by Peter Wood, Fiscal Times
I’d like to see colleges and universities recover their proper selves after decades of misdirection. If the rise of online education promotes that spirit of self-reform, all the better. But I also see merit in most of the forms of online education taken on their own terms. They do some things extraordinarily well. As it happens, liberal education in the traditional sense is probably not destined to be among those things, but that simply means we should prepare for a “disaggregation” of higher education. Not everyone is happy with the prospect of that disaggregation. In my experience a great many academics have fierce loyalty to the notion that residential colleges and universities are first-tier institutions and online learning preys on those who don’t know better and gives them an inferior education. In any case, a new genre of academic writing has begun to emerge, exemplified by Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, in which scholars create a new apologetics for residential liberal arts education.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/12/10/How-Online-Education-Can-Save-Our-Universities
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