Apparently my ruminations this semester about online education have not been pointless. Wellesley announced this morning that they are partnering with edX, and will begin the process by producing four courses through edX in the 2013-2014 academic year.
I am excited by the news. I think it will be interesting to see how it all plays out and how aggressive and creative Wellesley and edX are in conceptualizing a liberal arts education in an online, and potentially massive-scale, learning environment. The College has not announced which four courses will be included in WellesleyX next year (or even how they will be chosen), but obviously the individual courses will play a large role in shaping what WellesleyX looks like. My previous thoughts on online learning are linked below:
> Between Two Professors: Pros and cons to online undergraduate education
> More thoughts on Wellesley College and online learning
UPDATE:
Wellesley College’s president, Kim Bottomly, has an op-ed on the decision up at the Huffington Post
In the piece, President Bottomly provides a fairly concise summary of some of the criticisms of online education:
Ultimately, our mission is not merely to train students in the skills necessary for entry-level jobs, but rather to educate students to become lifelong learners and to have the skills for a lifetime of jobs. We believe that face-to-face interaction in the classroom and on campus is an essential part of the educational experience. Each class is an intellectual and interactive experience in which the teacher is responding continually to the students’ ability to understand and be excited about the topic, and the student is learning how to learn. Because of this, we have been skeptical about the current hype surrounding online education.
So why is Wellesley joining edX? What follows in the piece is a fairly standard set of positives; creative pedagogy development, expanded opportunities, alumnae connectivity…etc. But what strikes me as the most interesting and challenging is this:
We have also joined edX because we believe that the transformative experience of a liberal arts education, which has been so successful at Wellesley for generations, can contribute important value to the online learning space. Through edX and its partners, we will strive to develop the highest quality online education possible.
What does it mean to put a liberal arts education online, as opposed to simply putting an array of liberal arts courses online?
UPDATE 2: The Harvard Crimson called me earlier and their story on the announcement is now up, as well.
What I mean by “productive inefficiency” is the kind of community learning environment that is only possible when their are multiple contributors to the classroom content. I have a set of things that I want my students to learn throughout any given semester. If I only wanted the students to learn those things, I would spend most of my time lecturing, interspersing learning activities when appropriate. But I don’t want my students to just learn what I want them to learn. I want them to contribute their own learning goals as they become familiar with the course content. This is a difficult thing to achieve, but ultimately a much richer outcome, as students take responsibility not only of learning the content but for furthering the learning process itself. But there is no magic bullet for achieving this in a classroom and it often depends on understanding the perspectives and approaches individual students take towards the class material. I am not sure how this can be achieved in online learning settings. Many of the online platforms, including edX, have sophisticated systems for tracking specific learning goals, potentially making teaching very efficient with respect to a prior goals. Part of the value of a liberal arts classroom are the goals that are not established by me in advance.
