EDITORIAL pubs.acs.org/ac
On-line, On-Campus Education: A Mixed Bag aking a college-level course “on-line” used to refer to a college or university professor providing students with instructional materials and examining the student’s mastery of them off-campus and outside of a classroom setting. These “correspondence courses”, once conducted by mail, today use the Internet for student professor communications and can include visual materials and even video of lectures by the professor. The on-line, off-campus student often has a full-time job and studies on evenings and weekends. This has been a highly valuable way to access education for many people who for financial or family reasons are unable to afford a live-in, oncampus college experience. On-line coursework today is migrating onto campuses. This change is spurred on by current economic issues and by the steeply declining financial support of state universities and colleges. At the University of Florida, for example, 12% of the course credits earned by on-campus students are through on-line viewing of classroom lectures—either live or later—by students in their dorm rooms or apartments. This percentage is expected to grow substantially over the next few years (New York Times, 11/5/10; “Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web”); the combination of traditional lecture classes with on-line, oncampus classes was dubbed “the future of higher education” by a senior administrator. The same article noted that analogous online, on-campus instruction is used for all students taking first year Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (this Editor’s academic home). The mission of a public university requires treading the line of offering a quality education and providing access to qualified students. On-line, on-campus approaches are a route to maintaining increased student access in the face of economic trauma. On-line, on-campus instruction does entail compromises. For students in the sciences, the most obvious is the absence of the laboratory experience. Chemistry (including analytical chemistry) beyond the elementary beginnings of chemical knowledge is a hollow topic if it does not provide the experience of actual experimentation. This is a major failing of on-line instruction (on- or off-campus) for the sciences. On-line, oncampus instruction does preserve the “campus experience”; a student’s intellectual maturation among his/her own peers is a seriously important benefit of the on-campus college experience. On-line, on-campus courses don’t provide a student faculty personal interaction; that remains for the classroom portion of the student’s experience. The student faculty live interaction in the classroom or in the faculty office, and the study and course and career planning advice a faculty member can give, is a crucial element of the on-campus experience. The student faculty interaction is the main basis for the completely true notion that low student/faculty ratios are beneficial to learning; on-line, oncampus courses effectively elevate that ratio. Unlike the traditional off-campus “correspondence course”, the on-line, on-campus student bears an on-campus financial cost without (most likely) a reduction in the course tuition. On-line, on-campus instruction is a compromise direction that allows a
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campus to afford education of a larger student body than the state-provided resources would otherwise permit. And as basic tuition rates rise, the student receives less for more—a worrying trend in public university higher education. An aspect of the on-line, on-campus direction—about which chemistry should be most concerned—is magnification of the credit hour instructional cost difference between chemistry (with labs) and non-science (no labs) courses. The high cost of the laboratory experience will inevitably increase institutional budgetary pressures to decrease the extent (and quality) of laboratory instruction. I believe that public universities face continued necessity to invent imaginative approaches that moderate the laboratory cost but preserve it for our future scientist/scholars. Chemistry without experimentation is a hollow topic.
Published: May 10, 2011 3973
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac201139v | Anal. Chem. 2011, 83, 3973–3973
