Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
Jane's online helper is likely to be far better prepared to assist than your average teaching assistant, who is likely to be far more interested in their own graduate work and publication opportunities in furtherance of their career. Jane would get help from a full-time team member, who understands that Learning Coach is an honorable profession in and of itself, and not just a stepping stone to somewhere else. Again, economies of scale come into play. While Jane's helper will be expensive to hire and train, the cost is spread across the many institutions using the system-sponsored course and its designated support team. And not every Jane will need the team at the same time.
The system can succeed because Jane wants help, not a standing relationship with a particular helper. This has been a revelation in my own academic career. In my course evaluations, I get some of the highest ratings available for student service, but I have virtually no visitors to my on-campus office. Very few students wish to "get to know me." Most contact me because they want a problem solved or a question answered as quickly as possible. As soon as they understand that the most efficient way to get their needs met is by e-mail, that is what they use. They are perfectly happy with a return e-mail that says nothing more than "Yes, I approve of your proposal." Or, "Take another look at Step 22 of the exercise because I think your original problem may have started there."
Student work can also be evaluated by a bank of trained learning coaches shared by multiple institutions. These more personal interactions will take more skills and more of the specialists' time, even though the specialists will be very well acquainted with every assignment in advance. Yes, there will be practical limits as to how much time a specialist can spend discussing the sentence structure of a student's essay or a student's great ideas about the significance of the Peloponnesian Wars. But compare this to our current system: If an overworked assistant professor desperately trying to publish rather than perish must service a total of 300 undergraduates in five classes, how much "great idea time" is each student currently getting from the professor's few office hours under the current system? And if a serious problem is discovered with a student's writing clarity, they will probably be directed to a campus writing center, where their helper may well be an only slightly more proficient fellow undergraduate being paid minimum wage under a work/study program.
What SRUs Do Well
Does that mean that there is nothing that SRUs do that couldn't be done better through maximizing technology? Not at all. There are some services that students currently get from SRUs that no amount of silicon ingenuity will ever replace.
1) Practical experience and the many forms of "hands-on." Simulation through technology can't always replace the real thing. If you want to learn to play in an orchestra, explore fossils in our local Palo Duro Canyon, learn to swing a golf club, apply a tourniquet (careful!), learn to converse at full speed in French, teach third-graders to subtract, or do whatever those Ag people do to their cows on the other side of campus, you must be at a given place at a given time with access to a given set of equipment to do it.
2) Guidance. The big questions — "What am I really suited for?" or "What are my values? or "What do I want to accomplish in my life?" — will never be satisfactorily explored with an artificial intelligence programmable counselor.
While online support can help you fill gaps in your knowledge or evaluate your homework, every undergrad also needs a flesh-and-blood "case manager." A good analogy is medicine for seniors, something I am beginning to learn a bit about. I may have a large handful of "-ologists" keeping an eye on my bones, heart, feet, etc., but what I desperately need is someone who really knows me — in addition to keeping track of every medication that every specialist is prescribing and how they all interact.