For higher education, she said, Its not a silver bullet, the way it was originally portrayed to be. Its a lot harder than it looks, and by the way if you do it right it doesnt save all that much money, because you still have to have an opportunity for students to interact with either a teaching assistant or an assistant professor or a professor at some level. As for preparing the courses, if theyre really going to be top-quality, thats an investment as well. Taking aim at the dream that online learning might be most useful for students needing help in remedial courses in subjects like English and math, Napolitano said: I think thats false; those students need the teacher in the classroom working with them. Online courses might be all right for capitalizing on UCs multi-campus structure by allowing students at one campus to take courses developed at another, she said, but she indicated that theres still got to be human interaction. That might come as a real disappointment for Gov. Jerry Brown, who has been pushing hard for the most starry-eyed versions of online learning. As recently as the Jan. 22 meeting of the UC Board of Regents (of which hes an ex officio member) he pressed university officials to experiment with online education requiring no human interaction whatsoever -- a pure online course that, once its in the can, its almost perpetual motion. Bless Browns heart for thinking outside the box, but thank goodness that UC Provost Aimee Dorr was present to keep him tethered to Earth. We want people to interact with each other, she told him. They learn from that. Experience indicates, she said, that when students are utterly shut off from such interaction, theyre less happy and less engaged.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:27:14 +0000
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