NAS Blog

I run a Great Books Program that offers courses online so that students anywhere can earn a certificate.  Recently I heard Gareth Williams, Chair of Columbia’s famous Lit-Hum core and emailed him for his thoughts on teaching great books online.  He was, not surprisingly, dubious:

As for Core courses online, I myself would be sceptical about the feasibility of such a step, at least from a Columbia perspective: so much here depends on the seminar format of voices heard around the table, and I feel that that format would be very hard indeed to reproduce in anything like its ‘real-life’ vitality if we tried it online.

I confess to similar doubts, admit that synchronous live dialogue is not reproducible, and acknowledge that the online courses are a marketing tool.  Still, in 2010, perhaps discussion takes a back seat to getting students exposed to challenging texts at all.  I started my program basically to keep frequently-cancelled literature courses alive in my institution (administrative pluses:  lower cost and a draw for disenfranchised literature students across the country).  Yet Professor Williams’s reply started me thinking about other virtues of online courses (I have taken at least a dozen and taught even more).  My defense of the online mode was bolstered by an experience of “voices around the table” while reporting to an informal group of students about the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference where I heard Dr. Williams.  I could hardly get a word in edgewise with all the interruptions and crosstalk.  Everyone wanted to speak at once; everyone had an opinion; no one had a question; no one cared to listen.  I finally gave up.

Neil Postman preached that

for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.

For now, the cost of electronically embracing what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “vanquished civilization of readers” may be the loss of “voices around the table.”  The advantage of online discussions, however, is the opportunity to complete one’s thought.   Students can also take time to frame their words, reflect rather than react, revise, expand, cross reference,  corroborate, and fact-check.

My online classes often turn into one-on-one tutorials, epistolary, more time-consuming than the classroom but with a balance of distance and intimacy.  The shy can “speak” as loudly as the bold.  Discipline is limited to enforcing the flaming policy.  No one is watching the clock or tweeting, and students are no longer packed in a box (by the end of the day, my 1940s era classroom is redolent of a high school locker room).  Martin Pawley used to argue that all technology acts as insulation against human contact.  Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

As an undergrad, I spent one year at Berkeley, 1968, a year full of death, riots, tear gas, and bayonets under Peder Sather’s gate.  I dressed in Levis, love beads from a head shop on Telegraph Avenue, and an Army field jacket pilfered from Fort Ord.  I wore OD and flashed the peace sign in “solidarity” with my contemporaries who were fighting and dying in Vietnam while I skated by with an educational deferment.

Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus.

I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.”

That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”

California has too many students and not enough cash. Last semester, De Anza college opened with 8,000 students still looking for classes. Sorry, kids! Most schools cap their enrollment to the number of students the state will fund; above that number, colleges cut sections, classes, and programs trying to stop the bleeding. Problem is—there are no consistent and transparent criteria about who decides what gets cut or on what basis. Some community colleges, having made their cap, have decided to close for the summer. See you . . . in September! Call it what you will: rationing, triage, enrollment management; I like “educational death panels.”

How did this mess happen? First, our 110 open-door community colleges have an impossible triple mandate to deliver quality transfer curriculum but also to provide career and technical education (CTE) but in addition to remediate basic skills for nearly 3,000,000 students. Meanwhile, the CSU system is swamped with students, many of whom (up to 80% at some campuses) are unprepared for college level work. Many are unprepared for high school work meaning six years to a BA.

Other students survey the unemployment figures and decide to hunker down. Euphemistically called “super seniors,” they conclude that between college dorms, college health services, cafeteria, library, gym and pool, hey, life is good! Why graduate? The big losers are first-time college students who find their seats filled by superslackers. The CSU solution is to “redirect” them back to community colleges that are already choked with students who can’t transfer. Add to this toxic brew the fact that money is just going to get tighter because Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer are fed up with paying college professor salaries to teachers of yoga and spelling.

According to Patrick Perry, CCCO Vice Chancellor of Technology, Research and Information Systems, California far and away has the greatest access to higher education, but it has a mediocre success rate (defined as granting degrees and certificates). Perry says states with both high access and high success have:

• Strong Statewide Articulation/Transfer Agreements

• Common Core Curriculum

• Common Course Numbering

• AA transfer guarantee or Statewide General Ed guarantee

• CTE pathways

• Strong online student academic planners and support

• Common assessment tools

• Statewide Transfer scholarships

California comes up short in virtually all these areas, and community college students, sick of plodding through the maze, are transferring instead to for-profit and online schools such as The University of Phoenix. So far, it’s just a small leak in a big boat but the number has grown five-fold since 1995, and change is in the wind.