AfterTek

In just one year, Lee Levenson was able to upgrade his law career by earning 57 credits of rigorous computer programming and engineering courses. John McKinney, a father of three, completed more than 100 hours of online education in just three and a half years, while working full-time.

And Jessica Donnelly, a California-based publicist, knocked off two years of classroom time by earning both her bachelor’s and master’s in just four years. All three turned to the Web to get a head start on their education. According to proponents, online degrees have become the E-Z Pass of schooling, a pass to the education fast lane that could result in quicker degree completion.

But is faster always the better choice when it comes to education? Is eLearning able to eliminate some of the roadblocks present in traditional classroom settings? Or, are online learners missing out on key educational experiences, such as socializing with classmates, in-person brainstorming, and face-to-face interaction with professors? Educators are concerned with this program. Is the fast way the best way?

Ongoing research being conducted by cognitive scientists and education experts at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that it is. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), funded by $5.6 million in grants from the Hewlett Foundation, designed a series of high-quality introductory college level courses available for free on the Internet to anyone with an interest. Unlike other open-courseware that simply posts the class syllabus online, Carnegie Mellon’s OLI offers a Web-based interactive classroom complete with diagrams, real-time feedback, and a virtual tutor that provides hints when needed.

OLI currently offers 11 online courses, ranging from physics to logic to economics. The chemistry course features a virtual lab, where students are given a real-world problem (purifying the arsenic contaminated water supply in Bangladesh, for example). A typical French lesson includes a video shot in France of two French actors meeting each other at the train station. Students listen to the audio answer choices and choose the one that makes the most sense. The pedagogical methods underlying each exercise were researched by the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center, aided by a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Last fall, Carnegie Mellon took students enrolled in an introductory statistics course and divided them into two groups. The first group served as the control, attending the traditional three lecture hours per week in person and completing hundreds of homework problems. The second group took the course online. They didn’t buy a textbook, and only met with an instructor once a week. Students in both groups took three midterms and a final. In the end, the online group performed as well or better than the traditional group.

This semester, Carnegie Mellon is studying whether online learning could be just as effective as traditional classroom-based instruction, but finish the material in less time. The university chose 23 students to take an accelerated statistics course, which lasts only eight weeks, half the normal semester length. “We wanted to make OLI better, faster,” explains Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. “Now we’re testing to see whether we can get the same outcome with less work and less time.”

At press time, the class was still underway, but OLI statistics professor Oded Meyer says it’s clear that the students are much more focused. “Right now it seems like it’s succeeding,” he says, noting that the online test scores have been as good if not better than typical classes. “It’s not just that they learn quicker, but they maintain the same depth of learning and they do it faster,” says Marsha Lovett, the associate director of CMU’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence. “The best word for it is ‘efficient.’”

Other professors familiar with OLI courses agree with Lovett. “It’s a much more efficient way of teaching,” says Anna Dollar, an engineering professor at Miami University in Ohio, who teaches a statics course (a sophomore-level engineering class) using the OLI system. Since the students come to class already familiar with the material, Dollar uses class time to reinforce concepts that students found especially difficult.

Every keystroke is monitored, so teachers are able to see how students are faring with the new material, and are aware of trouble areas that need to be clarified. “It’s like peeking into their brains and seeing the logic of how they work and their misconceptions,” says Dollar. Later, learning experts analyze the student data to improve theories of how students learn most effectively. “OLI doesn’t replace the need for a brick-and-mortar classroom,” says Thille. “Instead, it has changed what we do in that classroom.”