There is this in yesterday’s New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/us/after-setbacks-online-courses-are-rethought.html?hpw&rref=us but I believe that online access can be very informative when used the way I described.
(Also, I just finished an excellent book on the role of the internet in education. It is “Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities” by Richard A. DeMillo.)
“Online material can be a boon to students in a simple way. They can use the internet to find out if a university is living up to its educational claims. In this day of marketing to “consumers” (once quaintly known as “students”), this kind of accountability is important.
Here is just one example of how the internet can be used. MIT puts material from its courses online. They include videos, lecture notes, problems and tests, with solutions. They call it OpenCourseWare. If, for example, a student wants to find out what MIT considers important for engineers to learn about differential equations, he can go to MIT’s course syllabus and read “The Ten Essential Skills”. MIT’s tests and problems are there, so any student taking the course anywhere can check to see how well they are acquiring these skills. Though not every engineer needs to know engineering at the level of a MIT grad, students (and parents) can use this to see how their course is measuring up. If their A was easy to get, but they can hardly do any of the MIT problems, or hardly know the MIT material, it may be that, to paraphrase David Riesman, their, or their classmates’, “wants” are being catered to, not their “needs”.”
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