Promise and Pitfalls in Online Ed

By Doug Lederman. It seemed almost too easy. Catharine Stimpson and Ann Kirschner start from such fundamentally different perspective in their views about technology-enabled education that staging a symposium at which the two of them talk about their experiences taking online courses (or writing about such an event) seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course Kirschner would be a booster, and Stimpson a naysayer. What enlightenment could possibly emerge?
The event late last month at New York University here (where Stimpson is University Professor and dean emerita of the graduate school of arts and science) followed the expected script in some ways. Stimpson, a Columbia- and Cambridge-trained feminist literary scholar who presided over the Modern Language Association and is a staunch defender of the humanities, probably surprised no one in the audience when she expressed her qualms that online learning, at least as embodied by tightly controlled courses like the creative writing class she took at the University of Phoenix, contribute to a trend in which “teaching is losing its dignity.” Read more...