate and empathize.

On-line courses have many of the same options for evaluating student performance as do traditional courses. Multiple-choice, matching, and fill in the blank questions can be presented and graded by contemporary on-line course development tools. Some of these development tools offer options that are not normally available in traditional testing environments, including immediate feedback and comments tagged to specific wrong answers. Essay questions can also be asked in an on-line course. They are not graded automatically but are instead sent to the instructor or teaching assistant for evaluation and feedback.

An important issue for on-line courses is how to insure that it is the student, and not some friend, whose performance is being evaluated. On-line courses face the same challenge here as do traditional correspondence courses. There are three approaches to addressing this concern.

a) One approach to addressing this concern is to ignore it. Some on-line courses do nothing to prevent someone else from doing a student’s work

b) A second approach is to take steps that appear to address the concern but actually do not. This is not as facetious as it sounds. A number of internet courses and certification programs advertise that they take steps to limit cheating, but a closer examination reveals that the steps they take can be so easily overcome that they are mere window dressing. Some of them attempt to keep someone other than the student from taking an on-line exam by requiring a password, yet nothing stops the student from giving the password to a friend. Other courses claim to rule out cheating by not letting students take the test more than once, but this also does not stop the student from having a friend take the test. There are other, good, reasons to require passwords and to limit the number of times a student may take a test, but they do not solve the problem of having someone else take the test on-line in place of the registered student. I have yet to see a way to prevent this type of cheating when a student is allowed to take an exam in an unproctored testing environment.

c) A third approach to resolving this concern is to require that at least some of the testing during the course take place in an environment that provides adequate proctoring. Institutions of learning have been offering this service for years in support of correspondence courses.

Before leaving this topic I would like to respond to an argument I have frequently encountered: that it is acceptable for on-line courses to ignore the problem of students not taking their own tests as the same situation can be found in large, traditional, on-campus, courses (where the problem is also ignored). My first response is that it is not a good thing that large traditional courses fail to limit this type of cheating, it is an unfortunate situation that academia has allowed to develop in the name of greater efficiency. If it is not a desirable situation, than it cannot be used as a justification for allowing it to spread. My second response is that while it is impossible to completely prevent cheating, I believe I have an obligation to education and to my students to make cheating difficult and risky. If I were a student I would find it much easier and less scary to sit at a friend’s computer in their house and take a test for them, than to go to one of their classes and impersonate them. My third and final response is that large, impersonal, courses constitute only a part of the traditional courses taken by a student. By the time the students graduate they will likely be known personally by at least some professors of smaller, upper division, courses. The time, expense, and risk of having someone take their place in all of their classes is immensely greater than having various people fill in for them during on-line testing. In programs offering a complete degree over the internet this form of cheating moves from a being an option in a few large, lower division, classes to being an option in all courses taken by the student in pursuit of a degree.

I believe that on-line courses should generally require that at least a portion of a student’s grade be obtained from a proctored exam. It is inconvenient but I see it as a necessary step to insure educational integrity. If many instructors hold to this position then the supply of proctored test-taking centers should increase to meet the demand. The manner in which many on-line courses are funded should provide a revenue stream to finance such centers. I do not advocate, however, that all on-line courses should be required to include proctored exams, for not all courses involve the type of work that can be evaluated with an exam, nor do I wish to push my pedagogical criteria upon others. My primary concern is that in the drive to bring courses on-line that this very important issue is not being adequately addressed or thoughtfully discussed within academia.

Though it has some definite disadvantages, on-line education does have some intriguing pedagogical advantages compared to traditional formats. So much of our teaching style is influenced by our traditional resources (lineal text books and lineal lectures) that it is not until one steps out of that realm that the exciting potential of on-line education becomes evident.

The time constraints of traditional classes put a definite limit on the number of student comments and questions that can be handled during class, and the situation is worse in larger classes where a corresponding smaller percentage of students can take the floor. In an on-line course it is possible for all students to contribute to class discussions. Threaded discussions can be established where the students respond to other students' viewpoints as well as contributing their own. While the quality of the communications drop (in that they are limited to syntactic communication) there can be an increase in the quantity of the communications. Increasing the quantity of interactions between students, and between students and the instructor, provides a means to break out of the passive role that many educational contexts engender in their students.

On-line education also makes possible an immediate application of the material being presented. Assignments involving the use of the computer (e.g. to access internet based tools, to explore supplementary information, or to discuss issues with other students or the professor) can be intertwined with the presentation of the material itself. This hands-on and immediate application of the material has obvious pedagogical advantages.

The computer, of course, can play a larger role in the course than just allowing information to flow between the various participants, for the computer can be a participant itself. In the simplest use of computer-as-participant the computer can grade assignments, provide immediate feedback to the students, and tailor its feedback to the specific error in the student's response. Computer interactions with the students can also play a more sophisticated role. It is possible to design programs that interact with students in such a way that the interaction evokes and installs the cognitive skills the students need to succeed in a course. Examples of how an internet program can teach the cognitive skills underlying a deep understanding of statistics can be seen in the work of my colleague Dr. Tom Malloy at our internet site www.utah.edu/stat.

Computer presentation of material also frees the instructor from the linear constraints of textbooks and lectures. The ramifications of this liberation only become evident after one has played with it for a while. In a 'History of Psychology' internet course that I am currently designing, for example, students travel through the history of psychology many times, each time adopting a different perspective or answering a different question. The first time through the history they learn the basic facts (e.g. people, events, paradigms). On subsequent journeys through the history they follow the evolution of basic themes in psychology (e.g. reductionism, determinism, empiricism). On another journey the students look at the experiments that have played a vital role in the history of psychology. On yet another journey they examine the metaphors that underlie the various schools of thought. This repeated journeying through the same history with different perspectives supports many pedagogical goals: the information is retained better through repetition; information is retained better through establishing its connections to other material; and--most importantly--the student will eventually come to see the pattern which connects all of the material into a unified whole. While such an approach could conceivably be accomplished in a textbook, it can be accomplished much more elegantly and effectively in a computer program.

On-line education should be held to the same standards as traditional education. To accept a lower standard would be to assert both that on-line education really is inherently inferior and that somehow that is acceptable. I have listed below some criteria that I suggest are applicable to college courses (both on-line and traditional). It is not my assertion that all courses should meet all criteria, for I know of no course that does. I am offering these criteria, instead, as a measuring stick, as a means of assuring that we don't accidentally 'lower the bar' for an on-line course by failing to make explicit what we want a course to accomplish.

a) Learning should be an active process. Students should be required to do more than passively soak up information (from a lecture, book, or web page) and then give it back at test time. Students should be required to engage in such activities as seeking out additional information on their own, thinking critically about that information, and arguing their viewpoints with others.

b) Teaching should be an interactive process. Students benefit from interacting with each other, they also benefit from interacting with the instructor. On-line education offers the potential of greatly enhancing the interactivity of a course through chat rooms, email, and the student's interaction with the software. A computer can uniquely alter the presentation of material to fit each student’s needs and learning style. While an instructor may be more flexible and skilled than a computer in accomplishing such a deed, the instructor is also less likely to have the time to do so for each student.

It should also be noted that instructors benefit from interacting with students. Through such interactions the instructors can alter the flow of material to uniquely fit the dialog they are having with a particular class, they can improve on their selection of material for the next time they teach the course, and--very importantly--they can also improve their teaching skills. Part of both the allure and danger of on-line education is that the professor can get by with fewer interactions with the students, leaving that task to the computer program and to student chat rooms. The allure is that more students can be reached in a class (by lessening the instructor's involvement with each student). If the course is fairly automated then it is also possible for the instructor to write it once, and then be paid for future enrollments that take little of the instructor's attention. In either case the danger is that the instructor is taken somewhat out of the loop of interaction that would otherwise lead to improvements in the course and to improvements in the instructor’s teaching skills. To make matters worse, the effort required to improve an on-line course is sometimes significantly greater than that required to change a lecture, providing a disincentive for having an on-line course evolve in quality.

c) Education should serve several roles. I stated earlier that it is a mistake to equate education with the delivery of information. A more complete list of the various roles of education is provided below:

When compared to traditional education, on-line education has inherent advantages and disadvantages in meeting some of these criteria. In evaluating whether putting a course on-line adds value or subtracts value from the educational experience, the totality of our criteria should be evaluated. It would be a shame if a loss of quality in education is tolerated (or perhaps not even noticed) in the enthusiasm to put courses on-line, or if opportunities to enhance the quality of education are lost due to a summary judgement that on-line education is inherently inferior.

If we think about on-line education as just being a more efficient (or more entertaining) means of teaching the way we have always taught, then the pedagogical disadvantages of on-line education outweigh the advantages. What is truly exciting about on-line education is that it offers the potential to evoke a qualitative revolution in our teaching capabilities. Our current pedagogy has evolved largely as the product of pragmatic constraints (e.g. time, class size, linear text books). Computers have lifted many of those constraints, and the new territory to be explored is vast and exciting. The questions of whether this potential will be realized, and whether the benefits can grow to the point where they can compensate for the inevitable losses from an on-line education, have yet to be answered. Success, I believe, depends upon bringing together sophistication in pedagogy, sophistication in technology, and an overt resolve that the quality of the educational experience is the most important criterion.