Professor Richard Walter from UCLA

Richard Walter began teaching in UCLA's world-renowned screenwriting department in 1977. He teachess both online and face-to-face classes.

He has been a member of the Writers Guild of America for 30 years and is a published novelist. His former students have written Oscar-winning screenplays such as Jurassic Park, Sideways, and War of the Worlds. Walter also tours throughout the world giving lectures and has appeared in various media outlets, including "O'Reilly Factor," "Hardball," and "ABC Primetime."

In this interview, Walter discusses the challenges online professors face and how he views the relationship between online and traditional classes.

What are some of the biggest challenges that online educators face?

The greatest challenge we face is opposition from colleagues who are fearful that this will be just a cut-rate way to get a UCLA education, that it's part of the dumbing down and dilution of the whole educational process. The only problems we've had that I've been aware of have been political ones, and those are still continuing, but we haven't had any problems setting up the classrooms or actually operating the enterprise.

Here's a joke that I first heard told about screenwriters, but it also works for tenured college professors. How many tenured college professors does it take to change a lightbulb? …CHANGE? CHANGE?? (in a terrified voice).

You know anything that's different from how they've done it over the years is considered threatening and frightening. And I think that's a pity because you have to stay open to technology, evolving theories, and every aspect of education.

Do you have these same concerns?

Sure I've felt my colleagues concerns. The tragedy of America is the abandonment of public education by the middle class, evident by the hugely reduced funding for schools. In Hawaii, they close the schools now on Friday. You can just hear the Indians and the Chinese salivating. They are not reducing the education budget in those parts of the world.

My fear, the reason I mention that, is I can easily see distance learning being used not as an enhancement or a supportive enterprise for the whole notion of education, but instead just becoming a cheap way to stay in business. In too many institutions, higher learning has become a retail enterprise. Whatever's popular, whatever's hot this week, is what is taught. Cheap ways of delivering courses are taking precedence over whether or not the teaching actually works.

It's especially interesting because what we're teaching is writing, which is on a computer anyway. So it's especially conducive to distance learning. Since you're staring at a computer screen and working on a keyboard anyways, screenwriting is uniquely suited to the kinds of exercises you can do with distance learning.

How do you view online classes in relation to traditional classes?

E-learning is not a substitute for brick-and-mortar education even with a discipline as well-suited for distance learning as screenwriting. For example, the bread-and-butter of our program is a round-table seminar workshop. It's an advanced screenwriting workshop that is offered for eight credit hours and there are only eight students in the room with one instructor. The students will take this course at least three times and more ambitious students will take it eight or nine times. Every student must produce a feature length professional quality screenplay in the quarter.

Now this would be very hard to replicate online. There's a big difference between people sitting together in a room for three hours once a week and people meeting online. It's just not the same looking at text on a keyboard and communicating that way. When you're communicating in person you have inflections, intonations, and facial expressions and there's a give and take that occurs.

In a way, I like to think of it like the controversy regarding talking on the cell phone, even hands-free, in the car. People say, “What's the difference if it's hands-free? Either you're listening to a speaker and you've got both hands on the wheel, or you're listening to someone sitting beside you in the car.” But there is a big difference. The person sitting next to you is sharing the same circumstances; they are seeing the same interruptions. The person sitting next to you in this analog world is aware of these things and will modify their conversation dependent upon circumstances that arise, especially in response to safety. The person on the phone won't do any of that.

There's just no substitute for students sitting around with a teacher and their cohorts. The e-learning enterprise can expand that but it can't replace that. It can't be one of the other; these things ride in tandem. The proof is in the pudding, the brick-and-mortar situation that we have now works.

Where do you see the future of online learning?

Things may change when the classroom is more like a Skype situation, when people are all on a screen together talking orally as opposed to typing. I mean the day will come when our screens will be replaced by holograms. Suppose you could go actually go into a room and see holographic images of the people who are suppose to be in the room. One guy is in Dubai and one guy is in Toronto and one guy is in Detroit, but they're all in the room together virtually there. This may be indistinguishable some day from the brick-and-mortar experience. It'll be more like a classroom then, but I still don't think online teaching in general will become a substitute for the brick-and-mortar classroom.