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Meet Jorge Cham. He's the creator of "Piled Higher and Deeper", a comic strip about life in graduate school. He's also a cartoonist who's found some success publishing his work through a web site rather than the traditional format of a daily newspaper. One might think that this would lead him to be more receptive to the idea that using the Internet as a vehicle for education is a sign of increased flexibility rather than decreased rigor.

Unfortunately, if one of his recent cartoons is any indication, this is not so. Given the gratuitous use of the word "online" and that the name of the school mentioned is a mix of "Walden" and "Capella", it seems the strip shows more how Dr. Cham feels about online education than about degree mills. Moreover, Walden and Capella are also a conspicuous pair in that they're both prominent proprietary institutions. So it seems his naysaying would also be broad enough also to include on-campus programs at other such institutions, such as the University of Phoenix.

One often sees truly insightful commentary from the best cartoonists. In this case, however, it seems that as with too many others in higher education, Dr. Cham does not understand the difference between academic rigor and mere inflexibility. For an online cartoonist to instead deliver a tired kneejerk salute to "That's the way we've always done it" is a real disappointment.

So because of my concern about using too much leave, and because GW was concerned that the course I was going to take might be too similar to another I've already taken, I found an alternative, a nice course called "Cross-cultural/International Curricula" that, while occurring in a classroom rather than online, is still also an extremely good match for my interests. I sent the syllabus to my faculty advisor at GW, Ryan Watkins, and his response in part was:

Given the situation this sounds like a fine choice to me... it does have a nice match with your long-term interests. My only disappointment with the syllabus is that it will be a campus-based course. Can you really learn in that archaic format? Do they have to check your ID to make sure that it is really you coming to class? Can people really learn with out continuous access to the Web? Hahahahaaaa

It's certainly nice to see butt-in-seat learning get some of the same undeserved criticism that distance learning gets for a change! Of course, at the same time, I'm also glad Ryan approved the course, you know, despite his reservations.