The Human Connection

                                    

 There is lots of talk in higher education circles about the wonderful proliferation of courses being offered, at little cost, on the internet, by universities as prestigious as Harvard and Yale. You can now, in many cases it seems, achieve all the credits necessary for a degree through these courses. What you can do with those credits is still being bandied about. And therein lies the rub; you have not been to the institution awarding the credits, only to their internet extension.

The question of value is inherent here. Is the internet education capable of matching the results of the actual expensive university experience? Certainly, for many people, it is all they can manage in time or money, or both. And certainly the physical universities could not accommodate the hundreds of thousands around the world they serve on line. It is indisputably wonderful to have these courses available to so many. But what formal recognition should their completion provide? Are the physical attendance at class, the residential factor, the laboratory and seminar situations where students and faculty constantly meet face to face, mingle, and exchange ideas, essential to the quality of a university’s degree? That is the question being asked

Recognizing the cost of residential, traditional colleges and universities, recognizing that they have been seen to be moribund by many watching the growth of for-profit colleges, and recognizing the transformative nature of this revolutionary period in which we live, there may well be a hybrid taking shape that will blend the two. That would be in line with the changes in grades one through twelve. Our universities are a national source of pride, so we have a lot to lose if we move too quickly with this.

Ours is a world awash in pads and pods that provide communication between individuals. The phone is playing second fiddle to the text-message, the voice second fiddle to the thumbs. The human connection is thus, to some degree, diminished, and it may appear to  young college students, that it is quite normal that this should happen.

As a vintage human, it doesn’t look that way to me, and I will be watching to be sure that the human connection is not withdrawn from the college and university experience to any degree that reduces the value of that experience.