Rethink online courses

At last week’s Arts and Sciences Council meeting, faculty members voiced concerns about Duke’s proposed Semester Online—a consortium program with other universities in which students can take online courses for credit. Although the issues identified by faculty members reflect legitimate anxieties about the future of higher education, the discussion recapitulated a familiar debate about whether a prestigious university should offer online courses for credit. Given the rapid propagation of online courses, we are no longer convinced that considering the issue in this way makes sense and believe the Duke community ought to rethink the debate about online education to better address the growing popularity of online courses.

In the meeting, faculty members questioned Duke’s need to become a leader in online education, challenged the wisdom of partnering with less prestigious universities and pondered the consequences of allowing students to receive additional credit from other institutions.

Maintaining academic quality and determining what constitutes a Duke degree remain important tasks as intercollegiate collaboration becomes more widespread. But if the University forgoes an opportunity to lead in online education, then the online landscape will grow and change without our input. Companies and universities without Duke’s best interests in mind will set the standard for online education. Instead of stalling, Duke should confront the issue squarely and work to produce a model for online education that incorporates the benefits of an online platform without compromising academic quality. To this end, we need to reimagine the framework of the debate. The discussion should not revolve around whether or not Duke ought to offer credit for online courses. Instead, we should ask, “what kind of online experience is one that would be worthy of credit?”

In our opinion, the experience offered by the proposed Semester Online is inadequate. The model, which supplements recorded lectures with discussions led by teaching assistants, will likely not work for seminar classes that depend on sustained interaction with professors and other students. Although many in the humanities fear that online courses are fundamentally incompatible with an interactive seminar model, the inadequacy of the Semester Online model does not preclude the possibility that a different platform could offer ways for humanities courses to thrive in an online format. If deployed thoughtfully, online courses could enhance collaboration in the humanities, bringing professors and students from institutions across the world together to debate and discuss.

Although professors and students have a number of different reasons for opposing online education, many of their concerns reflect a fear that an educational model they believe to have intrinsic value will be replaced by online courses. There may also be a fear that the incremental addition of online courses will lead the University down a slippery slope to offering degrees only through online courses. Although we share many of those fears, online courses are quickly becoming a fixture of higher education that, sooner or later, we will have to address.

If the University finds the Semester Online model lacking, it should take care not to reject online education entirely, but to seek out new implementation models that better reflect Duke’s academic commitments, strengths and priorities.