In the early days of online education, I imagined that virtual classrooms would follow the same basic model as in-person ones, with one instructor leading the same number of students in a typical campus class.
One of my colleagues at New York University disagreed, warning even decades ago that the belief was “pretty naive.” To make the online service financially viable, he predicted, “remote classes will need to enroll many more.”
Turns out he was right. Universities found new ways to scale, rethinking how teaching is done online.
It’s worth taking a step back to see how the largest online education providers in the US teach remote students.
As a reminder of the scale we’re talking about, I asked industry observer Phil Hill to dig into the federal enrollment data. It found that while enrollments from institutions that are almost exclusively online account for only a small percentage at state and non-profit universities, they account for about half of the student population at for-profit institutions, a trend that began many years ago. when investors poured money into digital. education.
But when Hill focused solely on the nation’s nonprofit online enrollments, he found that about 35 percent of them are at these virtual mega-institutions.
It turns out that universities with gigantic online enrollments, some with more than 100,000 students, run remote classrooms much differently than how my virtual classes at Stevens Institute of Technology and NYU worked.
Example 1: Western Governors University
He the largest institution of higher learning in the US is Western Governors University, a privatecompetency-based institution, located in Utah, with 150,000 students, all online.
The institution was built with the online in mind and focuses on the so-called competency-based teaching method, where students work at their own pace and earn credit when they show they know the material. Instruction at WGU discards key elements found in traditional universities, with no physical classrooms and no fixed course schedule. Classes do not start and end according to an academic calendar, but instead begin when a student clicks “start course” and is assigned a faculty member. The class ends when the student demonstrates proficiency in a given topic, a process that does not take a fixed number of weeks, but can be completed on the first day if the student masters its content quickly, or it can take as long as proficiency is achieved. – but not beyond the end of the term.
Students attend WGU entirely on screen, and instructors interact with them virtually via email, phone, text, and video. Classes are not led by a lone teacher teaching at the front of the classroom, but by teams of educators, with at least three virtual instructors and 10-15 assigned to larger classes. On average, instructors are assigned 230 students at a time, a big change from the 20 or 30 I was used to at NYU and Stevens.
To encourage peer-to-peer interaction, each course at Western Governors offers students a chat feature where they post questions and have faculty and other students respond. Live-streamed events take place once or twice a week, with break rooms open for students to interact virtually in small groups.
Performance evaluation varies, with students submitting essays, videos, or presentations to demonstrate that they have learned the material. In a dramatic departure from convention, grading is done not by instructors or TAs, but by “raters”—experts who don’t directly interact with students. Course completion at WGU is 86 percent.
The university argues that its unusual teaching model makes its scale work for students, and that its focus on demonstrating competence helps adult learners who return to the virtual classroom with skills that need to be recognized. Its leaders argue that it provides a faster and less expensive way to earn a college degree, which remains key to business careers in today’s economy.
Some traditional professors have opposed the model as too big a departure from the classical liberal arts college.
“WGU offers us a vision of the university without intellectuals,” Johann N. Neem, associate professor of history at Western Washington University, wrote in a critique of the model. “If the academy produced commodities, perhaps the WGU approach would make sense. But academia does not, and does not benefit, when teachers are replaced by managers, curriculum specialists, providers, assessment specialists, and ‘course mentors.’
Example 2: University of Southern New Hampshire
The next largest online mega-university is Southern New Hampshire, a private university, with 145,000 students online. SNHU also continues to run its traditional campus, with a campus population of approximately 6,000.
SNHU strays from the pedagogical path taken by WGU, with undergraduate classes as small as 24 to 35 and graduate classes averaging 21. Courses are designed for busy working professionals who make up much of its online student body.
Sessions are divided into week-long modules, starting on Monday mornings and ending on Sunday evenings. Assignments, much of it project-based instruction, are due at the end of each week. Students gain access to their courses (syllabus, major project, required commitments, discussion forum, and other materials) one week before class starts. After students meet individually with an advisor, they study at their own pace. Undergraduate courses last eight weeks; postgraduate courses last 10 weeks. To determine if students have mastered the material, faculty review student performance data, including participation, meeting deadlines, and passing tests or other activities assigned by instructors. Southern New Hampshire’s course completion rate is 90 percent.
A key difference at SNHU is how it recruits faculty, relying on an academic army of some 8,000 adjuncts who gain $2,000 per semester to teach an undergraduate course and $2,500 for a graduate course. Reliance on plugins, especially online instruction, is a national trend. Today, temporary professors fill about three-quarters of all US university professors. But southern New Hampshire and other online operations rely even more on contingent labor than most of their peers. traditional.
Relying entirely on an Uber-style educational workforce for universities may be financially prudent, but I argue that it is academically risky, with little continuity and no tenured faculty. It is also exploitative, with instructors ending up in precarious work arrangements without decent wages or benefits.
These models are worth highlighting at a time when higher education is no longer just for the privileged, but an essential part of the nation’s economic life. During their working lives, on average, college graduates earn twice what high school graduates earn.
Just a century ago two percent of Americans They were enrolled in the university. While many colleges have long welcomed working-class kids like me, as Brooklyn College did when I enrolled there in the 1950s, others continue to exclude those who need degrees most. Bypassing the conventions, these new large-scale online universities open their virtual doors to students whose financial lives depend on a college degree to get it done.
One of the greatest achievements of American higher education is its institutional diversity, with state and private universities, small liberal arts schools, urban academic complexes, and for-profit career academies, among others. To give students a wide variety of options, America’s higher education has ample room to house our old, mainstream, slow and steady universities, along with these new fast-track online academic hurdles.
