Online Education Promoting More Inequality? (updated 1jun13)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 May 2013.  This and previous commentaries are also available on the KVMR website.]

Information systems professor Larry Press of CalState Dominguez Hills recently asked the question ‘Are poor students excluded from online education?’  In this commentary and on my blog the larger issue of wealth and income inequality has been extensively debated, and continues to be a hot button topic between the Left and the Right.  The Left insists that the problem is correctible through the proper adoption of new and improved social justice policies.  The Right doesn’t agree and offers to lift all fortunes through smaller government, less regulation, and lower taxes.  But it claims no solution to the inequality problem.

Low cost, widely available online education has been promoted for its many benefits, one of which is its availability to broader classes of students that include the poor.  Before we get to the inequality issue, let’s review a little about online education and training.

Most teachers in grade and high schools know that there are several sources where students can learn not only STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects but many others in the soft sciences and even in the liberal arts.  These can be accessed by anyone in the world who can get on the web, and who speaks the instructor’s language.  Everyone should go to one of these sites and take a short lesson to see the promise of such online courses.

Lately private companies like Coursera have developed instructional software systems into which teachers and professors can pour their curriculum for online delivery.  These educational environments do everything from subject matter presentation, remediation, testing student performance, record keeping, and even mentoring with live human beings where needed.  Over 80 universities like University of California, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc have started to offer a wide catalog of courses for both fulfillment and credit, often with class sizes in the tens of thousands.

Last week the Georgia Institute of Technology announced that it will offer the entire curriculum for a masters degree in computer science, and upon meeting course requirements Georgia Tech will actually award the Master of Science degree for successful completion, all on line.  Students will be charged around $7,000 for the program, which works out to somewhere between one sixth and one tenth the current cost of attending classes given by a live instructor.  Other universities will quickly follow suit in awarding online degrees.  So we expect that through online interactive technologies, the cost of higher education will be going down in the coming years.

But how will this impact inequality.  Well, more poor students worldwide will have access to the kinds of education that before was out of their reach.  But the poor, many of whom are not able to handle the course materials even if they were free, will not be helped by such courses.  We may be sure that other courses will be designed for delivering workplace skills in cooking, carpentry, plumbing, small engine maintenance and repair, caring for the elderly, etc.  Some of these will even be available on cell phones (see Press), and they will help prepare more of the poor in wallet and wit for many job markets.

However, even with these advances, there is no guarantee that wage and wealth inequality will be reduced.  (see also Schumpeter in The Economist)  In fact, the prognosis is for exactly the opposite.  The added legions of students who will soon master the wealth creating STEM subjects will have the opportunity to soar like eagles in their new professions, and be lifted out of poverty.  But they will be lifted out disproportionately from how the poorer segments of the population will fare.  To be sure, all classes of workers will be aided by online technologies, but necessarily at different rates and to jobs with widely varying pay scales.

So even though everyone’s standard of living will undoubtedly increase with more education that is accessible and cheap, the difference in wages will still depend on what each student or worker brings to the party.  And for good or ill, the boost that students get will continue to depend on their DNA before factors like perseverance and state aid enter the picture.  Since nature and freedom tend to work together like that, the inequality gap can be expected to widen.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[1jun13 update]  This update was received from a reader. gjr

State Systems Go MOOC

Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup's efforts to take online education to the masses.

Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry's most established players.

The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera's online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

Source Inside Ed.  Read more here.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

Not Everyone is Happy with Outsourcing Lectures

Students at Massachusetts Bay Community College this year got a rare opportunity to take a computer-science course designed and taught online by some of the top professors in the field.

The 17 students in a programming course at MassBay's Wellesley Hills campus watched recorded lectures and completed online homework assignments created by professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and offered as a massive open online course through edX, a nonprofit MOOC vendor co-founded by MIT.

The MassBay students met for regular class sessions with Harold Riggs, a professor of computer science at the community college. Students were required to come for only 90 minutes each week, rather than the customary three hours. And in addition to graded in-class projects from Mr. Riggs, the students completed homework assignments and three major exams written by the MIT professors and graded automatically by edX. At the end of the semester, the students who passed the class got three credits from MassBay and a certificate of achievement from edX.

Some higher-education forecasters believe this is the future of public education. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the MassBay experiment, has devoted millions to seeing if MOOCs produced by elite universities could help boost student success at financially strapped state colleges.

But where state legislators and college administrators see an opportunity, some professors see a threat—if not to their jobs, then to their freedom to teach a course as they believe it should be taught.
http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Lectures-Raise/139471/

[Bill Tozer]

Mr. Steele: Oh its a threat alright. Probably just gave our resident former high school educator from The City By The Bay a major heart attack. A massive heart attack at that. There goes the argument that the po chilledrun have no access to inside the castle walls.

I was shocked that I can take on-line courses at Harvard of all places, or simply listen and watch classroom lectures on the web in real time. Like it when the camera pans to the co-eds as a bonus. Part of the school daze.

[Gregory]

George, if you didn't read it the first time around: "The Bell Curve" caught hell for pointing out that the stratification is largely by intelligence, and it is widely available meritocratic education that's driving it.

You were more likely to have a genius for a carpenter or a baker in the 18th century than in the 21st, not to mention a mediocre Harvard grad.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 1014am - Yes, have it,read it, and have been preaching its realities against strong headwinds here for years. Agreed.

[Russ Steele]

The Diplomad had some insight into our current University education system:

Universal University Education: How many people really need a university education? Better asked, how many people really need a budget-busting indoctrination "noneducation" which is what most universities now provide? Do we need hundreds, nay, thousands of these institutions producing millions of half-literate and arrogant idiots indoctrinated in the liberal orthodoxy and possessing no discernible skills? You know the answer . . .

Bring in the MOOCs! Students get to craft their own education at a reasonable cost.