Thoughts on online learning v. the traditional classroom

It goes without saying that the digital campus cannot fully replicate the traditional environment of the college campus, and this is true on many levels—socially, instructionally, developmentally, even aesthetically (Noble, 1997-2001). It has also been demonstrated that, even with the digital divide, online education increases access to many people who otherwise would not be able to go to a university (Shea, Pickett, & Li, 2005). There is a trade-off here that is very important, but it might not be as significant as we might think. Face-to-face interaction is a valuable part of education, so vital in fact that perhaps we should, when possible, look more seriously at distributed (or blended) learning, which is a blending of traditional and distance technologies. Regardless of one's particular attitude toward online learning, however, we must recognize that, at least for the foreseeable future, it is not going to go away. While the ramifications of its continued presence and growth are open to debate, whether or not it threatens the core of what we consider to be of most value about the university, it is the responsibility of the university to ensure that what online learning does in the name of the university is not a travesty.

That is not to say that the online classroom should seek merely to replicate the traditional classroom. It is highly unlikely that the best classroom practice can be replicated online, but it is equally unlikely that these best practices can be widely replicated in the traditional classroom either. Even more unlikely is the notion that we could ever clearly identify any kind of replicable essential element that makes the "best" practices best. The presumed existence of this sort of je ne sais quois, and more importantly the qualities that make it unknowable, is behind much of the thinking that motivates my interest in educational research. It is also indicative of what hinders the design of a lot of the research heretofore done on online learning. This mystical reality, this essence of good teaching, is simply not something that can be reduced to a dependent variable; nor is it translatable into any kind of statistical formulae or, for that matter, into theoretical exposition. Perhaps the biggest lesson we can take from all of this is that the comparison between traditional and online learning is at best problematic, especially when we recognize that virtually all of the education research outside of that which focuses on the online classroom tends to be fairly critical of the quality of instruction in the traditional classroom, especially at the higher education level. One need not look far to find that the fetishism of this traditional classroom is merely an unfounded rumor.

Our search for that je ne sais quois that represents the "best" of educational practice also demonstrates the value of a postmodern or poststructuralist approach to education. Through the lens of poststructuralism, we can recognize the search for a reified "best of" as a demonstration of the metaphysics of presence, a search for a transcendental signified. I believe that there can be quality online courses, but that quality cannot be easily quantified or automatically implemented. More importantly, however, I believe that the best university education experiences, whether online or in the classroom, are writerly experiences that allow the student/reader an opportunity to participate dialogically in the production of meaning in the classroom.