The blog ate my homework...Toward a Theory of Online Education's Marketing Rhetoric

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with the marketing rhetoric of online education programs, and though this topic will probably span several posts continuing well after 4347/5347 has concluded, this post will be my first attempt at an analysis of, among other things, the uses of amplification and exclusion (i.e. what things are emphasized and what things are left out). I may in fact be getting into some dangerous territory here, so please understand that my views only reflect, well, my views. And before I really launch into this, I want to mention that I have, for the past three long semesters, taught both sophomore literature and advanced composition online through Blackboard, with what I considered excellent results. I did not consider those courses to be qualitatively different in terms of student achievement (though my students did do quite a bit more writing than they would have done in the face to face classes, which I consider a plus). Courses taught solely online can be wonderful, and they can even sometimes allow students to enhance skills that would have been marginalized in a face to face setting. However, my interest here is in advertising strategies, which I often find crass in their reduction of online education into a product rather than a process.

I'll start with the seemingly harmless and amusing "Classinpjs.com"--I could not find the video on YouTube to embed, but if you check out the following url you'll understand the concept: http://classinpjs.com/. The actual commercial being 4-walled right now features a young woman talking about how great online courses are because one can take said courses in his/her pjs, and, really, isn't that just the bee's knees? (She doesn't really say "bee's knees," by the way--that's me ad libbing). That really is the crux of the ad--so here, the advantage of online education boils down to, "It's totally cool because we can stick it to the establishment by being all rebellious and stuff by not dressing up to learn." (As if the "establishment" is not in complete control of the distribution and marketing of online programs anyway.) As has been eloquently stated on several forums discussing this commercial, that really is a pretty weak argument, because students don't dress up to learn anyway. I concur with that observation--especially when I taught at Texas Woman's University, I had many students who would show up to 8and 9 am classes in pj attire. I drew the line, however, at their bringing donuts and coffee with them.

Another more "serious" but no less flawed representation of online learning comes courtesy of Kaplan University. The ad shown on t.v. comments that students will be taught by professors with "real world" experience, although just what that means is left unexplained. This ad has fascinated me for some time due to the obvious dig at the present incarnation of university faculty (people like me), who, according to the ad, must lack "real world" experience because we probably live in our offices and, though we hold advanced degrees (or perhaps because we hold advanced degrees) couldn't tie our shoes without written instructions. The approach is rather flimsy, not simply because of the thinly veiled ad hominem attack, but rather because Kaplan specifically refers to online education as a "product."

Another ad for Kaplan has a prof morphing into a digitized version of himself, delivering a message that literally apologizes for the greivous injustices (though just what these injustices are remains vague) that have been inflicted upon students by face to face education (and in case you don't get the oh so subtle warrant here, it is this: "Tradition is bad":



This commercial shamelessly panders its message to what is being pejoratively termed "Generation Me" by declaring, "Hey, universities need to change to suit your needs rather than the other way around" and stating, "It's your time," a comment that may be temporarily inspiring to some, but when the swelling music fades, they're still left wondering what that means.

The truth is, unless a course truly is weakly designed and doesn't demand much student participation, online education requires quite a bit of effort on the part of the student in terms of time management and drive. And it doesn't take much to see past the smoke and mirrors rhetoric of these marketing techniques to see that they are doing everything possible to eschew those issues.