Faculty Report at U. of Illinois Casts Skeptical Eye on Distance Education
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Distance education will not be the gold mine that some administrators imagine, predict 16 professors at the University of Illinois, because providing high-quality instruction is more costly and time-consuming on the Internet than in a traditional classroom.
A report from the group, to be officially released this week, says good teaching is possible online, but only by lowering student-to-instructor ratios and taking other steps to counteract the disadvantages of teaching at a distance. The report is the result of a unique yearlong study sparked by a complaint that faculty members were not being included in the university's distance-education planning.
The man who made the complaint, John Regalbuto, an associate professor of chemical engineering on the Chicago campus, was invited to lead a committee to study whether and how high-quality instruction could be done online. The committee's members were chosen from all three campuses of the university, about half of them enthusiastic about distance learning and half of them skeptical.
The group's members called themselves a "seminar" rather than a committee, and their approach was decidedly academic. They brought in a series of guest speakers from across the United States and Canada, studied literature about the effectiveness of online teaching, and met almost every other week -- either in person or by videoconference -- to discuss the issues. The effort ended up costing the university about $20,000 in travel and support costs.
"Teaching at an Internet Distance" is not a statement of university policy, but will be reviewed by administrators. It is available on the World Wide Web (http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/).
The report offers a mixed review of online education, arguing that it "shows both promise and peril."
"Computer mediated instruction may indeed introduce new and highly effective teaching paradigms, but high-quality teaching is not always assured," it says. "Administrative decisions made without due consideration to pedagogy, or worse, with policies or technology which hampers quality, may cause much wasted time, money, and effort of both faculty and students."
The report recommends against creating online mega-courses, regardless of how profitable they might be. Illinois hasn't yet developed such a course, but the seminar noted that administrators at other universities have imagined doing so.
"The scenario of hundreds or thousands of students enrolling in a well developed, essentially instructor-free online course does not appear realistic," the report says. "With rare exceptions, the successful online courses we have seen feature low student to faculty ratios."
What's more, the number of "non-traditional" students nationwide might not be as large as some administrators believe, the report says. Citing recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, it notes that nontraditional students remain a minority, and that traditional students -- under 22 years old -- represent the segment of the college-going population that is expected to grow the most in coming years.
The professors said the university should not create complete online undergraduate-degree programs for traditional students, because such students need the kind of personal socialization that can come only from face-to-face instruction. (Illinois has no plans to create such a program. It does, however, have a program that allows adult students to complete online the last two years of a bachelor's degree in "liberal studies.")
Another theme of the report is that technology should not be used to remove professors from the teaching process. In fact, the seminar argues that professors should retain ownership and control of online courses.
Although the tone of the report is skeptical, Mr. Regalbuto says it represents more of an endorsement of distance education than he initially expected it to. He and some other members of the seminar began the process doubtful that distance-education instructors could ever form the kind of bond with students that can occur in the classroom, he says. After hearing guest speakers talk about their distance-learning experiments, however, he says he became more persuaded that good teaching could occur online.
"I really started thinking, Maybe there really is something to this, that online can be as good, or even better in some ways, than face to face," he says.
Burks Oakley II, director of University of Illinois Online, the distance-learning program of the university system, says the report isn't forward-thinking enough about distance education's potential. He says the university should "push the envelope" by experimenting with teaching all sorts of courses online, including larger ones. "We are seeing successes. We are seeing larger class sizes than they discuss in their report."
Mr. Oakley also disputes the report's assertion that distance education will always be more costly than classroom instruction. "It's not going to cost less, but I think it can be done under the right conditions at a comparable cost," he says.
Other administrators say that, for the most part, the university is already following the suggestions in the report.
Sylvia Manning, interim chancellor of the Chicago campus, says the university's main goal for distance learning has always been to expand access to education, not to make money. And professors have been involved in the university's distance-education efforts from the beginning, she adds.
"I'm actually very pleased that this group of faculty has put to rest any arguments that this isn't going to work pedagogically -- that people can't learn this way," says Ms. Manning. "I think, basically, the report supports the efforts of online education."
Some members of the seminar agree that the university has handled distance education well so far. "Ironically, this campus is not one of the campuses nationally that has taken the most baldly commercial motivations," says Nicholas C. Burbules, a professor of educational policy on the Urbana-Champaign campus, who was part of the seminar.
He hopes that the report's message will be heard by administrators at other universities who are considering using technology to minimize the involvement of faculty members. "I think that is a dangerous trend," he says, "and I think it's important for reports like this to emphasize that that would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg."
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