Is Higher Education Failing

The YouTube video linked above came to me through my employer.

I work for a publisher of medical books. We publish reference books, textbooks, journals, and online courses for the benefit of anyone associated with the healthcare industry. If you are involved in any way with the heathcare industry from student to experienced professional, I've probably got a book for you.

In the almost 10 years I've been with this company I've seen the shift from printed materials to electronic offerings increase dramatically from year to year. This video certainly highlights the reality that the generation of students currently in college love their online connections through Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

The question is how much of this love of technology and the use of internet resources is relevant to education?

My answer - not as much as people would like to believe. In the video, students hold up signs stating their average class size is 115 students. Like many college level lecture halls, hundreds of students fill stadium seats to be present for a 1.5 to 3 hour lecture. If you have an energetic and engaging professor, this can be fun. If you have a monotoned dullard, it can be akin to having your body hair removed one hair at a time.

In my opinion, this has never been a good setup. The state of technology has nothing to do with the fact that smaller class sizes are always better for students from grade school on up.

Is this the point of the video, or is it to show how one can learn just as much by independently surfing around online to get the same information as one would get while sitting among a nameless sea of faces? If that's the point, what is really the fundamental difference between the two?

I could study online alone and submit my work to a faceless instructor who knows me only by my e-mail address, or I can sit in a lecture hall with 115 other people and listen to an instructor who knows me only by my e-mail address as it appears on the class list.

In order to assess what needs to be changed about how today's students are educated, we have to first assess just what it is we're after.

What we want are students who are good critical thinkers, who can work their way through a problem and solve it, who can communicate effectively with each other and with customers, clients, patients, and who can be efficient in the workplace.

Will today's students be able to achieve these goals when their preferred method of communication involves using pseudo-abbreviations like "u", "ur", "idk", "2" for all versions of its like sounding verbiage, and the interchangeable usage of "lose" and "loose"?

Am I merely being too picky about language and spelling? I don't think so. I think it's entirely indicative of the "shortcut" way students choose to look at life. Educators need to decide if they can create productive, smart, clear thinking individuals by delivering course content over instant messenger. If not, then they'll need to stick with teaching, commit themselves to becoming even better teachers, and keep the internet as one more tool in the arsenal instead of their replacement.