The passionate
response—97 listserv postings—shows that
the question is centrally important. Because online
delivery is easing place-bound constraints, prospective
learners can easily shop programs to compare curricula,
services, flexibility, scheduling, price, personalization,
responsiveness and more. When learners do not find
what they seek in one school, they can easily transfer
to another. Thus, customer satisfaction becomes an
important factor in institutional planning, and from
an administrative perspective, viewing students as
customers seems prudent.
Market forces such as Amazon, Hotmail, Napster, AOL, and employer-sponsored online learning undoubtedly shape student expectations. Interactive technology offers people immediacy through instant feedback, games, peer-to-peer semantic webs, innovative pedagogies and targeted marketing. Students may understandably think of themselves as customers who hold faculty accountable for providing paid-for results-life-enhancing skills and knowledge. Certainly, schools are developing more convenient support services in response to demand, but are similar transformations occurring in "learning services"? See the studies by Estabrook and Thompson in this issue for examinations of potentially positive and negative consequences that online learning can have for faculty.
The listserv discussion on students as customers branched out to discuss the impact that student-customer expectations have for faculty. While faculty may be willing to think of themselves as mentors in addition to their traditional roles as professors, content experts, and certifiers of competence, most faculty surely do not want to be thought of as edutainment salespeople: "If we give learners what they want, it is construed as entertainment, but if we give them what we think they need, then it is education." Thus, thinking of students primarily as customers rather than as learners deprofessionalizes faculty.
Far from being dominated by consumerism, online education does offer the potential for sustaining the faculty role of public intellectual and nurturer of learning and for affirming the time-honored designation alma mater. The nurturing mother provides what the child needs, not just what the child wants. In fact, technology can facilitate individual learning success for more people than ever before. When courses are clearly tagged for pre-requisites, using self-testing to assure entrance competencies, when courses are designed for learning styles, with links explaining the organic logic of the curriculum, online education can demonstrate that the learning project drives the learning. In such projects, the professor is clearly an expert learner, participating coordinator and coach. Such highly coordinated learning needs sage figures to model the ways that purpose drives the acquisition of knowledge and skills.
See
"Alma Mater", 9
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