The value of the UC degree we are all pursuing will be drastically decreased if the UC Board of Regents decides to go through with a proposal to create a program to offer a UC bachelor’s degree completely online.
This proposal, made by Christopher Edley Jr., dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, will essentially lower the value of a degree from the University of California. It will be expensive in a tough financial time for the UC and provide a poor educational experience for those enrolled.
Edley presented the idea of the UC being the first prestigious research university to have such an undergraduate online degree. His effort should be commended because discussing novel ideas in education pushes the UC forward. But this specific idea is poorly conceptualized and does not make perfect sense.
While it naturally seems like offering an online-only degree program would be a money saving technique, maintaining a UC-level education for distance students or online learners costs more than providing that level for traditional students.
Christopher Lynch, director of the UCLA Master of Science in Engineering Online Program, said that distance students can get to the same level of understanding concepts as traditional students, but that the department spends much more money per student to achieve this goal.
The department hired a teaching assistant and professor as consultants to provide support for distance learners, who are unable to approach professors after lecture or go to office hours as traditional students are. This would be a similar situation for undergraduates because face-to-face interaction is an important part of the university experience.
To maintain a UC-level education, many faculty members will have to be hired for support positions, costing the university millions. If this faculty is not hired, the UC online campus will not provide a UC-level education.
But because the online master’s program in engineering still exists, there is a demand for online degree programs. Yet because it is expensive to administer these at the UC level of education, maybe it should be left to other institutions, such as the California State University, UC Extensions or community colleges in the state.
Even if this program is implemented with a full supporting faculty at a high cost, the experience of online students will never be the educational experience that UC students currently go through.
Online classes would have a hard time incorporating projects, presentations and collaborative efforts in classes. Skipping class and cheating by having another student take an exam become easier as attendance, participation and identity verification are difficult, if not impossible over the Internet.
Further, these online students would miss out on student groups, campus traditions, student government politics, library resources, sporting events and other facets of student life that drew many of us to UCLA and provide for a great environment for students.
If the UC “cybercampus” comes to fruition, the value of the UC as a whole would be watered down, and the degrees the institution gives out would be devalued.
“This would severely hurt the reputation and prestige of a degree and call into question the (UC’s) commitment to undergraduate education,” said Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Program who taught a hybrid online and offline course last spring.
According to Samuels, there are ways to incorporate technology in the classroom, but a fully online degree has no place at a prestigious research university.
The UC system’s goal may be high-quality education for the California public, but this is not the way to achieve that end. Funding part of the budget for the UC Extension programs that already offer many online classes is a much better investment in mass public education.
Currently, UC Extension educates 400,000 people each year through 17,000 courses and is funded almost completely by student fees. If the UC wants to invest more in mass public education, which seems to be the goal of an online bachelor’s degree program, it should really consider beefing up the budget for the UC Extension programs.
Pushing forward with a program that will water down the value of a degree for 220,000 current UC students as it provides lower quality education to distance learners will be popular at first because the UC would be the first prestigious online bachelor’s degree program available. But it will hurt the university system in the long run.