Wow. Mike – you push us hard. Anne Herrington and I have just finished a piece, to be published soon in College English, in which we review computer programs that purport to 'read' and evaluate student writing. These are being pushed on us by commercial interests, ETS for one, for purposes of placement, certainly, but also for essay-grading in large, content-area courses. So we find ourselves having to argue for the value of human readers! And, by inference, for the value of F2F education. The specter, perhaps a paranoid vision: a two-tiered post-secondary educational system offering, for those who can pay, actual readers, actual teachers; and for those who can't pay, machine-readers and on-line courses.
So yes, we have to be involved, we have to push, argue, for what we believe to be good educational practice. As Chris puts it, we have to "seize control of our intellectual destiny."
What is not clear to me, yet, is what the benefits of F2F education actually are. Mike says that there are "fundamental differences between the experiences of teachers and learners in online courses and face-to-face courses." I'm wondering: what are these differences? And are the differences the same for all learners? All subjects? All aspects of a given subject? All learning styles? It seems to me that this is a huge challenge: to decide what works best, when, and for whom. One of my first-year students last year wanted to skip class and work exclusively on our web site, communicating with me and her peers by email. I told her that she could not – that our F2F work in class was important. My reaction was, I realized even then, an exercise of power, not of intelligence. But what, exactly, lies behind my felt sense that something good is happening in the F2F meetings that can't happen if this student stays in her dorm room and types? Is there something more than my self-interest operating here? My fear of becoming obsolete – a bank-teller, a travel-agent, a teacher – a person who delivers (money, air-tickets, curriculum) in an expensive and inefficient way? That may be the question of a lifetime.
– Charles Moran
cmoran@english.umass.edu