Electronic vs. Traditional Education

Nearly thirty years ago, I attended my first electronic-based class at San Antonio College, San Antonio, Texas.  It was a lower division college writing class, creative writing.  The delivery format was a BBS (bulletin board system) where I connected via a 2400 baud modem to a college BBS server.  From there I would download the syllabus and assignment requirements, and upload completed assignments and to view grades.

It was an effective course and for me the excitement of saving time not having to drive to the near downtown campus from my home southwest and outside the loop, was highly motivating.  But there was more motivation.  Social evaluative situations such as classrooms were sometimes distracting to me – especially since it always seemed others were able to automatically tune in and plug in to the expectations of the social norms.  This seemed to be what drove their perceptions and thought processes, which often distracted them from critical thinking.

I often found the products of my thought processes weren’t simply following what others expected, and that the rest of the class wasn’t interested in anyone’s thoughts that didn’t have the same feel generated by the social conversations.  Or, I believe more accurately, they weren’t interested in the thoughts of someone who didn’t automatically plug in to and operate within the social network.  Such a phenomenon however is automatic – they cannot be blamed.

It was over twenty years later did I really start to understand why.  I will touch on this a little later in the post but for now I will focus on the electronic delivery format of college-level classes.

My academic career included successfully completing over twenty non-traditional classes from five regionally accredited colleges and universities ranging from lower division baccalaureate level to graduate level.  I’ve also successfully completed over three dozen classes in a traditional classroom.  I can argue from personal experience that I learned as much or more in the non-traditional classroom than in the traditional classroom.

Now this is not to say that some classes have labs where physical presence with other students may be preferable or even necessary.  Clinical training such as therapy role playing or psychotherapy internships may be reasonable examples where vis-à-vis is necessary.  But this cannot be argued as a stock rationale against online degrees where for most or all of the coursework in-person presence detracts more than it benefits.

For teachers whether they are called professors, instructors or mentors, I would think the preference would be the non-traditional format since they could finish most of their work – including research, without leaving their office.  This should afford a greater use of time while better servicing students.  But I cannot speak for them.

Another important difference is the gross inefficiency of verbal instruction vs. written.  I cannot tell you how horrible lectures are with regards to inefficiency.  I can read much faster than anyone of my teachers could speak, and what is written is usually far less ridden with filler content not related to the topics.  Moreover, I would have thoughts spawned within lectures that I either couldn’t capture or if I did I missed part of the lecture.

With written lectures, far more detail can be put into it, it rarely has useless rhetoric, and I can highlight and write thoughts on open spaces.  Moreover, I can read them anywhere so it is a much greater use of my time.  In the end I can attest that the expansion of at least my mind has occurred more in the non-traditional delivery format.  Since expansion of the mind is the primary objective of college level learning, such is an important finding.

I won’t even get into other issues I took with the traditional classroom such as distracting behavioral habits, tone of voice, and, I have to admit, the distractions of attractive women in the class.  Also, I usually interacted with teacher’s assistants and rarely interacted with the professor.  Simply put, I found it was more effective and efficient to figure out answers to my questions on my own rather than waiting for a match between open time in my schedule and the sparse office hours of the professor.  Usually, the opportunity never came before the assignment was due.

Finally, as I mentioned before, the social norms of the class often steered discussions into consensus-seeking rather than critical-oriented social norms.  Dissent was sometimes met with harshly, depending on the skill and maturity of the facilitator. 

A main paradigm of traditional academia is to provide experience in the collegial social setting, and such is a main argument for claiming residency is an element of program quality.  However, this tradition developed in a mindset of a caste view of society, and it developed before human kind had even a start in truly understanding the human social animal.  To put it simply, the social aspect of human nature is driven predominantly by the limbic system through processes that occur beneath our awareness.  These processes were with us before we evolved enough to develop society and they include serving evolution's fitness for survival.  Since universities do not teach this as a standard thematic requirement, how it impacts cognition in social settings, and have procedures and tools within discussion groups to maximize the benefit of discussions, such a claim for quality cannot be made.  Moreover, I found no empirical evidence of such even correlates to quality let alone causes it.

In those face-to-face discussions, never have I witnessed techniques used to prevent group process loss (e.g. group polarization or Groupthink), such as those I have used in group discussion settings throughout my career.  But the issue is far more than just group process loss.  These discussion-damaging norms stemmed from social automaton functioning, and the natural evolutionary tendency is to ostracize students at least in social evaluative terms who had low social automaton ability – and the latter would make the best therapists for instance because they would be less prone to transference.

This is all great rationale but what does the research reveal?  Interestingly, empirical evidence suggests that non-traditional courses are as good as or better than vis-à-vis traditional courses.  Moreover, research has found that students also become better learners and even score higher on exams.

Regardless, the debate is over.  Accrediting bodies and the U.S. Department of Education have all embraced the online format.  It should make sense because as colleges and universities were lobbying to stop online schools, many of them already offered distant learning in courses you wouldn’t think possible – such as biology – and you could even attend a traditional class without ever leaving your desk (via live streaming video).  Moreover, a majority of traditional universities now offer online degrees.  Even Ivy League schools offer degrees completely online or with limited residency.  I have even seen an online graduate degree offered by Harvard that had only a small residency requirement – which they said could be met with online courses if the student could prove they lived within commuting distance. 

For those demands for residency, the real rational has to do with loosing students and loosing government funding, or some other ulterior reason – but nothing to do with quality.  So far the criticisms by brick-and-mortar institutions fail to find support in empirical evidence, and their hypocrisy comes across loud and clear.

Perhaps the future will hold far more universities – far more opportunity – and a much higher percentage of the peoples of the world holding college degrees.  We want this.  The best way for society to capitalize on the human resource of the world is to maximize college graduation.

If universities really cared about equal opportunity and diversity on their campuses whether physical or virtual, they would embrace the virtual classroom.  After all, the only reason why it is hard to get into most universities is that the demand is higher than their capacity.

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