One article in this vein caught my eye this week: a blog post called “The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes” on a tech blog called “Bits” hosted by The New York Times. Not surprisingly, it argues that free classes on iTunes have enormous transformative potential. It mentions a class on autism at Stanford and one on architecture at MIT, and reports an incredible fact: There are now audio recordings of more than 250,000 individual classes from more than 600 schools available for free on iTunes U. Want to venture a guess at how many of those are Princeton classes? Not a single one.
Universities like Stanford and MIT, which have both made a big push toward putting classes online, have two goals in mind: first, to make it easy for students who miss class to catch up, and second, to “educate the masses” in the service of the greater good of society. It can be argued fairly easily that those are both noble goals, so I’m not going to spend much time discussing them. What I find problematic about iTunes U is that it’s indicative of a broader trend: a belief in the revolutionary potential of new, experimental education technologies. So while this may seem counterintuitive, I’m going to argue here that Princeton should be wary of embracing technologies like these — especially those that claim to have the power to fundamentally alter the way that education is conducted on a day-to-day basis.
First, ostensibly revolutionary technologies aren’t cheap, and at a time when the University is laying off employees and abandoning the study of New Jersey politics, it would be tough to justify spending the money that — to choose just one example — digitizing lectures and putting them on iTunes (or similar) would require. The ‘Prince’ reported in 2007 that Yale’s “Open Yale” program required a grant from the Hewlett Foundation just to get off the ground. Another serious cost concern is egalitarianism: If the University were to invest in some kind of new whiz-bang technology, it would theoretically have to buy it for everyone. Costs in that scenario are dizzyingly high: When Duke decided in 2004 to give each of its incoming freshmen a brand new iPod, it shelled out half a million dollars.
More importantly, though, it’s unclear how much potential “revolutionary” technologies have to change the way we learn for the better. It’s exceedingly hard to believe that any technology could be invented that would truly supplant the experience of sitting in a classroom and listening to an expert in whatever it is you happen to be studying. Professor Diana Kleiner, director of Open Yale, told me in an e-mail that even though she’s pleased with the results of the iTunes pilot program so far, she still believes that “experiencing a course online is not the same as ‘being there’ because the essential face-to-face interaction between professor and students and students and their peers is missing.” Similarly, psychological studies have consistently shown that you retain more information when you read on paper than you do when you read on a computer screen.
And even if non-traditional technologies have transformative potential, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be user-friendly. In “Kindles yet to woo University users” (Sept. 28), incidentally the most read article on the ‘Prince’ website so far this fall, a number of students in Professor Stan Katz’ “Civil Society and Democracy” class complained that Kindles — at the cutting edge of technology deployed for education — are cumbersome and hard to use.
In many ways, the view that I’ve articulated here is far from the majority opinion. If Princeton decides not to pursue radical education technologies as vigorously as our competitors, it will likely take a fairly significant amount of flak. To quote Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the British distance learning company Open University: “There are still a lot of universities in the world that define the value of their experience as somehow locking up their content and only giving people access to the content when they enroll in the program.” But progress for progress’ sake is a dangerous concept. In the words of an old aphorism, it may be best to leave well enough alone.
Charlie Metzger is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.
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