Online classes: “higher” education?
“Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym.” —Woody Allen
From a 50-year career in academia, this is my take on the purposes of “higher” education:
—To provide information about accumulated human knowledge for a wide range of subjects.
—To provide an environment for interactions with other students and faculty.
—To allow students to develop a “world” view of concepts and ideas.
—To expose students to a variety of concepts, ideas, and viewpoints, whether they are conventional or controversial.
—To explain the procedures and processes of how to obtain information and gain knowledge.
—To train students to commit to and stick to a long-term goal, such as obtaining a college degree in some subject.
—To develop scholarly research programs in a variety of disciplines and publish results.
—To promote and pursue interactions between the campus and the community.
Within the United States, there are a few colleges and universities that have been “in the business” of education for well over 200 years (Harvard, William and Mary, University of Pennsylvania, etc.). Since that time, it could be justifiably argued that this country has developed one of the best systems, if not the best system, of higher education of any country. My concern is whether we are destroying one of the best higher educational systems in the world in the name of expediency. A number of “innovations” have been inserted into this system in the past 20 years or so that I feel are not in the best interests of students, faculty, or our citizens. One of these innovations is the proliferation of online course instruction.
“Online education”: an oxymoron?
The following comments are about my experiences, which although may be considered boring provide the background for my feelings about the proliferation of “online education.”
I graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in mid-January 1960. That same month, I, along with a few high school classmates, started classes at UCLA as slightly bewildered freshmen with various majors. It was quite a change from high school. The sprawling campus was huge and had a very large number of students compared to my high school. Some of my beginning freshman classes were very large with well over 200 students in a lecture hall. When sitting in the back, the professor appeared very small standing way down at the lectern, and it was sometimes difficult to see what was being “written” on the black chalkboards. Lecture exams were brutal, especially in the large science lecture courses, and average grades were sometimes well below 50 percent.
Lab classes were smaller but were mostly taught by teaching assistants. Some of those TAs were hard to understand as they were from other countries and had accents that were unfamiliar to us freshmen from sheltered high schools. Other lecture classes were smaller and taught by professors. As you might expect, some lectures were difficult to understand, some were just boring, and some were quite stimulating.
How did we cope with this radically new situation? By clustering in small groups from our high school. A typical plan was to head for the commons to get some food and ponder what was going on. Gradually, our circle of awareness expanded, and new people from other places and with different perspectives entered peripherally or completely into our communication circle. It was a valuable learning experience that, at the time, we mostly did not appreciate.
As my university experience progressed, although with some missteps, this same pattern of interaction with other students, and then with various faculty members, continued and became part of a normal pattern. Looking back on this brings home to me the fact that a significant portion of my educational experience and learning was in fact related to these campus interactions. I now consider it to have been a very valuable part of my overall educational and life experiences.
In this same vein, the range of abilities of the numerous faculty members I encountered as an undergraduate and graduate student was very great. Some were just simply boring lecturers, some were very stimulating, some had a great sense of humor, and some could really pull a subject together with all sorts of extraneous information and anecdotes during a lecture. Some were arrogant and some were friendly. Some I grew to dislike and some I liked a lot. Interestingly, in hindsight, what I learned and took away from any particular course was not necessarily dependent on a professor’s “likeability.”
I share these experiences because I see a trend in higher education that I consider to be going 180 degrees opposite of what I have just described. That trend began with the introduction of online classes, and as computer technology has almost exponentially advanced, this trend has rapidly expanded. It is true that access to online education has provided an opportunity for students who for one reason or another — financial issues, work schedules, a physical disability, or other situations — cannot attend traditional classes on a campus. However, overall, I think there are a number of negative aspects to such classes.
For a college or university, offering online classes is clearly an expedient way of teaching, although the few administrators I have talked with about this seem to be in denial of this monetary factor. A single faculty member can teach any number of students. Virtually no facilities such as classrooms are needed. Furthermore, a faculty member teaching such a class can be an adjunct with no real ties to the institution who is usually paid a pittance of a salary compared to a tenure-track or tenured faculty member. This is great for the institution as it saves a lot of money, but in my opinion, it sucks for the students for a number of reasons:
—Regardless of whether the online presentation is stimulating or dull, it will most likely come across as boring to the students listening to it.
—There is no real classroom interaction with other students or the instructor; in that sense, there is no soul to the lecture experience.
—Question-and-answer interplay among students themselves and with the instructor are marginal to mostly nonexistent.
—I suppose this type of lecture can be considered a type of learning experience, but it certainly does not represent a well rounded educational experience.
—From my informal polling of students over the past few years, I have noted that very few of them felt stimulated or motivated from an online class. The most common type of comment was “yeah it worked for me because of the convenience, but overall it was just boring.”
—On-campus interactions with other students and faculty, such as what I described above, are also very limited.
What I am getting at with these comments is the fact that online “learning” basically cheats students out of a significant part of their educational experience. These students miss out on interaction among other students and faculty and various pleasant, unpleasant, and stimulating events that take place on a campus. These activities and events are a traditional and integral aspect of a higher educational experience. Some examples of these are as follows:
—The enormous cultural event of James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962.
—The overall shared grief of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.
—The uproar and arguments for and against the Free Speech Movement and associated outrage by some with the communist professor Angela Davis at UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s.
—The campus-wide protests, large and small, against the Vietnam war late from the 1960s to the early 1970s.
—The Kent State University killings in 1972.
—The continuous protests and counterprotests against conservative or liberal speakers on campuses all over the country, which have continued, and perhaps intensified, at the present time.
Students living and studying away from a campus community, perhaps with a part time or full-time job, and who are taking most or all of their classes online are mostly isolated from such major events. They are also isolated from smaller positive and negative events that occur on an almost daily basis on pretty much any college or university campus. Additionally, such students miss out on most of the daily happenings and interactions with others that I mentioned above as part of my own experiences, which occur on any campus. Such students may end up getting a degree, but in reality, they will have missed out on a significant portion of their academic experiences, which in my opinion form an integral part of higher education.
As Albert Einstein said in 1921, “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
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These are important points to make, namely because conventional e-learning courses are indeed static and somewhat boring. That’s why they often produce poor results, but that’s also why we are working to create a truly engaging e-learning platform that will use brain hacks to produce outstanding results. With MemoZing, online courses will be fun, interactive, easy and efficient, and knowledge will become unforgettable because we will use cognitive psychology methods that easily transition what we learn from our short-term memory to our long-term memory. You can see more about it at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/development-of-the-e-learning-network-memozing-net/coming_soon.