A sign of the decline of established education is this response to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s call for cost-savings recommendations: students should go off-campus to complete at least ten percent of their degree requirements. An article in Wired Campus describes how online courses could be used to compensate for the inability of universities to deliver in the old analog way.
This quotation from the article contains a revealing nugget about what is happening spontaneously in the growth of online learning:
Richard Garrett, managing director at the consulting firm Eduventures, said requiring online education “would seem unnecessary” because it’s already “increasingly difficult to graduate from a mainstream higher-education institution and not have taken something that is more or less an online course.”
“It might create more negative feeling and go against what’s a pretty organic trend already,” he said. “In many ways, online is most successful where it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down.”
Here is the nugget — a clue that individual students, not pedagogical planners, are choosing online opportunities to meet their own goals: it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down. This fact demonstrates, among other things, the reality of students taking their schooling into their own hands.
