Imagine that as a high school student, you could have attended Dartmouth classes without leaving home. While this is impossible right now, the availability of classes on the Internet is already a reality for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other schools, including Yale, Notre Dame, Bryn Mawr and Stanford. These universities have begun to offer free online courses in an effort to extend scholarship to the general public, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. While this new wealth of available information surely benefits the public, is it ultimately good for higher education to offer its courses to prospective students?
In 2003, MIT launched its Open Course Ware program that publishes course materials such as lecture notes, reading lists and even tests for over 1,500 courses. Following the trend, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a charitable organization that focuses on education, has donated over $68 million so far to other universities' efforts to open up their resources to the general public. Next fall, Yale plans to offer free videos of seven introductory courses including "Introduction to the Old Testament" and "Fundamentals of Physics."
Disregarding for a moment whether or not it is profitable for a school like Yale to offer its class lectures gratis, it is a good thing to spread the intellectual wealth of higher education. The same reasoning behind the value of giving students financial aid applies to providing pro bono education; while it earns less money for the college, allowing students who have a lot to offer the college community besides money have access to education is worth more to the school than the extra tuition.
Many people surveyed by the Journal who use the service use course materials to supplement their professional training, while others simply love learning. However, making courses available on the Internet is quickly becoming a new means of advertising in the already media-clogged world of college applications.
Even in an age where visiting colleges is easier than it ever has been, the increasing availability of information online adds to the ways students can learn about colleges. If colleges continue to follow in MIT's footsteps as Yale and Notre Dame have already done, students around the world will be able to conduct their college search from their desks at home. Since an MIT survey showed that a third of the freshmen who used the Open Course Ware service reported that it had played a significant role in their decision to attend MIT, it is likely that other colleges will follow suit in order to capitalize on this new way of selling themselves to applicants and parents of applicants.
This reality increases the arbitrariness of the college application market. Schools that do not offer their courses online will suffer, but applicants who depend on online courses will suffer as well, because online courses cannot do full justice to a college. Schools should not have to compromise the uniqueness they are able to show off during a campus visit in order to keep up in the market for higher education.
There is such a thing, after all, as information overload. The Internet already makes it easy to be overwhelmed by too much information. Plus, the information about college courses that applicants can obtain through course videos is not even enough to get an idea of the big picture of the school. An online course lacks the interactive, personal experience of the classroom, and can therefore never be a substitute for actually visiting a college.
Even though more information helps students make more-informed choices, online courses add an invalid dimension to the competition between colleges for applicants because they do not truly represent the colleges. Five years from now, we will be able to watch an introductory psychology course from every university in America on our computers. Will college applicants really find meaningful differences between hundreds of psychology classes? The Dartmouth we know is certainly not defined by one introductory course. Offering free courses on the Internet will erase what remains of the personal differentiations of the college search, transforming higher education into a colorless market that does not reflect the many shapes and sizes of colleges there are to choose from.
