Online challenge to campus life

By Benjamin Preiss. ONLINE education is pushing some traditional campuses to the brink of extinction and universities will have to reinvent their role to preserve a bricks and mortar presence. That stark view emerged from university leaders last week at a conference in Melbourne on high-speed broadband and higher education. It heard that traditional aspects of campus life, such as packed lecture theatres, were already fading fast in some institutions.
Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Young said institutes that wanted to retain a physical presence would need to focus increasingly on research and student residential experiences. Professor Young told the University of Melbourne conference that "high-volume education" would continue moving online and large lectures would begin to disappear.
"Why in the world would students come along and . . . sit in a passive lecture with 300 other students when they can access material online themselves," he said. "It makes no sense to me."
In his speech, Professor Young said universities that wanted to maintain a focus on their campuses would need to offer additional value in their courses. This could include an emphasis on laboratory research that was difficult to conduct via the internet. "The campus will more and more become an environment of research rather than teaching." He said universities could also promote the benefits of students living together and forming networks as part of the "residential experience" on campus.
Professor Young acknowledged the rising popularity of massive online open courses, which some world-leading universities offer for free. Millions of people have signed on through providers such as Coursera. Earlier this month the University of Melbourne became the first Australian institute to join Coursera, which has more than 1.5 million students on its books, according to the company's website. Graduates are awarded certificates of completion but cannot earn qualifications. Professor Young said it was unlikely universities such as Stanford or Harvard would offer accredited courses where graduates gain qualifications for free. "Why is a Harvard degree valuable? Because it is rare and unique and a stamp of achievement. If you have hundreds of thousands of students with those degrees you're effectively devaluing the degree."
Professor Young said the world's leading universities had the freedom simply to explore "options" with their online open courses because demand for their on-campus courses remained so high. University of New England vice-chancellor Jim Barber told the conference that the traditional campus role was in decline. Hosting online learning would become one of the primary purposes for the bricks-and-mortar campus, he said. Under his vision, students would gather in online hubs studying with classmates from worldwide in the campus of the future, replacing packed lecture theatres and crowded tutorials. UNE has already started installing these nodes.
Professor Barber told Higher Age some tasks, including medical and dental practical work, would need to remain on campus. But almost anything universities offered at campuses now could be done online, he said. The UNE website says the university is at the forefront of online learning, with more than 12,500 of its 17,000 students studying via the internet.
Professor Barber said the "vast ocean of information" available online had undermined the "broadcast teaching" model where a teacher gives lectures to a passive group of students. This traditional model ignored students' learning preferences and technology had rendered this approach obsolete. Mobile phones and digital devices had become increasingly important educational tools, he said, allowing more students to study wherever they wanted. Students who were poor, isolated or disabled would be the "big winners" of the migration to mobile devices bringing distance education within reach. "As mobile technology takes hold distance education will increasingly move from the classroom and desktop and onto mobile devices," he said. But some experts fear online education could further isolate disadvantaged students who cannot afford new technology. Sally Kift, deputy vice-chancellor of James Cook University, warned greater dependence on mobile and online technology might worsen the lot of some underprivileged students. She said universities still offered computer loan schemes because many students could not afford them.
"I think it's important to balance the rush to online and other blended-learning delivery with the fact that for some students this is not technology they've necessarily had available to them."
The best-quality learning for undergraduate students was still happening on university campuses, Professor Kift said. Social interaction between students remained a crucial part of university education. "If the online or blended delivery can capture that social aspect of learning then that's good as well. But that needs to be quite intentionally enabled. It will not happen by chance." b.preiss@theage.com.au.