The critiques and possibilities of online learning

Over the years, online learning has taken its share of hits from critics all too ready to spring. Yet while online learning, in its past and present states, is certainly worthy of attack, most of the attacks are troubling in either their shortsightedness or their tendency toward the reactionary. These attacks, with David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills (1997-2001) chief among them, all seem to hold an irrational fear that some kind of fast-food-one-size-fits-all-mass-produced-cookie-cutter-reductionist-automated monstrosity is going to kill off and ultimately replace the hallowed halls of academia, a fear that the ivory tower will be devoured by a vacuous pit.

In this regard, it is worth noting that while a library is an important feature of a university, and while that library contains an appropriate amount of “knowledge” or information from which an enterprising student could appropriate a sufficient learning base equivalent to what could be learned in a classroom course, or even an entire degree program, there is no one who would argue that the library threatens to render the rest of the university obsolete. In other words, the library is not the university.

Instruction has as much to do with the provider and provision—as well as with the receiver and reception—of instruction as it does with the actual content to be learned, and no quality instruction or learning can result from a lack of understanding of this principle. Or, to put it another way, the unique advantage of the Internet is that it is not a delivery mechanism; rather, it is a two-way communication device, and if online learning is ever going to gain its share of respect in the academy, online instructors and course designers must never lose sight of this.