A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the
Classroom
I like to think of myself as being up-to-date with the
latest trends. Unfortunately, much of the evidence points
to the contrary. For example, I have been fond of saying
that online tools for education have a role but ultimately
can't compete with the type of interactive classroom
instruction that research universities like Johns Hopkins
provide.
The great thing about experiments, a professor of mine
once told me, "is that they always work."
While I was sleeping, various Hopkins divisions have
been experimenting with online courses. The results, I have
just learned, show that once again I am far behind the
times. The experiment worked — it just didn't work
the way I had expected it would.
Online courses specifically tailored for distance
education have been around for a number of years. And the
use of online or interactive Internet tools for so-called
asynchronous learning has been gaining in recent years. The
Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins has been
a pioneer in developing distance education courses. For a
number of years it has been possible to obtain a master of
public health degree from the Bloomberg School as a
part-time student enrolling via online courses. There is a
three-month residency requirement during which M.P.H.
candidates must be in Baltimore for study, but for the rest
of the time students can take courses from their home or
office in Boston, Bangladesh or beyond.
Good enough, I thought. In this case, the use of the
Internet enables people who would not otherwise be able to
obtain their M.P.H. by virtue of geographic separation to
do so rather conveniently. But, in a recent conversation
with Dr. Al Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School, I
found out something truly extraordinary. It seems that once
the online courses had been developed, they began to be
used not only by the part-time M.P.H. students in Botswana
but by the full-time students in Baltimore. Fully half the
online courses taken in the Bloomberg School are taken by
full-time students matriculating in Baltimore. Wow! I
wondered why that might be.
Dr. Sommer told me that one of the reasons was simple
convenience. Another was scheduling. If a student had a
scheduling conflict with a classroom course, she or he
could enroll via the Internet offering. But that was not
all.
Other interesting developments have followed the
creation of an online M.P.H. curriculum. First, pedagogy in
the classroom has improved. Evidently, in order to develop
an online course, you must invest more time and creativity
in developing pedagogical tools to facilitate asynchronous
(non-real time, noninteractive) learning. Some of these
tools enhance the classroom courses taught synchronously as
well. The result is that the quality of instruction rises
in the classroom as well as on the Internet. The two feed
each other symbiotically.
In addition, so many full-time students had taken the
Internet-based courses that when they enrolled in a
classroom course, if the professor didn't have
Internet-enabled course supplements, they complained
vociferously. The result: Within a year, almost all of the
Bloomberg School's classroom-based courses had developed
Internet supplements.
The Bloomberg School has joined MIT in putting its
public health courses online in a free shareware-based Web
site (ocw.mit.edu/index.html). You can access a number of
online courses for free, without credit and without the
benefit of an instructor. It is likely that many educators
are going to post their Web-based courses there,
facilitating broader access and also potentially freeing
faculty from having to prepare specific course programs
(which others will have already done), thereby freeing them
to focus on the interactive parts of education.
That interaction might take place in multiple ways:
face to face in small groups; remotely via video links over
the Internet; or asynchronously, via e-mail between teacher
and student. Burks Oakley, a professor of engineering at
the University of Illinois, has been one of the pioneers in
asynchronous learning, and if you take a look at the online
Web site at the University of Illinois
(
www.online.uillinois.edu), you will see the richness of
content and pedagogical tools being developed.
Asynchronous learning has had the most application to
science and engineering courses, and to subjects related to
professional degrees such as business or public health. But
it is increasingly being used in the more broadly based
disciplines, such as philosophy and ethics, where one would
suppose it difficult to employ this less interactive
learning form. If present trends continue, it may turn out
that asynchronous learning is one of the most important
tools yet discovered to enhance, but not replace, the
concept of the Johns Hopkins "hand-tooled education."
I had this dream: While walking to a classroom at
Johns Hopkins, I suddenly realized it was gone. Funny
thing; I woke up to discover it wasn't a dream at all.
William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.
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