Online learning: Wave of the future or demise of the academy?

SALT LAKE CITY — Trevor Hansen plops down in front of his small oak desk, flips open his silver laptop and starts emailing his classmate about a project due Monday.

There's a motocross poster on the wall, a snowboard in the corner and a framed picture of him pushing his niece on a swing on the top of his desk.

The 25-year-old Salt Lake City resident just got home from an eight-hour workday and will be leaving for a softball tournament in about an hour, but he has a little bit of time to work on his online class.

"It's really convenient," Hansen says of finishing his bachelor's in finance degree online. "I don't really like going to class, and I wanted to work more."

Over the last several years, more and more students are taking the same route. More than 100,000 college students in Minnesota are now taking classes online. From 2005 to 2010, the number of Utah public college students taking classes online jumped by about 15,000, according to Utah System of Higher Education Data. And innovators like Henry J. Eyring, BYU-Idaho administrator, and Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business professor, authors of the new book, "The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out," say that to be competitive in the future, colleges need to embrace high-quality online courses.

Yet some students and professors are still leery of online classes.

Hansen is afraid that a number of employers may not view an online education the same as they do a traditional college experience. Other students like Jarom Moore of Orem say they don't like the format of online classes. And there are professors nationally and in Utah who refuse to teach classes online, calling them "inferior."

Elayne Clift, a writer, journalist and adjunct professor currently living in Vermont, said she taught an online class a couple years ago and vowed never to do it again.

"All the joy of teaching and the deep importance of learning cannot happen very readily in an online environment," Clift said. "I think it is part of the demise of the academy, part of the crisis of higher education."

Clift, who has taught college writing courses since the late 1980s in schools like Yale, Emerson and Payap University in Thailand, said online courses are part of the "dumming-down" of academia and that she saw more plagiarism happen when she taught her online class.

Yet schools across the country are finding ways to make online classes more interactive and are finding that many students prefer it.