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From http://chronicle.com/free/99/12/99120201u.htm (reprinted with permission).
On-Line Courses of 1,000 Students Will Become Common, Industry Group Says
By DAN CARNEVALE
Washington
Within 20 years, on-line classes with as many as 1,000 students will replace traditional lecture courses on campus, according to a forecast of the distance-learning industry to be released this weekend.
The author of the forecast, William A. Draves, says that students will benefit from the development of large classes, because each student will have the opportunity to interact on line with many more classmates.
"The more people who contribute, the more you learn," says Mr. Draves, president of the Learning Resources Network, a distance-learning industry group. The forecast is to be released here Saturday at the group's annual conference.
Teaching a large on-line class should not present a difficult workload for professors, Mr. Draves says. Questions from students can be posed to the entire class, so that others may suggest answers. Any questions the professor does respond to can be answered once for all the class to see, he says.
Instructors for large on-line classes probably could rely heavily on multiple-choice examinations that can be graded by a computer, because grading essay tests would be time consuming, Mr. Draves says.
However, Jean McGrath, director of student services at Penn State World Campus, the distance-education arm of Pennsylvania State University, says having such large classes on line would be difficult for both the professors and the students.
The Penn State World Campus enrolls no more than 30 to 40 students in most classes. That makes it easier for professors to handle inquiries from students, Ms. McGrath says. "The faculty wants to give the students the attention," Ms. McGrath says. "It takes a lot longer to respond by e-mail." She agrees that student interaction is important to the class, which is why the university usually requires a minimum of about five students per class. And she adds that it might be possible to handle more than 40 students with teaching assistants.
But discussions are hard to follow with several hundred students responding to bulletin boards, Ms. McGrath says. As evidence, she cites the difficulty in following discussions on a listserv that's overloaded with participants.
Larger class sizes will be a result of businesses' increasing demand for an educated work force, Mr. Draves says. About 25 per cent of Americans seek to continue their education after college, he says, but that will increase to 50 per cent in the next 20 years, he predicts.
Mr. Draves says that universities should slash tuition for on-line courses to about $100 so that more people could afford them. But with 1,000 students, that would still earn a college $100,000 for a single course.
He doesn't believe that on-line education will drive traditional education out of business. But he does believe that on-line classes will replace most lecture-based courses on campus, while in-person classes will specialize in small-group discussions.
Some courses may always be better taught face to face, such as foreign languages, so that a professor can hear the student's speech, he says. "There will be some classes that you can't put on line at all," Mr. Draves says.
He believes colleges will begin sharing on-line courses, either because of star professors or a new course design. That way, he says, institutions could specialize in certain areas and carve out niches that could benefit other universities and other students as well.
Copyright 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be posted, published, or distributed without permission from The Chronicle.
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