‘Cost-cutting’ Distance Learning Alternatives?
Posted on January 14, 2009 by David Gray
The economy is in terrible shape, state and local community leaders everywhere are seeking budget-saving options, and teachers, students – and everyone else – must find new ways to go further, stay longer, and get more for less. Nobody faults anyone for any of that. This is an example of just this sort of thing, in an editorial recently published in a Florida newspaper. But when it comes to education specifically, there are two built-in assumptions among some that trouble me.
Assumption number one is that online learning is, or should or can be, offered at a discount over classroom-based instruction. That’s not true. Assumption number two is that lower costs – at all costs – represent an acceptable goal when it comes to educational budget setting. In other words, it is presumed that it isn’t difficult to cut educational costs: double the number of students and/or cut faculty numbers in half, for example. Costs will go down at a rate and to a level equal to the devaluation of the education being received from an overloaded system underserved by too few faculty. Said more succinctly, perhaps, “You get what you pay for.”
Certainly educational costs are not immune to reasonable oversight and review. I’ve hardly ever seen an operation, educational or otherwise, that couldn’t benefit at any time from a little scrutiny and belt tightening here and there. But so long as every action still has a reaction, it is important that cost cutters have a clear idea of how and why a dollar cut here may require a two dollar fix over there at some point.
Teachers, legislators, administrators, parents, students – we all have to be wary of the seemingly simple and obvious cuts in education, online or otherwise, that gain a balanced budget at the expense of quality losses carried on the books of our students years after the crisis passes.
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