Next week I will be part of a roundtable discussion focusing on Wellesley’s consideration of moving into the world of online education. I previously had an online discussion with Dr. Holly Dunsworth, of the University of Rhode Island, on the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of online education more broadly. This is an expansion of those thoughts in the specific context of Wellesley College
Additional thoughts on Wellesley College and online learning
I support the interest of Wellesley College in exploring potential online learning platforms for the College. Technology has always been an essential component in expanding the reach and efficacy of academic institutions, and while internet technologies may differ in important ways, particularly in their ability to sever the physical space of learning from the process of learning, these are not by themselves reasons to be wary of online education. It is my hope that the College does decide to pursue future online learning endeavors.
In order to evaluate the proper path for the College to take, however, it is necessary to understand what goals the College has in pursuing an online initiative. In the absence of a stated set of goals, what I present below is several potential goals and what I see as the relative merits and challenges of each of them. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but do at times reflect refinements of one another.
Goal #1 : Simply establish an online presence in order to have an online presence
Harvard. MIT. Stanford. NYU. Wash U. Emory. And on and on. Online educational initiatives, either for profit or open access, are a widespread and growing phenomena in academia at elite Universities and Colleges. There is some value I suppose, from a brand marketing standpoint, in keeping up with the model of peer institutions.
Yet as a goal, simply being online is a low hurdle to clear and provides little in the way of direction. Wellesley College is already online in numerous real ways, with podcasts of lectures and special events freely available to the public. Presumably the College’s aims are to strive for something more meaningful and engaging than simply being part of the growing herd.
Goal #2 : Expanding Wellesley’s teaching environment to a greater number of students
I believe that for most faculty, this is the goal in mind. What Wellesley does well is educate and train young women in a diverse array of subjects and disciplines. At the moment, this learning experience is only available to the students physically present in our classrooms. Why not expand that opportunity to a greater number of students by creating virtual online classrooms?
As a goal, I think this is an admirable one. As a direction for the College to pursue, I think there are several distinct and potentially difficult challenges.
The biggest challenge I see is that the model of teaching that occurs at Wellesley and that is the College’s strength does not seem consistent with a model whose goal is to significantly expand the number of students engaging in Wellesley classroom-style experiences. Much of the real value-added at Wellesley comes from the direct and close interaction between faculty and students.
Whether it be one on one mentoring in a lab, individual consultation on a research project, extended personal feedback on a piece of writing, or mentorship in guidance in transitioning from Wellesley to life beyond Wellesley, the essential element is intensive contact with the Wellesley faculty. While online learning platforms might allow this process to occur outside the boundaries of Wellesley’s physical campus, I struggle to see how they can reduce the actual work and time that goes into such interactions. Scalability, perhaps the most exciting and enticing component to online education, seems counter to both the philosophy and value of a Wellesley education.
I will use my own experience as a model. Prior to arriving at Wellesley in the Fall of 2008, I taught for a lecturer at the University of Michigan for two years. At Michigan, most of my courses were large lectures with 150+ students. The expectations of me as an instructor was to design the course content, provide up to 3 hours of engaging lecture each week, and coordinate small-classroom experiences that were led by graduate student teaching assistants. This model of teaching is highly amenable to the mixed asynchronous/synchronous content style of some online learning platforms. However, it is not, by and large, the model of Wellesley College.
From my initial job candidate visit to Wellesley to the present, students, fellow faculty, and administrators have impressed the notion of the “Wellesley way” of teaching upon me. My transition towards becoming a Wellesley faculty member has, on the pedagogical side of the ledger, largely been an effort to move away from the style of teaching I employed at Michigan towards a kind of teaching that is less obviously amenable to an online setting. In particular, I have worked to be less of a talking head, the kind of course content that can easily be accessed asynchronously through online videos or podcasts, and more a cultivator and moderator of individual student understanding and ideas, pedagogical elements that require direct interaction.
It is possible to produce synchronous online learning environments—the kind of environment that parallels what is available on campus—but is it possible for Wellesley College to do so and still be Wellesley College? An expansion in the number of students being taught by Wellesley in the “Wellesley way” would require a larger faculty. There are obvious financial, space and logistical issues with a faculty expansion. How do you maintain quality with an expanding faculty (the current system has many redundant and overlapping processes that ensure teacher quality)? What position do members of an expanded, virtual faculty possess relative to the “regular” factulty? How is online teaching compensated? Are online courses offered simultaneous, or in parallel to, traditional courses?
Goal #3 : Increasing revenue for the College
The College might also seek to raise revenue through online learning endeavors. Additional revenues might allow Wellesley to expand its academic mission in other ways or lower costs/provide additional financial support to current students. But without knowing a great detail about the business model that supports specific online learning platforms, it seems that as a source of revenue online learning is inevitably tied to issues of scale. Large expansions of scale might produce large additional revenues, but at a modest scale, the cost associated with the development of online content might actually entail a net cost to the College. For the reasons outlined above, I am skeptical about the College’s ability to scale up via online learning.
Of course, the question of revenue assumes the College pursuing an open access course model. The question of whether to pursue an open-access or fee model of online learning is a broader philosophical question for the College community to consider, and one that by and large I will leave for others to address. Given my skepticism in the benefits of scale to Wellesley, however, I think the College is best suited to pursue online learning with a revenue neutral goal.
Goal #4 : Enhancing the currently available resources of Wellesley College
I feel the best path available to Wellesley is to consider online learning and online educational initiatives might be to consider the issue in a broader context. Specifically, I think the College should consider its unique strengths as an institution and the potential of those strengths to be enhanced and broadened in an online setting.
Classroom teaching is surely a huge strength of the College. But it is not one that is necessarily, or frequently in the case of Wellesley, amenable to the technology offered by online learning platforms. Instead, Wellesley should pursue a mixed combination of online educational initiatives. This might include some limited courses, defined in the traditional sense, where such courses might be appropriately refigured as online courses. But it might consist more of an expansion of the capabilities of existing unique strengths of Wellesley such as the Newhouse Center for the Humanities, the Wellesley Center for Women, the Madeleine Albright Institute, the Davis Museum, the Botanical Gardens/Greenhouse, the Women in Public Service Project, and a host of other institutionally specific foci of student and faculty research and learning.
Some of these on-going projects and events might be expanded from physical places and events on Wellesley’s campus to virtual online communities and resources. Such expansions might take in partnership with existing chapters of Wellesley’s alumnae network or affiliated collaborative institutions around the globe. The form they take could be highly varied, but the goal would be to make Wellesley College—its students, faculty and space—the hub of a larger virtual online community of learners and educators.
I think pursuing such a non-traditional online model is a more ambitious, more difficult, but ultimately a more rewarding path for Wellesley College to take. I think such an approach, designed and implemented effectively, would work specifically with the unique strengths of Wellesley as an institution rather than trying to replicate the success of other, larger institutions that bring a different set of capabilities and resources to the online learning landscape.
