The+end+of+school

The End of School as We Know It?!?!?!? Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere By [|JOSEPH BERGER]Published: October 31, 2007 **Correction Appended** HERSHEY, Pa. The university classroom of the future is in Janet Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here. There is no blackboard and no lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in [|Pennsylvania State University]’s master’s program in business administration by sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween costume. In this homespun setting, the spirited Dr. Duck pecks at a Toshiba laptop and posts lesson content, readings and questions for her two courses on “managing human resources” that touch on topics like performance evaluations and recruitment. The instructional software allows her 54 students to log on from almost anywhere at any time and post remarkably extended responses, the equivalent of a blog about the course. Recently, the class exchanged hard-earned experiences about how managers deal with lackluster workers. Those students, mostly 30-ish middle managers and professionals trying to enhance their skills, cannot be with her in a Penn State classroom at a set time. One woman is an Air Force pilot flying missions over Afghanistan; other global travelers filed comments last week from Tokyo, Athens, São Paulo and Copenhagen. Dr. Duck cannot regularly be at Penn State, largely because of her three children. Yet she and other instructors will help the students acquire standard M.B.A.’s next August at a total cost of $52,000, with each side having barely stepped into a traditional classroom. Welcome to the brave burgeoning world of online education. It’s a world most of us, whether we like it or not, will have to grapple with, as students, tuition-paying parents or employees. Nearly 3.5 million college or graduate students, one of every five, took at least one online course last fall, double the figures of five years earlier, according to a survey of 2,500 campuses published last week in a collaboration among the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the [|College Board] and a Babson College research group. Taken at face value, the study was chilling. This writer’s first impulse was to recall a college course taught by Irving Howe, who read Robert Frost’s poems with tenderness and an edge of menace that conveyed the poet’s respect for the sinister beauty of nature. Those poems would not be as richly appreciated online. Yet for now such fears would be misplaced. The study’s fine print makes clear that growth is not across the board. Selective private four-year colleges that are the subject of so much angst this season are barely dipping their toes, typically providing online courses for students studying abroad or slackers who needed that 8 a.m. math course to graduate. Some, though, have taken note; for example, Columbia for several years has offered online master’s degrees in some engineering fields. Still, the surge is mostly among community colleges, professional programs like business and education, specialized online schools like the University of Phoenix, and public universities like Penn State and Illinois that feel obligated to accommodate far-flung residents. And the numbers are expected to grow partly because Congress last year dropped a requirement that colleges deliver half their courses on actual campuses in order to qualify for federal aid, a move critics saw as an enticement for diploma mills. Just as newspaper and television professionals are fumbling to figure out how to survive in an Internet world they did not grow up in, professors and students are realizing that they will have to learn, as one wag once said, to play the violin while performing at [|Carnegie Hall]. QUESTIONS persist. What kind of content works best online, and what gets lost in translation? Which instructors and students function best in the virtual classroom? What happens to all those brick-and-mortar dormitories? How do you calculate the price of tuition? Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers wonders what will happen, should campuses go exuberantly online, to the intangibles — the late-night bull sessions, the serendipitous strolls with professors, the chance to feel one’s oats in student government? And what will one more switch to electronic conversation do to our need for intimate human connections, he asks? Andrew Delbanco, the Columbia humanities professor, said flatly that it would be impossible to put his seminar on war and culture online because “the energy and spontaneity of discussion among people sitting together in a small room cannot be replicated by electronic exchanges.” His statement, not surprisingly, came in an e-mail message. For we live, for better or worse, in a harried world where people spend a good part of their lives on airplanes, where professionals are obliged to upgrade skills, where friends would rather chat via the screen of e-mail than face to face. It’s instructive for a skeptic to talk to Dr. Duck’s students — online, of course. They point out that online postings are more reasoned and detailed than off-the-cuff classroom observations. Students learn as much from one another’s postings, informed by the real business world, as they do from instructors, they say. And Kevin Krull, a technology executive, pointed out that introverts reluctant to speak up in class can strut their stuff. For those who shrug off online courses as watered-down soup, Dr. Duck and her students say courses like theirs at Penn State’s World Campus — the university’s online division, with 300 courses for 7,500 undergraduates and graduate students — require many more hours of work; discussion is not limited by a classroom hour. They confess, however, that they miss the ability to read expressions and body language that confirm that a point has been truly understood. Online courses may not be suited to subjects like laboratory science or theater, but can work fine for the nut-and-bolts information and analysis required in a history survey or for the editing needed for a basic writing course. Still, even in those fields many professors would feel lost online. Dr. Duck, a respected instructor who taught conventionally for nine years and online for five, said she “wouldn’t go back to the classroom if they doubled my salary.” Her work, she thinks, is on the frontier of education in a global economy In her dining room, her children sometimes pause beside her as she teaches, and she does not shoo them away. “It’s good for them to see this in action,” she said. “It’s going to be their world.” E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com **Correction: November 5, 2007**

The On Education column on Wednesday about online courses included the incorrect cost, from a Pennsylvania State University professor, for the master’s program in business administration at the university. It is $49,000, not $52,000. Because of an editing error, the column also referred incorrectly to a course the writer once took that he said would not be as effective if taught online. It was a graduate-level course, not an undergraduate one.