Cyber academia

Friday's The Chronicle of Higher Education carried the news that Stanford University has forged a deal with Apple Computers to make lectures, student-produced music and sports commentary available as free downloads via the iTunes Music Store. \nThis follows www.pickaprof.com's move to offer lectures as free downloadable MP3s (Indiana Daily Student, Sept. 29), and Purdue University's announcement that lectures, previously available on library cassettes, will be podcast (The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 31). Not to be outdone, IU is making its iStream lectures available as iTunes podcasts. \nSo far, all these initiatives have involved lectures in audio-form only, but with the advent of video iPods, the time of digital profs being seen as well as heard is fast approaching.\nThus, it's time that we start asking: What will all this technological change mean for academia? Can we adapt?\nFor starters, will there be a point to holding class anymore? What makes viewing lectures on one's computer or iPod an inferior experience to attending lectures in the flesh? \nWhile there might be exceptions, I would hazard that the majority of classes do not invoke the communal experience or sense of shared purpose that, for example, makes attending a sports event or concert superior to watching it on television. \nSure, live lectures allow real-time give-and-take between professors and students. But how often do students take advantage of it? How much opportunity is there for discussion in introductory-level courses with 100 to 200 students? How much of it could be done, instead, via e-mail or instant messenger? Examinations and grading have already moved to the web -- just look at Oncourse.\nSome courses involve hands-on activities that cannot yet be reproduced in a digital medium. For instance, given the expensive equipment, dangerous chemicals and carcasses used in lab classes, the hard sciences defy easy reproduction. But what about social science, art appreciation, literature, history or philosophy courses? With books, lectures and interaction available via the web, what's to stop these from going entirely digital?\nIf we polled undergraduates on whether they would prefer live lectures or downloaded lectures, what do you think the answer might be?\nAnd here's another question: With digital lectures infinitely reproducible and available globally, how many professors and universities will the market demand? How long until the Ivy Leagues follow the University of Phoenix online? What's to prevent them from holding courses for 100,000 students? If Dell Computer can train support center employees in the intricate details of an XPS desktop , what's to stop a university from forming such a center for questions about the works of Proust?\nFinally, what's the role of graduate students in all this? Grad students often fill the gap between a university's educational and research roles. We teach the basic, high-enrollment courses, freeing up faculty for research. In turn, we're trained to become the next generation of faculty. But basic, high-enrollment courses seem amenable to digitization -- so why not download them from another university? Then, what's the point of having grad students? And without grad students, how does academia reproduce itself?