Online universities are growing. They can provide an education cheaply and from any place on the globe. Even brick-and-mortar universities are providing content, courses and degrees over the Internet. Universities like Edinburgh and Oxford are offering graduate degrees online.
Correspondence courses have been around for a long time, so I do not expect Brown to be threatened by the new online universities. But one might still wonder: What do institutions like Brown have to offer as a physical university?
I can answer this very quickly. Online universities will never be able to fulfill what I consider the primary goal of a university: research, the discovery of new knowledge. But that probably won't satisfy those of you who put the focus of a university on the education of undergraduates. This is important, but I would argue that it should be subordinate to research. But for the sake of argument, I might as well go along with your selfish emphasis and instead ask: How can institutions like Brown provide a better education than online variants?
My class experience is heavily tilted toward the sciences. I usually take one or two classes per semester in the humanities or social sciences, but most of my courses are in physics and math. I do not think that there would much of a difference between holding a science class online or in person. Of course, laboratories would be a problem, but if we narrow our view so we only look at lectures, there is not much of a difference.
The main components of all science courses I have taken are textbooks, lectures and problem sets. The textbooks for a course cover all of the necessary material. They give overviews of the phenomena, provide essential theorems and go through examples to elucidate the topic. Then there are the lectures, which more or less do everything that the textbooks do. They differ from textbooks in that they are more explicit. Unlike a book, they are also easy to change from year to year, so ineffective parts can be reworked. Lectures also allow students to ask questions as the material is covered. Most important are the problem sets. I include exams in this category, since that is what they really are — just shorter and more important. Students gain real comprehension of the material through the problem sets.
Books can be bought online and they handily contain problems for you to learn the material. The benefit of attending lectures would not appear to justify enrolling in a physical rather than a virtual university. (My opinion is different if you include labs and, more importantly, research in the calculation.)
However, there are those of you interested (for some unknown reason) in the other branches of academia: the social sciences and the humanities. Their material allows these classes to be formatted in a drastically different way. While I have had lecture classes in both the humanities and the social sciences, most of my classes in those fields have been seminars. This semester, I'm even in a class with one student — me. Originally, the professor intended to give a lecture class, but with only one student enrolled, it turned into a cross between an independent study and an Oxford-style tutorial.
One way to differentiate the learning experience in brick-and-mortar universities from those online would be to incorporate the tutorial system. Oxford and Cambridge have lecture classes, but they also provide tutorials (also called supervisions), which pair one or a small group of students with an instructor. Brown, like its peer institutions, strongly pushes its low student-to-professor ratio. It also has been expanding seminars in the past decade. Incorporating tutorials would just be a more extreme version of what's already being done at Brown.
Including tutorials in the curriculum could be unfeasible for many different reasons. One is that professors only have so much time. I would not want them eating into time normally spent on research to give tutorials. One possible solution is to become a bit more like online universities. Instead of giving a lecture each year, professors could record a series once and then use them year after year. Such lectures would lose some of the characteristics that differentiate them from textbooks. However, professors could then hold tutorials in the time formerly spent in lecture.
Such a radical shift to tutorials would be impractical any time soon. In the short term, the University is right to get more seminar classes in fields that can benefit the most from them. They can be very effective while making Brown profoundly different from online universities.
David Sheffield '11 is a math-physics concentrator from New Jersey. He can be reached at david_sheffield@brown.edu.
