Advocate Online

Yes, students need to experience a real academic community to be truly educated.
Mary Texeira *

I love technology. I want my fax machine and remote control! Yet, technology has it limits. The notion of attaining an undergraduate degree in the isolation of one's home should be antithetical to the goals of higher education.

Experiencing university life in the flesh, as it were, has as much to do with education as lectures and exams. Distance learning—little more than a prettified, high-tech version of the old correspondence school—can't provide this experience. Distance learning is fiscally sound, but educationally harmful.

The rush to distance learning arises from the same cost-cutting mentality that encourages U.S. universities to hire part-time lecturers at an alarming rate. Since 1990, for instance, the California State University system has replaced hundreds of full-time, tenure-track positions with underpaid and overworked lecturers.

Distance learning contributes to the loss of full-time jobs and becomes the academic equivalent of NAFTA where jobs are hired out to "off- or on-campus computers." Why hire ten to teach a few hundred students, when one can "educate" thousands at a time? But what do students lose in this Faustian exchange? Clearly their loss is the invaluable intellectual stimulation that university life offers.

Does distance learning have a place at the university? Absolutely! Individuals traditionally excluded because of geography should have the opportunity to receive a university education.

But the vast majority must feel, smell, and taste university life, with its wonderful, complicated, and sometimes uncomfortable diversity, and with a living, breathing professor. This cannot be done via a computer terminal.

*Mary Texeira is an associate professor of sociology at California State University, San Bernardino. She is a member of the executive board of the San Bernardino chapter of the California Faculty Association, an NEA affiliate.

No, distance learning students can achieve as well if not better than in-class students.
Larry Spears *

Historically, most educators have felt correspondence courses, radio broadcasts, and the like would be of limited use in education. A number of current studies still reinforce this attitude.

But recently some unusual studies of distance learning have appeared.

Nesler and Hanner report—to their surprise—"nursing students near completion in distance nursing programs had significantly higher scores on two measures of socialization than did campus-based nursing students." As my son might say, "Wasup wit dat?"

From Virginia Polytechnic Institute, we have the puzzling result that Internet philosophy students scored better on eight of 16 scoring criteria important to philosophical discourse. Discourse apparently no longer requires synchronous conversations or any conversation at all.

At Baruch College, 76 percent of the students using "mediated" instruction in ENG 0160 passed the CUNY writing assessment tests compared with an average of 53 percent of in-class students.

Many other liberal arts seem to be making their way to the World Wide Web. A report shows increased content knowledge by students in "Internet" sections of a introductory Psychology course.

Research at Ball State, Indiana State, and Old Dominion shows that neither men nor women distance learning students appear to learn less than students in traditional classes.

Those of us who teach on-line are frantically trying to determine the limits of this educational experiment. The question on everyone's mind: What kind of learning can not be successfully achieved at a distance via some sort of technology?

*Larry Spears, an NEA higher education member and associate professor of life science at John A. Logan Community College in Illinois, invites comments and further discussion. E-mail him at: larryspears@jal.cc.il.us.