98. “In order to accommodate the increasing number of undergraduate students, college and universities should offer most courses through distance learning, such as videotaped instruction that can be accessed through the Internet or cable television. Requiring students to appear at a designated time and place is no longer an effective or efficient way of teaching most undergraduate courses.”
Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your position with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading. In response to the challenge of providing education for an expanding undergraduate population, one tempting solution is to replace university teachers and classrooms with distance learning technologies like the Internet or cable television. However, I believe that these technologies are best suited as valuable support resources, not as replacements for the traditional face-to-face classroom experience. Admittedly, the Internet or cable television may be more cost-effective than traditional classrooms as means for quickly transmitting information to a large number of students. And, computer-generated standardized tests are a cheap way to assess information acquisition. However, there is much more to teaching than conveying information. Likewise, there is more to learning than a demonstrated ability to pass standardized tests. Teaching just begins with the delivery of information. After that, teaching involves the complex and often spontaneous process of dialogical reasoning about the information at hand. This process includes clarifying, analyzing, evaluating, criticizing and synthesizing information and points of view, as well as creatively and logically exploring alternatives, solutions and new design possibilities. Done well, teaching further provides effective models of rationality and moral responsibility. It is difficult to see how flat technology can replace the human element in these essential aspects of the teaching craft. In the same way, absorbing information is just the starting point of learning. To learn is also to develop habits of careful, critical and creative thinking about information and to acquire a hunger for learning more. Moreover, learning is fundamental to a person’s emerging rational autonomy and sense of moral responsibility to others. These dispositional aspects of learning are difficult to foster in technical packages or to assess. nonetheless they are at the heart of what learning is supposed to produce: educated persons. In conclusion, I believe that distance learning technologies are best used as efficient supplements to teaching and learning. We cannot think that technology will make a good substitute for the classroom without relying on the unlikely assumption that students are effective autodidacts (n. 自学者, 自学成功的人), and can develop educated dispositions and habits of mind in the absence of teachers and mentors. This assumption, I fear, would effectively reduce education to unreflective training.