When Robert Ubell first applied for a job in a university's online program in the late '90s, he had no experience with online education. But then, almost no one else did either.
First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (kind of like ai chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were trying to teach courses on it. Ubell's background was in academic publishing and he had recently finished a stint as editor of the journal Nature and was looking for something different. He had some friends at Stanford University who had shown him what the university was doing using the web to train workers at local factories and high-tech companies, and he was intrigued by the potential.
So when he saw that Stevens Institute of technology had an opening to create online programs, he applied, citing the weekend he spent observing Stanford's program.
“That was my only background, my only experience,” he says, “and I got the job.”
And like on many college campuses at the time, Ubell faced resistance from professors.
“The teachers were totally opposed,” he says, fearing that the quality will never be as good as in-person teaching.
The story of how higher education went from a reluctant innovator to what it is today, when tech-innovation/teaching-learning/2024/01/30/online-college-enrollment-continues-post-pandemic” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>More than half of American college students take at least one online course. – offers many lessons on how to try to bring new teaching practices to universities.
A big challenge that online learning has long faced is who will pay the costs of building something new, like a virtual campus.
Ubell notes that philanthropic foundations are key to helping many universities, including Stevens, take their first steps toward online offerings.
And it turns out that the most successful teachers in the new online format weren't the best with computers or the most tech-savvy, says Frank Mayadas, who spent 17 years at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarding scholarships in hopes of generating adoptions. of online learning.
“It was the teachers who had a great conviction to be good teachers who were going to be good no matter how they did it,” Mayadas says. “If they were good in the classroom, they were usually good online.”
We delve into the checkered history of online higher education in this week's EdSurge podcast. And we hear what advice online pioneers have for those trying out the latest innovations in the classroom.
Watch the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcastsor in the player below.
