With university education becoming more expensive, we should start looking at online courses to lower fees, writes Dr Hannes Smit of the Department of Philosophy in an opinion piece published in Business Day on Wednesday (24 August 2016).
- Read the complete article below or click here for the piece as published.
Tertiary Education For All?
Studying full-time at a residential university (including accommodation and basic maintenance) costs roughly R300 000 per degree. Funding an additional one hundred students will cost 30 million rand, funding an additional one thousand students will cost 300 million rand, and so on. The numbers spiral out of control in a hurry; university education is expensive and the majority of South Africans are poor.
We live in an age where information is practically free. Can we do better?
A few years ago there was a lot of enthusiasm for massive open online courses (MOOCs), but such enthusiasm has faded due to the relative lack of interested students. MOOCs typically force students to finish a course within a set time frame and typically do not allow someone to pursue an already existing degree. Consider, however, what can be done if we combine the content delivery system of a MOOC with the certification process of a traditional university.
Recording lectures and placing them online is not difficult. Class notes can be made available for free and we can use free, open source textbooks. Student can access these resources from home on their smartphones. We can schedule extra exam opportunities during student holidays and, for a nominal fee, students can take the exam and earn the exact same credits as earned by residential students. A hundred rand per exam should cover the costs involved (assuming that R20 000 can pay for grading and the administrative overhead associated with an exam written by 200 people).
If all courses are available in this format a degree can cost less than R5 000, i.e. less than 2% of the current cost. Occasionally, of course, the use of copyrighted material and proprietary software will be unavoidable. Even where such costs are incurred, the cost of a degree will still be lower by an order of magnitude.
An initial problem is that students typically cannot afford to watch hundreds of hours' worth of lectures online. Fortunately a university's entire offering can fit on a modern hard drive. These can distributed to every library in the region, where they can be copied by the student.
Students need not conform to a particular timetable. Students can study when time allows and register for the exam when they feel ready to take it. There is similarly no need to require that students have university exemption or even matric. If the student can pass the exam there is no reason to deny them the credits, no matter their educational background. (Of course, the number of students without proper credentials can be greatly decreased by making high school lessons available in a similar format. Then students with mediocre teachers can access the lectures of the top teachers in the country.)
Students studying in this way lose out on student-lecturer interaction. For most students, however, the gain from interaction comes from hearing the questions asked by all the other students. Students watching recordings of actual lectures will see such interactions anyway.
One fear would be that such students will gain second rate degrees. We must ensure that evaluation is of the exact same standard as for residential degrees and the exact same degree certificate must be issued. One option to ensure proper standards of evaluation would be to set two exams for each course and then a random process decides which question paper is used at which exam opportunity.
Some courses, of course, do require students to be present in order to do laboratory work, etc. Note that a lot of degrees have few such constraints; there is little in most undergraduate degrees in humanities, economics, law or accounting that require the student to be present for class. Sometimes, however, this problem will be insurmountable. But even then it may be feasible to let the student learn all the theory online and then organise a repeat of the residence-required component of the course.
Obviously the "student experience", networking benefits and the learning experience of living far from home goes missing. What the student would get, however, is a quality education and a recognised degree in a way that minimally disrupts their lives. And at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Photo: Pixabay
