Finished Lanham’s book, and I’ll likely go back and blog on some of the other chapters. However chapter seven was perhaps the most provocative: a real jab at higher education.

A couple caveats:

1. I share the concerns of many for academic entrepeneurialism–what it means for "pure research" in the sciences and the non-commerical scholarship of the humanities, as well as the effects it may have upon teaching as curriculum becomes more market-driven.
2. I am also not one of those academics who believes the grass is necessarily greener in the corporate world.

That said, I am largely in agreement with most of Lanham’s assertions. Here are some of the assumptions he *ahem* investigates:

• The ideal education is face-to-face, one-on-one education
• Higher education, in its ideal form, proceeds in a setting sequestered in both time and space
• The education every university offers should be generated in-house by a resident faculty employed full time for this purpose

Well, I’m sure that last one will get everyone’s attention. The first two resonate obviously with online education. I think most professors would agree that there is such a thing as a course that’s too small. One-on-one education presupposes, I think, the clearly authoritative position of the professor. For a collaborative, constructivist pedagogical experience, one requires a group of learners; it’s a social experience. I would say classes under 10 are too small, unless perhaps they are truly dedicated graduate students. FTF classes over 20 or 30 are essentially lecture-driven; lecture can be useful, but not as one’s sole option.

I think however that it is an open question yet what type of learning experience can occur among 100 or more students in an online environment. It is an open question in part b/c emerging technologies keep shifting the terms. We know from our Web 2.0 experience that knowledge-building experiences improving dramatically online with increased participation. Wikipedia does not require an authoritative expert the way the classroom does.

This leads to the second point. College’s remained structured primarily around the idea of a four-year, on-campus experience, despite the fact that few students actually have the experience. Most students work, and most take several years more than four to graduate. Lanham argues this system partly reflects academia’s hierachy of theory over practice: spend four years learning theory and then go out and spend a lifetime practicing it. However, we know learning does work this way now (if it ever did). Lanham notes that online universities "get" this and offer their students the opportunity to learn theory in the context of their professional practice.

The last one though is the real kicker. However, if you aren’t going to teach FTF, and you are going to make curriculum available over an extended space and time, then you don’t really need to have faculty…just customer support. As Lanham writes, "the professor, in electronic space, needs the university only as a retailer, and sometimes not even as that." And as he continues, "a system of this sort, digital in medium and transmission, allows us to see the present system as extraordinarily wasteful, a preindustrial handicraft pattern."

Well, I don’t know about that. It may be that students as UCLA can be given a URL and sent off to learn, but that’s not gonna fly at many institutions. Even if they did learn, someone has to evaluate their learning, and, you know, talk to them every now and then, at least by e-mail ;). Lanham notes he spent 32 years teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare, mostly via lecture. Though he says he tried to keep his lectures "fresh," I’m sure they were occassionally mailed in, so why not e-mail them in instead?

Perhaps certain, er, areas could be "delivered" through a website. The content isn’t going to change, so put it together and let it run. Hire some folks to answer phones, respond to e-mails, and grade exams and you’ve got your own little curriculum mill going that you can franchise out to every podunk college in America.

But I’m not really buying that.

I don’t think higher education will improve if it turns into students watching textbook publisher productions with Ivy League faculty in the starring role. After all, we already have the low-tech version of that in textbooks, and how good are they? Is putting it online really going to be that kind of transformative miracle?

That said, Lanham does have a point. It is a waste of time and effort to have faculty delivering the same lectures over and over, year in, year out. This material could be delivered more effectively online (and probably in conjunction with published media elements just as currently courses use textbooks). In turn, faculty would need to discover other pedagogic activities that made better of their knowledge and expertise. After all, delivering the same lecture year after year instead of delivering it online is analogus to writing out by hand multiple copies of your syllabus instead of using the office copy machine.

Don’t worry, there’s more provocative stuff from Lanham to come.