Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, a Democrat and another WGU cofounder, agrees. Skills, knowledge and new ideas are going to drive the economies of the world. We've got to get into a system of making education more accessible, more affordable and of higher quality. Learning, skeptics say, requires interacting, in real-time and face to face, with instructors and other students. It's a deficit in terms of contact with the instructors and other students and an experience deficit on the part of the instructor.
Some skeptics say Web-based education creates the potential for uncontrollable cheating.
Beyond that, there's WGU's controversial emphasis on competency, allowing students to graduate based on demonstrated knowledge or skills rather than on acquiring credits. Taking courses from disembodied professors may seem futuristic, but the model is deeply rooted in the past. Correspondence and home study have been offered by mail for about 150 years, developed in tandem with reliable postal services. In the 1960s and '70s, schools and broadcast media began offering courses via television and radio. More recently, many distance-education programs began including videocassettes or audiocassettes in their materials, allowing students to watch or hear lectures at their convenience.