Are colleges raising their requirements? If so, why are they doing it?

How much money would implementing online courses for core educational requirements save large colleges?

• For example, the University of Texas offers the basic government course required as part of the core curriculum online through a live stream to over 900 students. The students get in-residence credit and instead of having a 200 to 1 student to professor ratio, they get 450 to 1 (since they use two professors). Not to mention they don't have to incur the costs of using large lecture halls throughout the course. I know this isn't viable at least as of now for more important upper division courses, but what about for the purposes of core education. Large core classes such as government has minimal in class interaction to begin with and even that that could be equalled or surpassed over the chat, email, and office hours. It seems colleges would stand to benefit hugely from such measures. Ultimately, lowering costs per student, etc.

• Answer:

  It won't.  Large online courses are substantially more expensive than lecture classes.  If you are going online for the purpose of saving money, you are doomed. For a number of reasons.... 1) facilities are a lot more expensive.  You have the lecture hall.  To keep it running takes a janitor.  If you want to keep the servers running, you need to hire an IT staff and buy hardware and network. 2) the cost of educational development is a lot higher.  You can give a lecture with piece of chalk.  With online, you have to worry about web systems and uploads, and the technical ability to manage an online course is a lot higher.  3) the expectations are a lot higher.  If you have a lecture class, people will have to make a special effort to talk to you.  Once the class goes online, you are going to be *flooded* with e-mail and chat requests because once you are online, people expect that.  At that point you are either spending a *lot* more time dealing with students, or you have to hire more TA's to deal with the extra volume.   Also online courses are more two-way than one-way, which means that it's a lot harder and more expensive to deal with. 4) No one knows what they are doing.  People have been giving lectures for hundreds of years.  It's a very well known format.  With online courses, this is a new media in which you *will* make mistakes, and those mistakes *will* be expensive.  This is pretty cool because the purpose of a university is research.  If it was something that everyone could do without research, you wouldn't need to do it at the university. The botton line is that online education is going to substantially *increase* your costs of instruction.  It's an investment (and an expensive one) and not a cost saving measure.  If you go into online education with a cost saving mindset, you are going to end up with a disaster. The *only* place where online learning might save you money is if you have a course that no one wants to teach and no one wants to take which happens to be required by the state legislature (i.e. the Texas Government course at UTAustin is one that no one wants to teach or take).  In that case, you can just play the tape, do the minimum about of work, and make the legislature happy.