1)Entrepreneurs are spending millions to create for-profit universities of the Internet, and the smart money is betting that by the time your middle schoolers go off to college, they may not really go anywhere. Their campus may be your basement, their computer their classroom.
Arthur Levine, President of Teacher’s College at Columbia University, says the new online schools are catering to the new American college student.
Arthur Levine: The image of the college student is somebody who falls between 18 and 22 who attends college full-time and lives on the campus. That person now makes up 16 percent of the college population. The rest are older, part-time, working.
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems and perhaps the most respected executive in the world of technology, says that no university can afford not to be on the Internet.
John Chambers: If they don’t change, the students aren’t going to be there.
Reporter: Are you saying that if a Harvard or a Yale or a Stanford doesn’t get, doesn’t start teaching online, that they won’t exist in 20 years?
Chambers: If you don’t change, you will get left behind. It isn’t just teaching online...
Reporter: Even Harvard, Yale, Stanford?
Chambers: Even Harvard, Yale, Stanford.
Robert Berdahl: He’s in the Internet business, I’m in the education business.
Robert Berdahl, 2)Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, worries that schools jumping onto the Internet bandwagon may not like where it takes them.
Berdahl: How do we make certain that the students are of the same quality that we have on campus?
Reporter: You’re getting right at the heart of what concerns the critics of this, what some call the gold rush; rushing in for fear you’ll be left behind, without stopping to think about what some of the downsides are.
Berdahl: Well, I think that is the core issue. How do we make certain that a deGREe is truly worth a degree and make certain that we don’t have the 3)equivalent of diploma mills on the Internet?
Lots of academics aGREe with him that an online education could never be as rich, as complete, as fulfilling as an on-campus education.
Berdahl: I don’t think chatrooms and virtual discussions are the functional equivalent of being in a classroom.
Karen Fungerolli: Your education is like sex on the Internet. You can get it online but it’s a lot better in person.
When Karen Fungerolli decided to go back to college 12 years ago, the Internet wasn’t an option. Now with a bachelor’s, a master’s, a PhD and a job teaching English at Georgetown University, she’s become one of the most vocal opponents of online education.
Fungerolli: My biggest fear is that adults, particularly adults just like me, when I was 28 and working full time, are gonna see it as an irresponsible choice to go to campus, a 4)self-indulgent choice and they’re going to be lured to the Internet, they’re going to believe that this is the only responsible thing for them to do.
Reporter: Let’s say you’re in the classroom and it’s also being taught online and there is an interaction capability, what do you lose? Why can’t you get the same back and forth, the same 5)Socratic method going online?
Fungerolli: There is some sort of marvelous energy that gets going between me and a student when I know that that student is really catching on. I can tell, I read eyes, I can tell the difference between a shut-down response and an engaged response. Not only do I not know how that would happen with someone online, I don’t know how I’d care. And caring, I think, is a lot of it. How do you care about someone you’ve never met or you don’t know?
Reporter: Do you know who the other people in the class are?
Ella Hullah: Yeah.
Reporter: You do?
Hullah: In a traditional school, I may never know the person sitting next to me. There would be no reason to even speak to them. Online the first thing you do is send a bio, when you go into your class, introducing yourself and who you are and what you do. So you get to know the people and learn about them.
