Let’s say you’re invited to make a savory but unusual choice. Each night, you may get a fine four-course steak dinner from a drive-thru and eat it in your car on the way home. Or, you may elect to have burgers at home in the company of your family and friends. Taken alone, the four-course dinner may be more delicious and more nutritive, unquestionably the better assortment of consumable items. But is the meal better? Meal begins to sound like an ambiguous term. What do we mean by meal? Is a meal a social experience or an object we consume? These days we are asking the same of university classes.
There is no hotter topic in higher education today than online learning. This summer, online courses helped fuel a firestorm at our own University of Virginia. The Board of Visitors offered several vague reasons for President Teresa Sullivan’s ouster, but one rang clear enough: in the rector’s eyes, UVa had fallen behind its peer institutions by failing to develop a greater online presence. Since Sullivan’s reinstatement, the administration has rushed to show that this is not the case. The University recently announced that it would join peer institutions like Berkeley, Michigan, Princeton, and Stanford in offering free online classes through Coursera.
