What We Stand to Lose With Fully Online Advertising Education

On a warm sunny Sunday afternoon in June, I found myself in a windowless cylindrical-shaped room called the One Button Studio in the basement of the law school building at the University of Colorado Boulder. I was there to record a lecture for an online course that was part of a specialization in Digital Advertising on the Coursera platform. The room was aptly called One Button Studio as recording lectures was really that simple. All I had to do was plug in a USB drive to store the video files and hit one big circular button on the desk to start recording. There were no wires, no computers, and no messing around with lighting or camera settings. That one button took care of everything. Welcome to online education! At first, it was a surreal experience talking to a camera with no one in the room. However, soon I began to notice some similarities with my experience teaching a traditional face-to-face 500-student introductory course in Advertising. This cold, one-size-fits-all method of information delivery, which was devoid of any human interaction, seemed closer to my experience teaching a large 500-student introductory course and farthest from the joy of teaching a 15-student senior capstone where part of the learning outcome was the group interaction and learning to deal with fellow group members, their working styles, and idiosyncrasies as one would in a real-world ad agency.