Clark Glymour

Clark Glymour is the Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and former Head of the Philosophy Department. His recent research concerns the application of machine learning methods developed at Carnegie Mellon to problems in mineralogy, genetics, and psychology. Professor Glymour completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1969, and has taught at Carnegie Mellon for 19 years.

Richard Scheines

Richard Scheines is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His areas of specialization are in the philosophy of science and artificial intelligence. Professor Scheines received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for seven years.

Chapter 18, selection: Accountability, Accessibility and Cost: How the Web Will Change Higher Education
Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines

Distance learning over the Internet is a growing business, offering chat rooms, e-mail, video lectures and inconvenient, on-screen texts of lectures. With important exceptions (the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford for example), distance education is principally confined to delivery of technical skills courses, low-grade introductory courses, and quasi-professional graduate degrees in management, nursing, public health and the like. Perhaps sometimes correctly, critics deride the providers as diploma mills, although, for all we know, students taking similar courses on campus may learn and retain no more than do distance students. But an entirely different quality of distance education is on the horizon, and as it arrives, universities will have to change. We think the changes can and should be much for the better, that Carnegie Mellon is prepared to play a role in this process, and that underprepared minority students, slighted by poor K-12 public education, will be major beneficiaries.

Aside from language-intensive courses, and perhaps even for them, Web-based, interactive, mastery designed, automated introductory instruction will provide better instruction than the traditional lecture and recitation format, especially for underprepared students. It will increase minority access to higher education, and it has the potential to reduce the standard four- to five-year undergraduate residency to something like three years, or make graduate degrees more affordable, or both. It will give us a much deeper understanding of what students actually do when they study, and allow us to assess what they know and what they don’t in a systematic, scientific way.

Will Web-based education replace the faculty? Of course not. Might it reduce the number of faculty? Not unless administrations explicitly make that a goal. Much more likely, it will change where, what, and how faculty teach. It will drive faculty who have lived on their introductory lecture notes out of the lecture halls, moving them into much smaller venues. Instead of teaching 200 students standard introductory material—yes, sometimes that can happen even at Carnegie Mellon—the same faculty will be able to tutor small groups of students on the subtleties of their subject, providing knowledge, and interaction that computers will probably never reach. That is a good thing. Perhaps most importantly, Web-based instruction will force curricular innovation; it will force us to think much more carefully about the learning process in a way we seldom have before. It will not remove the need for mentoring (see Kadane, Chapter 5), or for campus residency for the development of many skills.