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ESSAY: Why Online Education Will Never Work
by Stephen Morrill
For some 22 years now people have told me I have been doing something wrong. Well, yes, some people say I've been wrong a whole lot longer, but I want to talk about online education, and, specifically, teaching writing.
After several years doing it part-time I started full-time freelancing in 1984 and soon realized that most of the nonfiction writers I knew had not a clue of how to run a business, especially a tough one like this. So, when a friend suggested me to the AOL folks as their second writer-instructor, I took the job in 1988. He covered fiction, I taught people how to run a nonfiction writing business. The Web was a new thing and everyone just knew it was a passing fad, sort of CB radio with pictures. Even so, lots of people liked the idea of cheap writing classes they could take in their pajamas..
I didn't dislike AOL but I disliked their management of the online school portion. When the management job came open I asked to run it but they said no and hired a replacement nincompoop instead. AOL eventually decided online education was stupid because their manager didn't know how to manage and did away with their online school. But by then I had moved on.
I left AOL and joined with Writers Club, a startup company with a writing-information web site. I created a writing school on their web site. We provided (and the school still does today) courses in every kind of writing, from nonfiction articles to books to fiction genres to greeting cards, speeches, technical, newspaper, essays and journals, even a new course in how to write eulogies. We have basic courses in editing, grammar and the like. If it's writing-related, we have it or I want it.
But by now the buzzword was 'distance education' and real universities were trying to figure out how to do this. I attended three annual meetings of some organization of English department deans and teachers who wanted to learn how to teach on the Web. I already knew how and was already doing exactly what they all said they wanted to do and which they told one another would be possible to do — someday. When I pointed out that I was already doing what they hoped would be possible someday, they reminded me that I was not from some university English department, making me one level lower than a leper in their eyes, and went on discussing how this might be possible — someday. I quit attending those conferences and they soon quit having them anyway. I seemed to have a knack for lowering the lifeboat and rowing away just before the ship hit the iceberg.
I did teach, for a while and by email, for a college in Ohio and the University of California at Stanislaus. I no longer recall the Ohio school's name and I never heard of Stanislaus and couldn't find it today. But both places charged students a small fortune for classes I was also teaching at my own web site for a fraction of the price. These schools thought distance learning was a great profit-center because they charged the same price as for an in-classroom course but had almost no overhead to cover. (At a brick-and-mortar university more than half of tuition typically goes for everything from janitorial to maintenance to police protection. Why are you paying for those things when you are two thousand miles away?) That bothered me so much that I quit teaching for those people. To want to tell students "Hey, you can learn all this for less money, same course, if you click here" and not to be allowed to do so seemed dishonest to me.
After just two years we sold our Writers Club to iUniverse, an early entrant into the print-on-demand book publishing business. For the next few years I was actually an employee, with an office in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of a bunch of cubicles, that I visited several times each year and that other people seemed to use for storage. I didn't mind, I was their only telecommuting employee, working out of my home office in Florida. The school continued but I found myself spending most of my 40 hours per week sorting out complaints from people who could not figure out the Byzantine web site iUniverse had at the time. I begged them to fix things because our student numbers had plummeted thanks to their programmers' lack of focus. Although there were web designers in Lincoln, the programmers were in Shanghai and my requests never seemed to reach them. I could never get my school set up the way I wanted and it hemorrhaged students despite my spending all my time fixing complaints about the website. Eventually iUniverse, deciding my school was obviously a stupid idea because their programming crippled it too badly to work right, dumped me, though we did have to let two months pass to finish out the contracts we had with the students we had at the time.
Two months and one day later, WritersCollege.com went live. It was an immediate hit even though back then (early 2000s) Web commerce and online education was still very new. Because I still had the same teachers, and a lot of the same students, we started with about fifty courses, instantly becoming the largest online writing school at the time. Today we have about 60 courses.
And now, for the first time, I was truly able to implement my vision, using - for good or ill - my own programming and web design. And things have gone swimmingly ever since. Almost no hassles, happy students, happy teachers and a happy me.
But, I am quite sure that this Web/online education thing will never work. People tell me so. Visit our web site at http://www.WritersCollege.com to see it not working. |
