LEARNING NEEDS A HUMAN FACE

Remember correspondence courses that promised you the equivalentof a Harvard education "from the comfort of your own home?"

A new brand of the old hucksterism was legitimized last week whenthe Massachusetts Board of Higher Education gave degree-grantingauthority to the first for-profit, online college in the Northeast.

Harcourt Higher Education is a subsidiary of the Newton-basedpublishing conglomerate, Harcourt General Inc. It is not affiliatedwith any accredited college. It has no track record in teaching. It'sa start-up, gambling that there is profit to be mined in the public'sinfatuation with new technology.

You don't have to be a computer-phobic Luddite to have some doubtsabout a university without classrooms and a faculty without faces.The rush to embrace this virtual college - the board approved aNovember start date with little input from educators - reflects thekind of thinking that has elevated the standardized test to godlikestatus. The Internet, like the MCAS, is a tool to supplementtraditional education, not supplant it. Computers are an efficientmeans of delivering facts to students, just as standardized tests area handy method of retrieving them. But education is more thaninformation-gathering.

Harcourt paints a cyber-world in which chat rooms will be electricwith critical analysis and impassioned debate, where shy studentswill blossom behind computer screens, where e-mail exchanges willtrump the human interactions of the classroom. Maybe, but it is hardto imagine a substitute for the spontaneous magic that happens whenan idea catches fire, when one student's analysis sparks another'sreinterpretation, when one student hears her unarticulated thoughtsvoiced, and validated, by that very real fellow across the room. Howdo you go out for coffee after a virtual class to continue thediscussion?

The most reputable universities are experimenting with onlinecourses, but not because they are better. They're cheaper. Watching alecture online is also more convenient than having to show up at anappointed place and time and run the risk that the professor ishaving an off day. But pre-taped lectures preclude the randomthought, the tangential aside, the relevent anecdote, which occurs tothe lecturer in midstream.

At base, this enterprise is about money. Why else would Harcourtinsist that its "professors" use Harcourt-published texts, easilydownloaded from the Harcourt database, in their "classes"? Thiscompany did not have $2.1 billion in sales last year for lack ofinterest in the bottom line. But Harcourt is selling its college as anoble act of outreach to the elderly, the disabled, and the workingpoor. Why should college be accessible only to the young, thehealthy, and people of means? Good question. But if cyber-learning isthe equal of a world-class education, why hasn't Harvard put thoseivy-covered bricks on the block and John Kenneth Galbraith onvideotape?

Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and self-described "computercontrarian," bristles at inflated claims for the instructional valueof cyberspace. "Who'll get the live teachers?," he asked last year inhis book, "High Tech Heretic." "The affluent, of course."

Stoll recounts the experience at Vanderbilt when the universityenrolled 250 students in technology workshops over the Internet. Onlyone completed completed the work, but the Alfred P. Sloan Foundationrenewed the project's grant to build more cyberspace courses. "Nopilot project in educational technology has ever been declared afailure," Stoll wrote. " . . . most [educators] have been cloyed by ariver of money flowing into such `research' projects. Who do youthink gets the grants: those who promise wonders from electronicclassrooms or those who challenge the results?"

Harcourt expects 1,000 students of health sciences, technology,and business to enroll the first year, 20,000 in five years. Itdoesn't say how many it anticipates will actually earn a two-year orfour-year degree. Like those correspondence courses before it,Harcourt can make as much money from the dropouts as the graduates.

Harcourt may sell itself as a real college but the buyers arelikely to be the same people who thought that "Survivor" was "reality-based" television.

Eileen McNamara's e-mail address is mcnamara@globe.com