Interactive Learning Online: Challenges and Opportunities

摘要

Higher education is a labor-intensive sector. Smaller classes, more faculty-student direct interactions, prompt and individualized feedback, and more hands-on and collaborative learning with peers raise the quality of student education. Valuable person-to-person interactions, on the other hand, are costly and, to complicate matters, indicative of the Baumol's cost disease . Labor-intensive sectors that are dominated by personal services, such as education and health care, do not have rising productivity through technological innovations. These "stagnant sectors", says Willliam Baumol, keep up with salaries in sectors where more is produced with less, like in manufacturing, by raising costs. Since the early 1990s online education and online learning systems have held the promise of increasing instructional productivity and reducing costs without sacrificing educational quality. There is no evidence to date that such promise has materialized. The impetus of the newest developments with free online courses offered by Ivy League research universities to hundreds of thousands of students might drastically transform how we teach more and better with less. The innovation that prompted this panel is called Interactive Learning Online (ILO), and has the distinctive feature of highly interactive, machine-guided instruction that can be scaled to accommodate a large number of students who benefit from targeted and personalized learning . A generic software platform that would permit faculty at diverse institutions to develop ILO content with customized feedback loops and machine-guided interactivity does not exist. Bacow et al. observe that it would be "foolishly inefficient to rely on a 'hundred flowers' approach".