Indian Supreme Court rules that CS degrees cannot be provided on-line

On-line CS degrees cannot be on par with face-to-face CS degrees, rules the highest court in India.

What makes an online class worse than a face-to-face class?  I think that there’s a good bit of evidence that they are worse for many students, e.g., the NYTimes article about how on-line classes hinder students needing remedial help. I’m interested in the research question of why on-line classes have such differential results from face-to-face classes — it isn’t obvious to me.  But the court’s rules says that on-line classes always are worse, and even that they always will be.  There’s a design space to explore, and it’s short-sighted to rule that on-line is always worse and never on par.

But how should the court have ruled? We need a measure of quality such that we can compare the results of the two degrees.  It’s hard to figure out what such a measure might be — maybe success in work, or employability, or even a measure of skill or content knowledge.  Any reasonable measure would be better than making a decision based on the medium.

(Thanks to Amy Bruckman for sending me this article.)

The Court affirmed the findings of the Punjab and Haryana High Court which had given a similar ruling two years ago, stating that a degree in the subject of ‘computer science’ from a distance learning course could not be considered on par with one attained by attending regular classes.

The verdict came on a batch of appeals challenging the orders of the High Courts of Orissa and Punjab and Haryana by which the former held the degrees in engineering obtained by serving diploma holders through distance learning mode offered by certain deemed universities to be valid, whereas the latter termed such degrees to be invalid.

The top court also directed the University Grants Commission (UGC) to restrain such institutions from using the word ‘University’ within one month from today, observing that commercialisation of education “seriously affects the credibility of standards in education, eroding power and essence of knowledge and seriously affecting excellence and merit”.

Source: Cannot provide technical education through correspondence, rules Supreme Court