The answer is yes and no.
Measuring the relative effectiveness of online education is difficult due to the variability in subject matter, class size, and what is meant by the term online education. Moreover, as has been observed by Richard DeMillo (Center for 21st Century Universities) and others, forms and methods of online education are rapidly evolving. The methods studied in the most current reports are outdated by the time they are completed.
When English colleges were being developed, first at Oxford and shortly thereafter at Cambridge, the chapel was at the center of the diagram. The cultures of these institutions were only slightly removed from the monasteries of the Middle Ages. It was in such cloistered setting that teaching and scholarship had been maintained through the aegis of the Church.
At Oxford and Cambridge, the chapel and its schedule of worship continued to be central to the life of each college. And so it continued for more than 300 years. By the early 1800s it was possible for Thomas Jefferson to conceive a new American university in Charlottesville in which the library took over the center of the diagram. It was there that the essential role of books and the printed page became the symbolic heart of the university.
Once when I met with a group of university architects from Canada and the US, we marveled at the beauty of the campus and the apparent coherence of the values that had shaped its design for more than a century.
The campus had come through the middle decades of twentieth century without either the brutalism or simplistic excesses of modernism. Historic spaces had been preserved and strengthened. Scale had been respected. Connections had been maintained and improved. All in all it was a place that showed the effects of care and deep stewardship over an extended period of time.
Some seasoned observers of the current challenges to higher education believe that there is nothing new. Colleges and universities have gone through multiple periods of change and transformation since their emergence at the end of the Middle Ages about 700 years ago. Each time, institutions have adapted and survived.
Competition makes this time different. In the United States not only are institutions faced with declining financial prospects, but also with questions of legitimacy and cost-effectiveness. They have survived such situations in the past, but the only competition then was less education, not more.
