The Werner Institute for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution has joined the ranks of Creighton University’s pharmacy and business schools in offering a master’s or professional degree almost entirely online.
Now, with the university’s new Web site dedicated solely to online education (e-learning) and with online classes in undergraduate colleges, academia and technology collide, creating a new dimension for the future of our institution.
Before we continue to develop and expand the online classroom, we as a community must consider e-learning’s benefits, its hindrances and its implications on education as a whole.
The term e-learning can encompass online education from a Web-based program such as BlueLine to a degree attained online. While integrating technology, such as video-conferences and podcasts, in the classroom provides students with many benefits, we wish to focus on classes and degrees completed entirely online because these programs have the greatest potential to transform collegiate education as we know it.
E-learning’s most significant advantage is the power of inclusion. It allows students from around the globe to receive an education, and non-traditional students who may have full-time jobs or parenting responsibilities will find it easier to earn a higher degree.
Finally, e-learning can include part-time faculty from anywhere in the world. A business student can take a class taught by an accountant in Dubai. The possibilities for faculty specialization are endless.
Yet, even with all these benefits, the expansion of e-learning, specifically into undergraduate education, compromises Creighton’s mission statement as “a university dedicated to comprehensive education which targets the intellectual, social, spiritual, physical and recreational aspects of students’ lives.”
The Internet paired with new programs can do many things for online education, such as video conferencing, test-taking, group discussions, etc., but no program will be able to reproduce Creighton’s intellectual and social atmosphere over a Web site.
A degree represents more than just a course load. It represents the experience a student gains when interacting with colleagues and professors and absorbing the campus atmosphere.
With Eduventures, an educational research company, predicting that one in 10 college students are in an online degree program, this view of a holistic education may be too idealistic, especially when the workforce now requires constant retraining.
Nonetheless, the university’s administration needs to match the expansion of e-learning into the undergraduate schools with a promise to bring more students with diverse backgrounds onto campus. This involves building more residence halls, increasing financial scholarships and a stronger recruitment program.
If e-learning expands too rapidly into the undergraduate schools without these benchmarks, it becomes easy to imagine a two-tiered higher educational system. In this system, the cost of a traditional college education becomes so expensive that only the wealthiest members of society can afford it.
The bottom tier spends their time working while improving “skill sets” through online education. Education becomes a divider, instead of an includer.