What started as a discussion among my colleagues of whether it is possible to teach writing skills online degenerated into meaningless screeds about the university needing to adapt to “the free markets”, the burning necessity of teaching entrepreneurship in college*, and the suggestions that professors of Chemistry and Biology can teach writing and public speaking as well as profs of English and Philosophy with the implication that it’s time to get rid of the useless Humanities altogether.
* Yeah, whatever, I have no idea how you can teach it either and I believe nobody does.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have long thought that the best, if not only, way to “teach” writing skills is by reading well-written books and essays. Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill (the British PM, not the novelist) come immediately to mind but, of course, there are others. It would also be useful to suggest that students of writing review their own works and systematically delete redundant or otherwise superfluous words. Perhaps a competent teacher could then review the result and suggest other beneficial deletions.
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“It would also be useful to suggest that students of writing review their own works and systematically delete redundant or otherwise superfluous words. ”
– This is the hardest skill to teach but, yes, it’s an extremely important one.
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I think a revolution in higher education is coming, probably it’s already started. The high costs of higher education, combined with the availability of super-advanced telecommunication, will create powerful pressure for streamlined, lower-cost higher education. Lectures by the best professors in Canada or the US can be viewed on television or computer, virtually anywhere, anytime. Also, the concept of self-directed education is popular (maybe the word should be “seductive”).
I’m afraid that many college professors are about to be rendered obsolete and unemployed or underemployed, following the fate of industrial workers. Professors who believe this can’t happen need to take the blinders off and look at other professions. In my own industry, the vast printing trade has been wiped out by the revolution of offset printing, followed by the computer revolution. It took a little longer, but the ranks of reporters and editors are greatly reduced, thanks to computers, 24-hour cable news, and the internet.
The revolution in higher education will probably trickle down quickly to secondary education. It will be impossible to argue that bright students, with a sound foundation in elementary education from pre-K through sixth or eighth grade, cannot learn through their computer terminal. With skype and similar services, questions can be asked and discussions held in real time.
I agree that much of great value will be lost in the race to efficiency.
Who knows what higher ed and secondary ed will look like 50 years from now? I fear that education will be administered and delivered by intelligent computers, with a little assistance from humans to maintain the hardware and make sure the computers are plugged in. Please don’t shoot me, I’m only delivering the message.
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Auto-didacts are so extremely rare that I don’t see crowds of employers lining up to hire people with online diplomas from online diploma mills. Given that each course in such schools has an over 80% drop-out rate, we shouldn’t expect more than a handful of people graduating from them.
As for secondary schools, their number one function is that of socialization, which is why home-schooling is so wrong. Learning is not about rote memorization of data gleaned from dubious online sources. Fads come and go but I don’t expect much competition from Rosetta Stone and its brethren. 🙂 I also don’t fear that a lecture by a Hispanic literature prof at Yale will somehow make my lecture on the same subject redundant. There is no single and God-given correct point of view in my discipline. My reading and that of a hundred colleagues all over the world are equally valid.
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While I agree with your comment below that resisting the economic pressure will be difficult, I doubt online courses are ever going to wipe out traditional classes. Correspondence courses have existed in some form or another for quite a while – I took both a paper correspondence course and an online course when I was in high school (I graduate a decade ago) and that was exceptionally rare. I don’t see it picking up in popularity until online courses become good enough that a reliable majority can stick with the class and pass with good marks.
My personal worst fear is that traditional higher ed courses become concentrated in “elite” schools servicing the most privileged students, and state colleges get driven to mostly online learning by the economic pressures of defunding by ignorant/bribed legislators.
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“I doubt online courses are ever going to wipe out traditional classes. Correspondence courses have existed in some form or another for quite a while – I took both a paper correspondence course and an online course when I was in high school (I graduate a decade ago) and that was exceptionally rare.”
– That’s exactly what I’m saying. I took 6 years worth of correspondence courses in French. The result is that I don’t speak French. And that’s me, a person who already knew a foreign language and has a very high capacity for concentration and working on my own. In Spanish, on the other hand, I took a single intensive course in college, and that gave me more than 6 years of correspondence studying in French ever did. I cannot imagine regular 18-year-olds sticking to a schedule, doing the homework, working every day on their studies on their own. I just don’t see that happening at all.
“My personal worst fear is that traditional higher ed courses become concentrated in “elite” schools servicing the most privileged students, and state colleges get driven to mostly online learning by the economic pressures of defunding by ignorant/bribed legislators.”
– I couldn’t agree more! This is the real danger that we need to resist. If we go down that road, we will end up seeing a sky-rocketing impoverishment of people who won’t be able to afford to go to the Ivies and who will deprived of the skills and knowledge needed to survive in the world where technology is exploding and basic-skills manufacturing jobs are disappearing completely. This is why we need to stand firm against the completely imaginary pressures of “free markets” and insist that education is not about staring at a computer screen alone at home.
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I share your worst fear that excellent higher education will soon be limited to elites, based on wealth and “meritocracy.” I fear that 98 percent of us are going to be marginalized, and the top two percent won’t care — they don’t need us.
And I share Clarissa’s reservations about “free markets.” Higher education should be protected from free markets. That’s why we have so many public colleges and universities. Maintaining funding for higher education is going to be a challenge in the new age of austerity and the worship of free markets.
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I mentioned austerity policies in class asked my students what they were. Nobody knew.
“Austerity is the reason why your tuition keeps rising,” I said. That woke them up.
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Maybe your students should read my 2012 post entitled “Austerity Is The New Slavery.” http://johnhaydeninmd.com/2012/06/20/austerity-is-the-new-name-for-slavery/
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I agree with you that no single point-of-view is correct. I’m not in favor of this, I’m just saying the fiscal pressure will be difficult to resist. As for the present graduation rate from “diploma mills” etc., as I said, the revolution is only beginning. A few years hence, I suspect online higher ed programs will be greatly improved and accepted.
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“I’m just saying the fiscal pressure will be difficult to resist.”
– Yes, this is true. This is precisely why it bugs me so that my colleagues keep discussing the needs of “free markets” as the greatest standard we should all measure ourselves against. Will there be no place for me to hide from the deification of “free markets’? This is a rhetorical question. 🙂
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What works for me are one on one, face to face interactions with outlines first and then essays with two way questions and answers.
They learn more in 15 minutes when they have to answer questions about why they do or don’t have something in one or the other or they can ask why some detail is irrelevant or would this other approach be okay than they do in 10 or more hours of classroom exercises.
For me classroom time on writing is a prop for the real learning which happens in office hours. ymmv.
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“For me classroom time on writing is a prop for the real learning which happens in office hours.”
– Yes. This is very true. Intense one-on-one interactions work the best in terms of teaching writing. But it’s very very difficult to make that happen.
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