There's an ongoing debate in academia about the role of online courses and online degrees and such. I can tell you that it comes down to one thing: academic integrity. Without an emphasis on academic integrity, no new whiz bang modality (remember TV courses?) is going to make any difference in participation rates or graduation rates or careers or lives.
At UH Clear Lake, the School of Business started proctoring in all of our online courses during Spring 2014. It was a surprise to students, and some folks seemed to be shocked that we would start this so abruptly.
In the words of one of my new (older) MS Finance students "You should have been proctoring the whole time." He's right.
Anything that separates face-to-face (traditional) classes from Web classes (or any other distance classes) just muddies the water. Two sections of the same course separated only by modality must be as close as possible to each other or the curriculum (and the outcomes) suffer. This is why faculty spend so much time on assurance of learning (assessment) and curriculum integration, and why we work very hard to make sure students can take away something valuable.
Online "Programs" and Enrollment Growth:
Let me set up a hypothetical situation here: Suppose you wanted to increase (short-term) enrollment at a university, maybe in their Masters of Studies program, or their Masters of Branching Algorithms. One way to do that would be to, in the short-term, accept pretty much everyone who had a pulse. Another way would be to dilute the curriculum so that those marginal students could pass right along with the really bright majority of students. Those two things work hand-in-hand, you know.
The easiest way to convince faculty to pass everyone might be to let faculty (who are lazy, as everyone knows) teach online courses with no accountability for faculty OR students, and let the chips fall where they may. Throughout my career I've referred to this as "The Game."
Sidebar: The Game
In Academia, The Game is the phenomenon that occurs when the faculty wants to be left to its own devices, to "do science" or whatever, and the students want to have the fewest constraints placed on their time as well. So, The Game consists of the students pretending to learn while the faculty pretend to teach. At the end of semester the faculty assign grades on a nearly random but inflated basis, with only the too stoned or brain-dead laziest undergrads missing out on the gravy train.
As long as nobody outside of Academia gets wind of The Game it can go on unnoticed for years. Witness, for example, the sheer popularity of undergraduate degrees that have negative NPVs, such as social work and psychology. A very few people actually end up working in their college major after school, I admit, but virtually NONE of the sociology majors end up being sociologists. It's part of The Game - the more students we have, the easier it is to justify crappier classes (large sections, lots of teaching assistants, etc.) and then faculty don't have to be "bothered" by teaching. Especially teaching undergrads.
Note: I recognized The Game pretty early on, and became a professor to push back against it. Tilting at windmills - it's on my business card.
Back to Academic Integrity:
So...we have a university or college that wants to increase enrollment. The "leadership" (and I use that word loosely) decides to put more things online, and to offer "online degrees". In the meantime they cut sections of F2F classes, screwing the already existing student base. They encourage faculty in online courses to make things as easy as possible by limiting the development time and resources available to them, which throws off the balance between online and F2F curriculum. In the meantime, they REQUIRE faculty to use online testing if they test at all - no proctoring of any kind (even at remote locations for the very few remote students) is allowed. Faculty who want to proctor are forced by their dean to change their syllabus, thus ensuring that the disparity in rigor will be institutionalized and get wider over time. Oh, and if some faculty say anything about it they are systematically demonized as "troublemakers."
Once a clientele develops, changing the culture BACK to one of academic integrity entails huge costs - they will lose students. Just as they lost students when they went away from emphasizing F2F classes by substituting online classes in the schedule.
What's also clear, but unrecognized in the short-term, is that the reputation of the F2F program, which has been built up over many years and by many people, and upon which thousands of current students and alums depend, will be diluted by the addition of the online programs. Good luck convincing alums, employers and the community at large that unproctored online classes are as good as a F2F traditional program. They don't care how academic administrators feel about it, they deal with results. But...that's in the long term.
In the short term: Administrators get to brag about how "forward-thinking" they are, how responsible they are being for embracing change and "leading" the university into a new era. They get to put on their CVs that they were responsible for X new online programs and spread that around when looking for new jobs. In the short term they've been able to create whatever administrative infrastructure they deemed necessary (except an actual, useful "Testing Center" that online faculty and students could get some use out of) while holding the wolves at bay. When questioned about the huge growth in staff and administration they ask "Well just think how bad would things be if we hadn't started online programs?"
In short, we have a new Game. It involves administrators encouraging things that MIGHT benefit the short-term outcomes of the school, but SURELY will harm the long-term outcomes of the school. In corporate finance we call some aspects of this the agency problem.
What does this have to do with Academic Integrity? Everything. Once we've stepped off the curb, there's a lot of lanes to cross before we're on the other side, and the other side may not be the place we want to be.
If it involves LESS Academic Integrity, I'll vote no.
Certification:
Academia, in short, is about certification. As professor I certify that you know something when you leave my class, and I rank you against that crop of students. As a faculty we rank our graduates and find many that don't need to graduate.
If everyone makes a good grade, and everyone graduates, then something is broken. The key is to make sure that everyone we bring in has the opportunity to make good grades and has the opportunity to graduate if they work hard. Notice the last part.
Once we've removed any semblance of certification, good luck with the "adding value" part. If I don't test my students, I don't know if they were the ones who did the work (same as if I just used team projects in class). If I don't know my students because I never see them or don't communicate with them routinely in a 1-on-1 fashion, then I can't counsel them on career or write recommendations for them. Not with a good conscience, anyway.
Online classes can be effective (I've tried to convince my peers, weekly) but they are difficult and expensive because of the connections that are lost. To make up for facetime is very expensive, and without it online classes are useless, or even worse than useless if they dilute the reputation of the F2F degrees.
Conspiracy:
One more hypothetical for today. Say you wanted to curtail the power of the faculty at a school. Taking students out of the classroom and into The Cloud might be one way to do it. Breaking that connection. Limiting the amount the professor could advise students (by cluttering up faculty time, if nothing else) would work, too.
That's something to ponder.
