Online teaching's disconnect

[Commentary] To the long list of threats to the quality of an American university education, we can now add another: the rush into online instruction.

Universities across the country are under increasing pressure to offer more of their courses over the Internet. Amid the enthusiasm for all that is gained, it is also important to look at what is lost when the classroom experience is piped through the Internet and delivered on a screen. The Internet is very efficient at conveying words and images from one place to another. But good university teaching is much more than that. Teaching in the truest sense is what occurs when a committed instructor gets in a room with a group of equally committed students and engages them in an interactive, probing and challenging treatment of a subject. A course is also made effective by the unscripted interactions that occur as students gather before and after the class, and by the simple fact that the physical act of getting to class requires at least some investment of time and energy. In short, attending a well-run class in person is immersive and engaging in a way that far exceeds anything that consumer technology can possibly hope to deliver now or in the foreseeable future.

[Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA]