In a recent New York Times article, we find that colleges such as The University of Florida are experiencing heavy budget cuts, forcing teachers to push their classes online. With some teachers responsible for 1500+ students in a single semester, it appears the only option is to stream lectures online while students sit back and watch the show from the comfort of their own home. Is this the future we’ve been waiting for with technology finally streamlining life, reducing concerns like arriving on time, what to wear, where to sit, etc? Or is technology actually deluding one of the most valued experiences of a higher education — personal interactions?
You wake up, brush your teeth, make a pot a coffee, open up your laptop, and class begins. What could be wrong with that? The teacher sits in a small room with a camera that is manually controlled, switching the focus between him or her and the whiteboard. Obviously this satisfies budget concerns by requiring minimal space for class and increasing the student to teacher ratio. But where is the interaction? The heated debates between students and teachers? What is preventing the kids from flipping TV channels or making some breakfast while the teacher is lecturing? Obviously this new technology is fun and interesting, but it seems to undercut some valuable fundamentals that students must learn while in the college environment.
Tony Wagner is a major name in school reform. In his recent book The Global Achievement Gap, he argues it is necessary for students to have 7 basic skills in order to succeed in our new economic climate. Many of these skills, including effective oral communication and collaboration, are being completely lost through this new medium. Yes students have an opportunity to write-in a question through a dialogue box during the video stream, but this doesn’t encourage the fast-paced discussions that circle a classroom once a hot topic is reached. Students are loosing opportunities to develop effective communication skills. Additionally, due to their physical separation, they are loosing the experience of collaborative interactions. They can’t share notes in class or work on a problem presented together. We’re teaching students to learn and interact through a computer, and slowly removing principle notions of a college classroom or even campus.
Obviously our motivations here at Unplggd are to bring you the latest and greatest in technology news, products, and life integration. But not every step technology takes is necessarily a step forward and we believe it is important to highlight both the advances in tech as well as its flaws. What do you think about this new system of teaching? Are they digitizing and secluding the college experience? Has anyone here participated in online classes before? Have you found it to be effective? Ineffective? We would love to know.
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as a [somewhat] recent alumnus of both the UF and [similarly ranked] U of Texas b-schools, I would say that UF's online classes were just as effective as UT's intro classes, with the caveat that you got out of them what you put into them. UF's online classes were filmed in actual classrooms that you could attend at will (I never did). I also found that the profs (and TA's) were widely accessible during extensive office hours. UF's strategy of recruiting top profs (many were ex-ivy league profs) and (i assume) paying them well (instead of a number of lesser-paid, less experienced teachers) was certainly a factor in the effectiveness. My main complaint was that grades were assessed solely on 3-4 exams, which is an issue in any university (i made decent grades, but a lot of ppl could "skate by" under this process).
since college tuition is constantly rising and the average income is falling, its online or nothing for alot of people. The irony is Republicans want only the rich and privieged to have education, and the 2008 recession saw lots of unskilled/semi skilled jobs get flushed from existance, so the result is Universities are hurting. I cant afford college, i can make it work online though.....true you lose the social aspect, which I missed out on and deeply regret many years ago....but an education is a must unless you want to be doomed to a profession easily dismissable by the economy (like me!)
I would very much like to have more programs available online. I have been looking into a few graduate programs and I have not found that many programs that have online options. But the main thing that really keeps me from doing a graduate program right now is that I work and my schedule is not flexible enough to take day time classes.
I think on-line courses for some classes are a great idea, and a way to possibly lower tuition (or attempt to keep it from increasing, at any rate). I took a few on-line and correspondence courses (paper and pencil) as supplements to my campus-based education, because they were cheaper than campus courses, but still counted towards my "core" classes: English, history, etc, and I would say that I didn't suffer any as a result.
A lot of the on-line for-profit universities have fallen under scrutiny, though, because their tuition is more costly relative to state universities, and their students tend to be less competitive in the jobs markets, so tend to have higher default rates on government-sponsored student loans. The internet is still a relatively new phenomenon in communication, so it will undoubtedly take a while to get to the point where universities are comfortable offering more classes on-line. And then there are classes that are almost impossible to offer on-line, because they require rapid-fire idea exchanges, or complex visualization techniques, etc.
As with all methods of education, there's no one right answer for everyone.
In my opinion, and from my experiences both as a student and someone working at a university, is that online courses are horrible. They take one of the worst aspects of undergrad at a lot of schools, over sized classes, with poor interaction and critical thinking requirements, and make them worse. The professors hate them as well because they often actually require more, not less, effort to manage if you want them to not be horrible. They also make any kind of discourse a joke. Most of the software used to deal with them is atrocious. About the only thing they manage to make easier is being there. Most of them are not even convenient from a schedule point of view, because the ones that are not complete bullshit will have fixed hours for many assignment and tests.
lowonthe456: If we want more college graduates the answer isn't to further devalue our system in order to make it cheap, it is to look into what has been causing rising costs in the first place. Administration, the facilities race, student loans etc. are what we should be pointing fingers at.
Sorry, online courses are a very sticky subject in a lot of colleges right now. Professorships in general are under an ongoing threat. Online courses are something the administration often looks at as being an easy way to expand courses for cheap so they just tack them onto professors workloads or worse, get underpaid adjuncts to do them. Even if they are taught well the lack of one on one devalues the education. On top of that pretty much any course above the 200 level can't be effectively taught online unless you want to throw out any illusion that you are actually teaching people. Most of those courses will require equipment, discussion, or work that cannot be effectively dealt with in an online course.
It all just further moves college degrees into that whole "just a piece of paper" joke, and the last thing we need to do is devalue college educations further.