Response to "Rethink online courses"

I am grateful to the Editorial Board for supporting Duke’s efforts to be a leader in online education in their April 15 editorial. With our venture into online education, we seek to create opportunities to enrich our current offerings and to help improve what we already teach. The potential benefits to Duke students and faculty are considerable.

It is, however, important to note that Semester Online is not intended to, nor should it ever, substitute for small seminars that are an essential and distinctive element of a Duke education, regardless of one’s major. Indeed, more than two-thirds of Duke classes have fewer than 18 students, and more than 80 percent of all courses have 30 or fewer. Our commitment to the intensive, interactive, personal, educational experience permeates every part of the curriculum.

What Semester Online will make possible is something that we are not always able to provide: larger survey courses with discussion sections. These courses introduce subject matter, especially in the humanities and social sciences, which can then be more deeply explored in the small seminar format by our own faculty. Semester Online courses will supplement and enrich, not substitute for, what we are currently teaching. These courses will operate in a way that is both rigorous and convenient, with classes only being taught by Duke professors themselves or by qualified instructors to be selected, trained and supervised by Duke faculty.

Duke has been, and will continue to be, an innovator in teaching and learning. We do this in many different ways—by adapting and creating technology in the classroom, by enabling students to research and create new knowledge, and by developing new models, like DukeEngage, that themselves have become examples for others. Semester Online is a chance for Duke to extend that spirit of innovation to something that we already do well and seek to do even better.

Peter Lange
Provost