I have been told by my students that some do not attend class because the class material is posted on the school web site (the password protected one) and there are students who are discourteous enough in class to distract others who are serious about study. I was shocked by the last statement but I now hear about students who talk during lectures in medical school. When I was a student, only an idiot would pay so little attention to lectures, which were the backbone of the course. Textbooks were sometimes of marginal value because, in being complete, they failed to discriminate between key facts and minutiae. I did have one such idiot in my class so, even then, there were those who had trouble with impulse control.
This article also stimulates some thought about tuition. Universities are incredibly inefficient economic units. When I wrote a grant proposal 13 years ago for a study that would be conducted mostly by computer analysis of Medicare billing records, the overhead factor that had to be added for the university (Dartmouth) was over 40%. Now, we have medical students paying $40,000 per year tuition who do not attend class but essentially take the course online. Of course, that doesn’t apply to clinical study with patients and hospital wards but there is a lot of simulation going on there, too. My student group spent a day at the Surgical Skills Center at USC a couple of weeks ago, practicing tying knots and suturing pigs’ feet back together.
This piece in Inside Higher Ed discusses the role of blogs in law schools and legal education. Online education is coming and high tuition is pushing it faster. I worked on a program to teach medical students to listen to heart sounds a few years ago. My skills at programming animation were not good enough but it is coming and we will be better for it.