Наука и Образование: научно-техническое издание: Tomorrow's College: The classroom of the future features face-to-face, online, and hybrid learning. And the future is here.

By Marc Parry

Jennifer Black isn't a fan of technology. Until college, she didn't know much about online classes. If the stereotypical online student is a career-minded adult working full time, she's the opposite—a dorm-dwelling, ballet-dancing, sorority-joining 20-year-old who throws herself into campus life here at the University of Central Florida.

Yet in the past year, the junior hospitality major has taken classes online, face to face, and in a blended format featuring elements of both. This isn't unusual: More than half of the university's 56,000 students will take an online or blended class this year, and nearly 2,700 are taking all three modes at once.

As online education goes mainstream, it's no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a "traditional" student at places like Central Florida, one of the country's largest public universities. And UCF's story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too?

Signs suggest yes. The University System of Maryland now requires undergraduates to take 12 credits in alternative learning modes, including online. Texas has proposed a similar rule. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is pushing to have 25 percent of credits earned online by 2015. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pointing to UCF as a model, has made blended learning a cornerstone of its new $20-million education-technology grant program.

These players pin their hopes on Web classes as a panacea that will expand access, speed up the time spent earning a degree, save money, manage classroom needs, and much more.

The trend toward online courses for campus students can be a head scratcher. Why pay to go away to college if you're going to sit in your dorm room taking online classes?

Control over course schedules, for one thing. Alexander Harrison, 20, a junior majoring in accounting and finance at Central Florida, often prefers watching lectures online to enduring a two-and-a-half-hour class in person. Web courses also free up time for more campus involvement, be that playing baseball or joining the belly-dancing club.

Or sleeping in.

The convenience of online classes can be a slacker's paradise. Schedule the right mix, and you might not have to face a live professor before 1:30 in the afternoon. Which means you can stay out until 4 in the morning and still sleep nearly eight hours. Not only that: Some students talk about online classes being so easy a caveman could pass them. In a test, there's no one telling you that you can't look at the book, says Ariel Hatten, 20, a junior and nursing major who considers her online class an easy A.

"No one enforces you to do the right thing" in an online course, Ms. Hatten says. "It's at your discretion. I care about my grade, so if I don't know the answer, I'm not gonna let myself fail when I have an opportunity to look in the book."

This is the good and not-so-good news as universities move from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar. The Chronicle spent three days trailing Ms. Black, Mr. Harrison, and Ms. Hatten to get a closer look at how that shift is changing the student experience—and how students feel about their growing digital freedom.

Full text of the article - on The Chronicle.com website
Photo from The Chronicle.com

scientific edition of Bauman MSTU

SCIENCE & EDUCATION

Bauman Moscow State Technical University. El № FS 77 - 48211. ISSN 1994-0408