From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Future On-Line Courses of 1,000? (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 13:36:13 -0600
On-Line Courses of 1,000 Students Will Become Common, Industry Group Says
By DAN CARNEVALE
Within 20 years, on-line classes with as many as 1,000 students will replace
traditional lecture courses on campus, according to a forecast of the
distance-learning industry to be released this weekend.
The author of the forecast, William A. Draves, says that students will
benefit from the development of large classes, because each student will
have the opportunity to interact on line with many more classmates.
"The more people who contribute, the more you learn," says Mr. Draves,
president of the Learning Resources Network, a distance-learning industry
group (http://www.lern.org). The forecast is to be released here Saturday at
the group's annual conference.
Teaching a large on-line class should not present a difficult workload for
professors, Mr. Draves says. Questions from students can be posed to the
entire class, so that others may suggest answers. Any questions the
professor does respond to can be answered once for all the class to see, he
says.
Instructors for large on-line classes probably could rely heavily on
multiple-choice examinations that can be graded by a computer, because
grading essay tests would be time consuming, Mr. Draves says.
However, Jean McGrath, director of student services at Penn State World
Campus, the distance-education arm of Pennsylvania State University, says
having such large classes on line would be difficult for both the professors
and the students.
The Penn State World Campus enrolls no more than 30 to 40 students in most
classes. That makes it easier for professors to handle inquiries from
students, Ms. McGrath says.
"The faculty wants to give the students the attention," Ms. McGrath says.
"It takes a lot longer to respond by e-mail."
She agrees that student interaction is important to the class, which is why
the university usually requires a minimum of about five students per class.
And she adds that it might be possible to handle more than 40 students with
teaching assistants.
But discussions are hard to follow with several hundred students responding
to bulletin boards, Ms. McGrath says. As evidence, she cites the difficulty
in following discussions on a listserv that's overloaded with participants.
Larger class sizes will be a result of businesses' increasing demand for an
educated work force, Mr. Draves says. About 25 per cent of Americans seek to
continue their education after college, he says, but that will increase to
50 per cent in the next 20 years, he predicts.
Mr. Draves says that universities should slash tuition for on-line courses
to about $100 so that more people could afford them. But with 1,000
students, that would still earn a college $100,000 for a single course.
He doesn't believe that on-line education will drive traditional education
out of business. But he does believe that on-line classes will replace most
lecture-based courses on campus, while in-person classes will specialize in
small-group discussions.
Some courses may always be better taught face to face, such as foreign
languages, so that a professor can hear the student's speech, he says.
"There will be some classes that you can't put on line at all," Mr. Draves
says.
He believes colleges will begin sharing on-line courses, either because of
star professors or a new course design. That way, he says, institutions
could specialize in certain areas and carve out niches that could benefit
other universities and other students as well.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education