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The Two Big Problems With Online College Courses
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that while online college classes are already common, on the whole, the record is not encouraging because there are two big problems with online teaching. First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed. Research has shown that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses. 'Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely,' says the Times. 'Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.' Interestingly, research found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming. 'The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.'"
they should teach students in secondary school to be more "highly motivated". would make the college experience much more rewarding.
"Correspondence Courses", of which online is the latest incarnation, have always had these problems. Indeed, degrees obtained through this type of self-study are often very highly regarded, not just because you have the degree, but because you had the motivation and tenacity to complete the degree without all the traditional support structure of an bricks-and-mortar college.
It's not online courses that are the issue, it's the people taking them. I'm in a Business 101 class at the moment (Have a B.S. in C.S., taking this a pre-req for some other educational goals I have), and the other people in the class are completely without discipline. It's a condensed 8 week course. We had one full week to take a mid term, which entails showing up to a campus in Northern Virginia, there are like 6, and taking a one hour exam. Enough people failed to do that, that the professor extended the time to take the exam by ONE WHOLE WEEK, this was after it was due!
Then I had a group project to do, each person in our group was assigned a portion which involved a 1-2 paragraph response. I get a beautiful full page response from someone two hours before we turn it in (I was to combine and submit for our group). The devil's advocate in me copied an entire paragraph, googled it, and low and behold, that person had plagiarized word for word from another group who had taken this course previously. When I asked for citations, they simply cited the main website for the fortune 500 company that the report was in, which, mind you, had ZERO information on it than what was on the page they turned in.
So like I say, it's not the medium, it's the dumbasses who typically enroll in them. Community colleges should stop focusing on passing everyone or handing out blue ribbons and start thinning out the herd. They're doing more a disservice to these kids by allowing them so much slack than they realize.
Don't forget those "job creators" hire people like me, to do the homework and tests for them, so that they can take future credit for many more accomplishments. Just look at what happened at Harvard, or how someone like James Franco could finish his degree so quickly.
I attend University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. For every class I take online I have to pay $300 on top of the already ridiculously high tuition. I have no idea why; there's no additional resources they're using, and they don't have to use any classrooms for this. It should be a $300 DISCOUNT.
close contact with instructors is at the tech / trade schools and the Community Colleges.
Not so much at the bigger Universitys where you may just have big class room with a TA.
I have taken several online classes with Coursera starting with Andrew Ng's Machine Learning outing (before he even launched Coursera).
I'll sign up for lots of classes that look interesting, but I don't know what they're going to be like or more importantly when they're ever going to start. Then suddenly, a whole bunch of them start at the same time. I pick the best one or two and stick with those. Three at once with a full-time lead dev gig is not so cool.
You can't plan when you're going to take what because it's very touch-and-go with Coursera. I've been registered for Jurafsky and Manning's NLP class for months and months now, and I have no clue when or even if it will ever start. Also, you have no idea with a class if it's going to get stupid part way through because people complain that it's too tough.
And, sometimes work just picks up and you have to drop most or all of your classes, that's just how it goes.
Still, one class I just finished, something like 17% of the people who finished had doctoral degrees (self-reported). So there's a pretty good quality of student that sticks it out.
I thought the point of higher education was to pursue a topic of your own interest. That in itself was the motivation to complete the studies, you actually wanted to learn the topic being taught. Why is it such a failure of the system when people drop out? - Maybe they just discovered that they didn't like that subject or perhaps they really were not capable of being self motivated and independent.
All this academic hand-holding in college/university can't be producing the best possible graduates. What happens when these people hit the workforce where there is a non-existent support structure?
still tied to the old traditional ideas when overall we need to rethink college.
Too much is put on a degree / name of school over real skills / on the job work.
Maybe degrees need to be broken up in to smaller chucks or maybe even killed off. The degree system seems to drag down tech schools
Also the (degree / college class / credits) time table can lead to stuff being padded out to fill out a credit and other stuff can get over slimmed down to fit it.
And other things are relevance of the classes as in too much theory or too much one size fits all.
I think that the older degree system needs to be spilt up into a (smaller system / more modular system) that has more flexibility and is not tied down to older ideas about college or is not just a BIG block of years where doing 90% can = NO degree or anything saying that you know X.
I teach history at a community college, both online and face to face, and I can attest to the failure rates for online classes. They're high. My failure rate for face to face classes is probably about 30% (I teach in a very low-income, low-literacy area, with most students speaking English as a second language) while it's around 50% for online classes. Many of those students do only maybe 30% of the assignments. Face to face students who aren't into it just stop coming, but online students keep doing a few things, but they won't just drop the class. It's really crazy. I have a quiz every week, and they have to contribute to online discussions every week, and there are a number of students who only do one or the other. I have a student who has been in my class for four semesters in a row. He's never done anything more than take a few quizzes, yet he keeps signing up for the class. If he was on financial aid it is likely pulled by now, yet he keeps taking the class. The article is definitely right, though, in that online is good for driven students. For others, I think it's a disaster.
When I really want to learn something, I'm plenty motivated - I eat, breath and shit the subject.
When I had to take a subject because somewhere someone dictated that one has to take that subject to be "well rounded", I did the bare minimum to get a decent grade and get it over with. Art History for example. The only way to get a good grade in it was to memorize paintings and artists that I forgot 3 days after the class ended.
They're not outlawing "normal" colleges here so I don't see what the problem is. This is just a different delivery mechanism. This quote: "which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return" really bothers me. Nobody is forcing anyone to spend hard-earned dollars. Such a co-dependent approach to education is why colleges are increasingly getting the reputation for pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Right now, my wife is taking 2 courses online from a local CC, before she returns to school this fall to finish her B.A. Although we generally like it because these classes have a TON of helpful ancillary materials (video lectures, practice quizzes, practice homework, etc) and the instructors for both have been very responsive to electronic communications, there are still difficulties not associated with the regular classroom experience.
One of my biggest peeves with it is that, at times you're working to figure out the system, in addition to the school work. For example, it can be a real struggle, if the directions are sufficiently vague, to determine the desired format of an answer. One of her classes is an algebra class. Getting the correct answer isn't hard. Earning proper credit for that correct answer by determining if the program wants you to actually simplify the answer when it says "Simplify" is something else entirely. Really frustrating when you know the grading experience would be much better if this was a face to face, human graded deal.
I'd like to see some more detailed data on a course by course basis (or in different programs). I've taken some bio courses that are about 95% pure memorization - I'd be inclined to think the online courses like this wouldn't have 90% attrition rates. Conversely, I'd be lost in some math or comp sci courses without a teacher explaining how a concept or formula actually works. Some classes have a lot more students asking teachers than others.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Now, the best online instructor I had ran a forum and that really worked. Everyone could see someone's questions and even respond to it but the biggest thing was that by each Saturday afternoon the instructor had responded as well. And if he felt that it was something that needed to be one on one, we would receive a detailed email. But he was, unfortunately, the exception.
With the problems you could take it up with the school but ultimately I never received answers just my grades seemed to be better than I expected, which I felt wasn't the right way to handle it. I think the schools are a little out of touch and nervous about online classes due to the testing of the students. Mine packaged the class and rotated the tests every other semester but the test pool came from the publisher and it wasn't hard to gain access to it. I didn't feel that some of the classes I was taught as just repackaging the answers from the book.
My best online instructor, well he had actually made us write in the answers. No multiple choice, nor true/false, according to some students who took his class in person stated he hated them, and nothing seemed to be coming from the publisher, we had to truly think about our answer and give an answer. So no instant knowledge of the answer and when we received a grade we all felt that we earned it and learned something. I actually understood the subject which happened to be Physics. BTW: I received a 'B' in the class I missed an 'A' by a few points on an online lab but I still felt that I learned more in that online class than the other dozen courses I took online.
My experience, if a school has an online course, then the instructor has to run it just like she was face to face and make time for the students questions because there seemed to be a lot more questions online than the students who were face to face. Why? I dunno but I think it had more to do with the course being a one size fits all packaged course versus the instructor actually has to have a discussion of the subject. I think that schools need to make sure their instructors are teaching and not use those publisher online courses. I don't blame the instructor for the online material just not being 'there' with the students.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Inferring from the fact (among others) that "[m]any students ... show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English," that "[c]olleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely," doesn't reflect a deeply considered position on the question at hand. Does anyone (anyone at all) believe that moving courses online is the solution to this problem? The editorial amounts to the banal observation that many students are unprepared for online courses. The author might as well have added that many students aren't prepared for college. The problems are not the same, and the solution is not to "improve" the courses.
Learning has a lot to do with presence and environement, where the teacher can react quickly to cues from the student, change rythm, go deeper into the topic, etc. which are not that easy to convey online. And from the student's perspective, there is always the brain telling you "oh, nobody can see if you are going or not, so it is ok if you miss this time", that's why only highly motivated students keep going. Make VR classrooms, equip students with Oculus, a virtual 3D presence and ways of conveying mental state (biosensors for detecting tiredness, struggling, etc) and then online courses will have a chance.
Taking online courses for credit requires self-discipline that not everyone has. Film at 11.
Life needs more saving throws.
There's nothing wrong with the current university education, other than letting in far too many unqualified students.
What you are asking for already exists. It's called a trade school. It's far more appropriate for what the summary euphemistically calls "struggling students." People who are "needing remedial education" should not be attending a university. Any college that has lowered its entrance standards so far that remedial education is even on the table has turned itself into a diploma mill that will shortly be known as worthless. They're cutting their own throats in pursuit of the almighty dollar, diluting education, deceiving employers, and generally ruining the entire concept of a university education.
And it's going to require multiple lost generations before anything is done about it. That's right, generations. As in, pairs of decades. Unemployment is highest right now among new college graduates, and the severe dumbing down of university educations is one reason why. When the economy is already shifting to eliminate jobs permanently, people who can barely struggle through their supposed education are at a double disadvantage. But this isn't going to sink in with enough people to make any difference for decades. The mystique and cachet of college has a long lasting draw that's going to cause a whole lot of grief before it declines.
Meanwhile there are any number of companies all over the country who are crying for trained, reliable, dependable, competent employees with trade skills like welding. If they can find somebody who already has the skill, they're amazed, and if they can find somebody who both knows the job and will show up to work regularly, they're astonished. And they pay pretty good too. Much better than minimum wage. But the combination of people trying to get educations they are in no way qualified to acquire who also have a poor work ethic has left all the current managers thinking new college grads are useless and more trouble than they're worth. And I can't blame them.
Shit, when did I get old...
As I've noted in other forums/threads, online courses produce extremely low learning compared to traditional direct contact classroom courses. Estimates are that online students learn about 30% of what in class students learn. Give the same test to the online students and classroom students and that picture is clear. There's something about direct contact with instructors and peer students that facilitates learning. It's not very subtle, either.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I've done both. Don't knock online courses. Many American universities are putting their lectures and course materials online. If you're motivated, this is a treasure trove and makes available education to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to do it.
To do anything at home though, you have to be highly motivated and have a work environment where you won't be interrupted. If you live with other people - and let's face it - most of us do - it can be hard for them to understand that, but this is true of anything, even working at home, and it's why so many companies don't like telecommuting. It can be done though. Instead of dismissing online courses, they need to educate people how to do online courses - teach skills like focus, motivation, saying no. If we could we would all do physical courses, but online is better and we have to adapt. Oblig. link to online lectures: http://www.youtube.com/education
For the online college courses, the issue is really cost. If the courses are pay for service, then we need to educate high school counselors and kids that they are likely not as effective as a community college situation where they are set up to help challenging students. If it free, there is no harm done except a students wasted time, which sometimes is the best learning experience.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
they should be in a trade / apprenticeship then some people learn better that way to bad HR does not see it that way.
Online courses can be a viable alternative to the traditional University experience,but it does not replace the University Experience. If for whatever reason, you aren't able to attend a brick & mortar course, the best alternative is to take it online. Much of the learning that happens taking traditional courses happens outside the classroom. It is when you are working with others on projects and sharing ideas that really expands your knowledge set. It is being able to interact with professors and visit them during office hours where you really get to push your knowledge frontier.
If you look at the extraordinarily successful people, it wasn't just what they knew that got them to where they are, it was who they knew/know. The traditional university has tremendous resources that are dedicated to facilitating networking between students, their peers, the faculty, and industry.
I completed my entire undergrad online through FHSU (Go TIGERS!) and for the most part my experience was quite good.. yes, there were a couple of professors who failed to communicate with the students, but most were quite good. If extra help was sought, they were willing to help through email and BB forum discussions. What weighed in my favor was that I was in my mid 30s when I started it - I had the self discipline to study at home while working FT and make the Dean's List. I loathed classes where group assignments / discussions were mandatory as more often than not people would "contribute" their part of a discussion topic with mere minutes to spare before the deadline: One can not have a discussion without user interaction. It can be done, but success is entirely dependent on the person - and what their motivation is. Perhaps HS simply does not properly prepare for College; perhaps time management issues quickly become evident when no one chases you down to complete assignments.. or perhaps the thinking is that online college courses are a joke and easy.. and they find out that it isn't so... whatever the reason, whether one completes a degree or not is up to the individual and one shouldn't blame the method of delivery.
Any college that has lowered its entrance standards so far that remedial education is even on the table has turned itself into a diploma mill that will shortly be known as worthless.
Or it is a state university where the people who pay the taxes kinda expect that their kids can go and get a degree, even if their kids are unmotivated lunks who do nothing but consume oxygen and fritos. And beer.
Funny how people kinda think that a college degree is now a right of some kind. So much so that Oregon just passed a law saying that illegal immigrants can attend state schools at in-state tuition rates. One interesting argument was that allowing them to attend at lower rates would help build an educated, motivated workforce for the future. This ignores the one tiny detail that illegal immigrants can't be employed to create that workforce.
I went to college when technologies like Blackboard were just beginning to come to fruition. The problem I've always had with online courses is that they give you no added incentive to do to the work. Motivation may be its own reward for some people, but I still need that subtle "mental push" to succeed. A class set in an actual classroom gives my brain some reason to be there and do the work. Online courses just makes me think they're available "whenever." The concept of deadlines and necessity quickly goes out the window, usually along with my grades.
People don't drop these courses, because they don't remember them and/or don't think about them. The same goes for "hybrid" online courses, where you still spend some class time in a physical classroom. You're not getting enough cues to actually realize you're doing poorly. The instructor is also poorly interfaced with the class that they don't match a student's online progress with their physical presence.
Maybe working on your day's assignment in your PJs at 3 a.m. appeals to you. I still want to see and talk to the instructor. I need that "meat space" interaction.
That is a sweeping generalization. For example, recitation sections are valuable for working through difficult problems and rooting out misconceptions. I actually think the future will look more like Salman Khan's view of the "flipped classroom" where students use video and other tools for pre-study of key concepts / unit operations and use classroom time for problem solving and exams. There simply is not an effective substitute for a human proctor and a certified ID to insure exams and certifications are meaningful. And even these are not foolproof...
Barriers and costs to entry and exit are lower online, less committed people join, therefore you get more drops.
And yes, there are motivational advantages with a teacher standing there holding your hand. If you need your hand held, find someone to hold it.
I'd note that the other side of that pancake are the people who do better with the relative privacy of online learning. Some people with a relative lack of education or intelligence don't want to be put in a classroom setting displaying their relative lack of talents to all.
Life is full off trade offs.
I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.
I've come to the realization that college professors - even highly esteemed professors from highly esteemed universities - don't know much about the actual technique of teaching, nor of presentation.
Every course I've seen so far goes against the grain of how we learn, or has features which repel attention. Droning talk with hypnotic rhythm, no vocal variety, poor spacing and timing, and filled with pauses and disfluencies which put the student to sleep (Daphne Koller, Stanford). Tedious derivations with no initial apparent purpose and no apparent endpoint which go on and on, suddenly ending with simple result (Anant Agarwal, MIT). Pointless exercise and homework with no apparent relevance to the subject (Richard Buckland, UNSW). The list is endless.
People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.
College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback. If students don't do well, it's because of the course content; or it's because the students are not "Stanford level" or whatever. Stanford is considered tough, but no one ever wonders whether it's because the quality of teaching is low. Colleges aren't rated highly when they can teach anyone, they are rated highly when they can only teach the top students.
The typical online course just videotapes a lecture and throws it up on the net with some homework and grading software. There is no rehearsal, no redoing of bloopers or flubs, nothing one would get in a professionally-made video. The homework is generally "one question per concept" and is often "get it right the first time". No room for experimentation, multiple practice, or exploration. No feedback or watching the professor run through an example.
They wonder why the attrition rate is so low, it's obvious.
It's because their methods are just bloody awful.
(Note: I've scored high 90's in each course so far. The material isn't that tough, if you've ever had a good professor you know how understanding is easy when well presented. Blaming the content or the student is a dodge - very little is difficult to understand if it is taught well.)
well theory loaded classes with big lectures are not very hands on as well.
Any time there is a big pile of money somewhere, there will always be people who will try their best to get some of it in their pockets. The availability of medical insurance has jacked up medical costs. Anything the government subsidizes always costs somebody more than it otherwise would. For most of us that increased cost comes in the form of taxes.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Maybe for the Art History majoring hipsters, that will suffice. If you are telling me that you could have learned, oh say, abstract algebra, without a little guidance, then you are a fucking liar.
they should teach students in secondary school to be more "highly motivated". would make the college experience much more rewarding.
Motivation is the responsibility of the lecturer, not the student. You can't teach someone to be more motivated. Forcing someone to "tough it out" when things are boring is counterproductive, it's not the way we learn.
Motivation comes from two things: perceived value, and emotional content.
Courses which focus on theory and the abstract aspects of a subject are going to seem boring and pointless, while courses which incorporate a mix of theory and practical application in a way that's perceived as valuable will be more interesting.
So for example, an electronics course can focus on theory and problem solving - with long derivations at the start and the formula results at the end of each lecture. That would be boring, and requires a significant amount of "forced attention".
That same course could focus on hands-on projects, showing students that they could build things which they could actually use. Once a circuit is working, *then* explain why it works - filling in the knowledge gaps after the student has basic familiarity. That would be interesting, and follow more naturally the way humans learn.
That's perceived value; the other aspect is emotional content.
Many lecturers present the information in a dry, matter-of-fact manner. This is also boring, and requires "forced attention".
Some lecturers, however, have an infectious enthusiasm for the subject. They laugh, tell jokes and amusing stories, and generally have fun with the subject. The students enjoy the lecture and the learning isn't an ordeal.
That's the emotional side of value. There are other types of emotional content, such as horror novels in literature, or the chemistry of explosives.
Teach the professors about motivation. You'll get a lot more effect for your efforts.
Charge them Ivy League rates and yo'll see the attrition rate drop significantly. The courses will have far fewer takers in the first place though.
When you're giving something away, whether it's a somebody else's copyrighted media, porn, or free beer, you'll get a far larger audience than would be willing to buy the product with a price tag.
I studied actuarial science; a field with some of the most difficult credentials to obtain. The head of the department dedicated all class time to flip through pages and pages of formulas all while occasionally explaining what the left hand side did, and what the right hand side did and why they were equal. He used to have students stand up and "draw" the charts or timelines in the air or he would draw them on the wall with his finger. I think his approach matched the field - you have to be self motivated and willing to study on your own to succeed. Kinda makes me wonder what his job really was... Distinguishing the highly motivated folks from the less motivated isn't something native to online courses.
when taking a test for an online course, you can open a second browser and cut and paste the question, and be offered the right answer from any number of websites for a buck.
So. Key findings. OnlineTraditionalHybrid for attrition and performance. Hybrid means much greater time investment. For hybrid to succeed, you need a lot of factors working together. Students need to know what they're doing. Face to face classes need to be more student centered/fluid. Faculty need to be given sufficient professional development. LMS coherence is important. Tenured faculty will want to stick with what they've been doing for years. Student body makeup is important. CS students age ~20 will do much better than veterinary students age ~40. Digital literacy matters, but can be taught. I had a lot more findings, but this is not news. One of the biggest things is that many online courses are very poorly designed from a pedagogical point of view. It's almost like you asked some person who's been teaching face to face for 20 years to teach an online course with no experience or training.
The problem that employers have is knowing ahead of time who would and who would not be able to do the job they need done. If for example there are a dozen applicants for a welder job, how does an employer pick the best applicant? Some kid out of high school might be the best welder, but is not likely to get the job over someone who can present some kind of fancy school certificate. It is not likely that there are many employers who will take each applicant and have them actually weld something, to try to determine who the best welder is. A college degree or a school certificate has become a primary filtering mechanism to narrow down the number of applicants that would even be considered for the job opening.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Funnily enough, just as I was about to go to sleep I saw a "stay home" collage commercial
People once told me 68K ram was all we needed,
I'm currently pursuing my M.S. in Education Technology at a Midwestern school but I currently work as a web developer for said school. I've been around the gamut with this stuff and here's my two cents concerning every experience I've ever had with "online courses"...
There isn't a student on Earth that likes "Blackboard" (or other similar courseware) but the reason these things keep getting used is because they save on maintenance costs, provide a means to avoid having to create expensive homebrew solutions, usually come with a decent security net full of resources and technically-experienced people from other schools to bounce ideas off of, etc. For example, one Blackboard database schema will be similar if not the same at another school. Do you know how helpful someone from another school can be because of this?
-- Some random phone call... --
Guy at Campus A: "Hi, we're having a problem with the blah table. We've implemented the term calc feature but the expected date field isn't displaying correctly."
Guy at Campus B: "We had that problem too. Make sure the widget column in the blah table is being displayed by the foobar view."
Guy at Campus A: "Ah, you mean the foobar-term view?"
Guy at Campus B: "Yep. In fact, I think one of our guys has the SQL we used to fix that. I'll have him send it to you."
Guy at Campus A: "Thanks!"
When it comes to major education systems, this kind of phone call can save thousands of dollars.
Systems you use to deliver online classes are very nasty beasts... Many require multiple servers for multiple development, testing, and production environments. If done right, they usually only require entire teams of people to successfully keep running. If done wrong, well, the outcome can be a nightmare of unbelievable proportions. They always require constant on-call support to avoid disaster recovery situations, have entire books written for upgrade procedures alone, and are rarely released without extensive testing (certain situations notwithstanding, of course).
So if you could take all of this--the servers, the maintenance and support, the skill sets, etc.--and assign a monetary appraisal to it, the cost would TRIPLE if not QUADRUPLE if instead an in-house solution is pursued. The scary thing is that some universities have things like that and STILL suck.
You can throw a dart at a map and hit 20 schools that all use Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT; whatever... It gets them by, and each year, they keep applying the upgrades that the vendors shove down their throats in order to claim that they all have the latest-and-greatest features.
But at the core, they're all the same--just with a different color scheme, brand, or placement of text boxes.
Again, it gets them by and when you have so many people flooding the schools, looking for the next degree to get them a job, well, you don't normally have the resources necessary to make big changes that many students (and their parents) dream of acquiring. But the truly unique schools that employ special creations for teaching online are special schools for reasons like this. I'm not sure what schools these might be... I suppose MIT and Harvard, etc. would likely fit this mold, but I don't know. All I do know is that Blackboard is a brand standard anymore and despite the fact that the schools have legit reasons for using it, I've never met a single student who "liked" it and when you're attempting to learn something, well, you SHOULD like what you're doing.
But really, what all this comes down to is cash. The more cash the institution has, the better off your online courses will likely be. It's that simple.
The videos that I find most informative of both the teaching and learning experience are 1) John Cleese in The Meaning of Life as the English Public School instructor who manages to make "the facts of life" a complete bore, 2) John Cleese in Life of Brian in the stoning scene, 3) Ben Stein and the ensemble cast in the "Bueller . . . Bueller" scene, and 4) Father Guido Sarducii's "5 Minute University."
When I sign up for a physical bricks and mortar course I will typically be paying for it, consider which course I want very carefully, and then set time aside in my week. But when I sign up for say a Coursera (Love them) course I will click enroll willy-nilly. I am perfectly happy to dip my toe in the water and see if the course is for me or if the person doing the course has any idea what they are doing. For example, I recently took a Cryptography course. The professor knew how to run the tutorials. The workload was about right and the quiz / exam questions were on material somewhat covered by the course. My daughter signed up for a Coursera Pre-calculus math course and withrew after attempting the first week. The course was a mess of dog crap. They had nearly zero idea how to properly use the coursera system and the tutorials were odd. Then worst of all when she went to enter the answers it was rejecting answers that were simple and correct.
At the present time the simple problem is one of editorial and production. I would say that few of the people creating these moocs have any real experience; nor do they seem to be getting much direction. If you compare the videos to say those in the great courses there is no comparison. Also there are the fundamentals such as workload; it is too easy to have an assignment where you ask the students to do things that will require way too much work. Or like a recent Game Theory course I have been taking does: ask questions on material they didn't really cover.
But time should take care of this. If the people running the courses are getting good feedback from the questions then they will slowly iterate their courses into something great.
What I do agree on is that there is going to be a sea change in those who are able to thrive in modern education. In the past, as an employer you can look at a collage grad and know that they showed up every day and did their time. But with online courses you will basically know that the student has done the work (ignore cheating for the moment) but did they binge and do the course in a caffeine fueled weekend in the last minute? Did they do it slowly or are they a god and pounded out a whole degree in a summer? This isn't necessarily better or worse but it will be different.
But there are two areas where it will get far better and far worse. First the better will be that an amazing opportunity will now be available for people to better themselves who would never have been able to. This applies to both people in distant countries with few educational opportunities and people who are trapped in situations here in the western world such as dropping out of school to provide for a family. Online education will be like a night school GED on mega steroids. The area where it will be far worse will be that you can now get an education without any of the hidden benefits such as social interaction, social interaction, and meeting amazing people socially. Meeting people with similar interests is one of the great things about a physical school as beyond the satisfaction it provides it also provides future networking, and present development of ideas and businesses. It is possible to interact with people in a forum but something is usually missing.
I am not sure that it is the greatest loss if undisciplined and unfocused people end up dropping out. I have met too many programmers who did have that piece of paper but were unable to contribute squato.
Some kid out of high school might be the best welder, but is not likely to get the job over someone who can present some kind of fancy school certificate.
Not sure which university teaches welding, but I'd stay away from that one if you want a real education.
It is not likely that there are many employers who will take each applicant and have them actually weld something,
Well, better that than asking for a college transcript and thinking that the English major has a better chance of working out than the high-school vo-tech graduate as a welder.
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I pioneered online learning back in 1994 with the Internet. After a year of struggling with online learning with post secondary learners and the problems that they faced, I came quickly to the conclusion that nothing beats face to face learning. I wrote up a multipage report on the problems and presented it to the Dean of our department. The report was ignored, shelved and never read. The attitude was that I must of been doing something wrong and that they could do it better.
Almost 20 years later, the same problems are occuring for online learning, it focuses on one predominat learning style: seeing. There are 4 basic learning styles: seeing, hearing, doing and thinking. The "seeing" learning style is characterized by a person who can pickup a book or read a webpage and gather knowledge in that manner. A "hearing" oriented learning, learns by listening. They are characterized by being able to follow verbal instructions or directions easily: "go two blocks North, turn left, go 4 blocks then turn right next to the blue garbage bin, etc..".
The "doing" learning style, learns by doing the work, this is the best way to learn. Our institute is heavily loaded with lab work, up to 50% of classroom time is spent in the lab. Another way to re-inforce doing is by taking notes, either through pen and paper or laptop. The last learning style is "thinking". A person who is predominantly a thinker will have to "think" about what was said or presented to him in order to understand. They "go away" for a little while to assimilate the information then return back to the conversation. A typical reaction from a thinker is that they will briefly look away when you tell them something new.
Nobody has just one learning style, we have combinations of all 4 and are predominate with one or two.
If I gave a University theatre style lecture, no interaction with the students, straight power point presentations with powerpoint handouts already given out, the students will remember about 10-15% after 3 days. If it was a smaller class size of 30 students or less, interactive questions between the students and instructors, note taking, then after 3 days, the students will remember about 30%. If it was a lab with hands on exercises and interaction, the students will remember about 80% after 3 days.
Online learning fails by not delivering multiple learning styles and by missing the teacher/student interaction. It falls somewhere in the University large theatre learning results - that's why the high failure rate. Often, it takes a person to explain how things work. I found that the majority of students were particularly hesistant to use online tools (email, forums, blogs, twitter, 1-800 numbers) to contact the instructor to ask questions when things didn't make sense. They preferred to struggle "days" trying to figure it out until they could meet face to face.
The best learning is obviously "to do", my preference is to have no theory classes, just lab classes and pass on the information on a need to know basis. It's time to do this lab, this is what you need to know to do this. In the past, I've found that no matter how many times, you talk about a particular topic: in the classroom, online, at the beginning of a lab, it will be forgotten until the time is right and the student is ready for the information. In one course, I used to repeat the same explanation to each student in the lab when they needed to know it. I would repeat the exact same 5 minute explanation over 100 times a week. The students appreciated the one on one time and I got really good at explaining it! LOL.
The problem with having "just lab" classes, is that it flies in the face of everything that Universities teach about learning. The mantra is present the material, give an example, students practice the material and then assess the students. That is the "best practice" (I hate that phrase!) teaching method. In my labs, I don't feel that it is right to be assessed on the first
(1) Watching instructional videos doesn't count as guidance?
(2) Khan Academy is shit. A extremely cursory pseudo-explaination involving avocados, then a couple basic examples doesn't do anything. He never explains how anything works, just that it works (and frequently leaves off units, which pisses me off to no end). He doesn't even bother to shout WOLOG like a proper teacher would when he uses to simplest illustrations possible so he can cram as much MS Paint artwork into 10 minutes as possible.
Research has shown that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses. 'Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely,'
Or there needs to be more competition in online courses to bring the costs down. I think it's fine to have products that most people are not self-disciplined enough to fully exploit. If an online course can be offered to a 1000x as many people for the same cost to the university, the free market will drive the cost down 1000x to students. I wouldn't mind flunking out of online school if it only costs me $50 instead of $50,000
Can someone remind me what problem is supposed to be addressed by online college course?
I read it does not perform very well. This is a drawback compared to traditional courses, but what is the advantage?
My degree was assembled from coursework taken at various colleges, the degree program that collected them all together and granted me my BA required that all degree candidates hold a one hour discussion with an independent professor on a single topic related to the degree sought. The conversation is recorded, and it is a pass/fail "exam".
I think a similar "sanity test" could scale pretty well for an online college.
Ken
That's probably not true. I'm not aware of any college where that's the case outside of that first year, once you get into your major, the classes are more normal sized.
And that's assuming you chose to go to a large state school, I went to a small state school and when there'd be 75 students in a class, I would have 3 professors. I never had to deal with any of those massive lecture halls and TA quiz sections.
Something to consider is that, from a business perspective, poorly performing students that keep failing and coming back are very lucrative as far as the school is concerned. Doubly so if they take online courses as the overhead to the school is (generally) much less.
The real problem is the relatively easy access these poor students have to educational financing. If they can limp along with a 2.00001 GPA they can pull more loans to retake half of their classes next semester. Federal loans are so lax that there is hardly any pressure for the student to pay them back this century. Mommy and Daddy may also be funding them and forcing them to continue on with an education that they do not want or appreciate.
Schools win with a steady base of poor students that keep paying, banks win with more loans, students lose with a mountain of debt and nothing to show for it in the end.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Online education offers an incredibly equalizing opportunity for people all over the world. At the same time it destroys the notion that everybody is equal and everybody should be given the opportunity to succeed. The reality is if you cannot hack it then you should not be wasting a university's resources.
"Struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment" should not be wasting seats which could be offered to students who are more motivated and better prepared to learn. Harvard, Yale and Columbia should eliminate the admissions process all together and allow anybody who thinks they can make it at one of these leading schools to enroll. Fill classroom seats according to SAT scores. Allow online students and classroom students to compete for seats during the four year process. If you are an online student and you get an 'A' then you will have a seat. If you have a seat and you get a 'C' or lower then you become an online student until you become a top performer.
Students who "show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English" should not be in university. If they were too lazy to learn English they probably lack the financial wherewithal to stay in school - lack of money is the real reason most online students don't get degrees. The problem is not the online school, the problem is the student. Students "lacking confidence as well as competence" need to spend more time reading and less time doing bong hits.
You obviously haven't been paying attention to the growing trend in the educated population to not procreate.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Correspondence courses never were considered that good, neither were the degrees from those schools. Today we place "cyber" onto anything and somehow whatever it was is all new and wonderful. Except for cyber crime, which needs all new laws for some reason...
I remember from a Communications course, a transcript was only 20% of the message being conveyed or something like that was said. Audio is better, Video is even better than that. But nothing compares with the interactive aspect; even if not utilized, somebody asks a question and it takes another direction that a video can't. Also, by having other people raise issues it impacts the others in a way a 1 on 1 can't -- and I can tell you that online courses have LESS interaction, because despite a student saying nothing and being completely passive they do benefit (on average) from the other active students. I suggest people look into communications, which is a field of study. look into what is ACTIVE LISTENING. A college lecture is supposed to be an active listening exercise not a 1 person repeat performance.
So, one could say the questions and discussions should be in a forum so everybody can read it-- except that getting students to read the forum isn't going to happen. Sitting there physically, they LIVE the experience and it is not as easily dismissed as an optional transcript of a question they don't need the answer to (the answer given might not be what they expected) or if they do need the information they end up skimming and skipping which also can rob them. Also, even dull info you already know is going to be more cemented by repetition, especially when it has slight variations to it.
Mostly, I think it has to do with BEING somewhere, forced to do it all with minimal distraction on a SCHEDULE. The #1 problem is students not doing what they should and when they should - anybody in education should tell you that within minutes of a discussion. Once you realize this, it should be obvious how foolish these online correspondence programs are for the majority of students. If you dig deeper, you'll also find that the self motivated driven students can gain MORE from the traditional model as well -- that is, if they are not solely into making the grade and want to learn the subject as opposed to just passing the class. You see this with non-traditional students who must learn it and apply it on the job they wish to keep, they'd be fine on their own without a course but do better when they utilize one.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
'The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.'
Any poorly designed course shortchanges students, whether it is online or traditional. People learn in different ways and have different circumstances. For some people, online courses are heaven sent. For others they may be hell sent. And in both cases it can depend on the teacher. The same can be said for traditional courses. When it comes course design, it is apropos to blame the messenger.
A year ago I signed up for an online course in software testing. It went OK until I was supposed to post unit test code for an existing function. The function function (target code) was well specified, the unit test (my code) was under-specified, the user interface (web site GUI) was totally unspecified. I copied my code and pasted it into the textarea and clicked on "submit". What did I get back? "Wrong". What was wrong? No way to tell. No error message, just "Wrong". After a dozen variations over at least three days, I gave up and dropped out of the course. I have degrees from U.C.Berkeley and Stanford. It is amazing how important the Teaching Assistants are in a live course. Where is the submit bin? What do I erase, and what to I keep? Why am I not seeing an error message? TA's are a vital point of human contact. Professors' lectures can be recorded; TAs' answers must be responsive.
There is no way you can trust that a degree means a person knows their stuff.
So it's the same as normal college, then?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
For example the technical computer science or information security classes which require computer labs are not better because at this point in time the virtual labs tend to be very slow. As far as how good it is for the students, I would not recommend online classes for undergrad. For graduate students it's fine but for undergrad they aren't going to have the skill or expertise to actually do certain subjects well without asking questions or going for help.
I wouldn't for instance take a math class online. For that the lectures help. But for a programming class I would take that online because that kind of class help can be posted in an online forum. Just so long as it's not your first class and it's not a hard language like C++.
It has advantages. One advantage is there is no slowing down the class so the rest of the students can catch up. The classes move at a much faster pace than ordinary classes. In fact some classes let you do the next 2 weeks assignments ahead of time. If you're a motivated hard working smart student you'll do fine but if you're not that kind of student or if you're in the wrong major you'll fail hard.
I will say it's as simple as that. You're correct if you're a smart or very high IQ person and you're presented with an online course and they basically give it all to you at once then you can breeze right through it. This is something a very smart person can do, but a person who is not as smart would never be able to do that and would benefit from a slower paced classroom style instruction.
There are pros and cons for both. In certain subjects and classes it's better to be in person because the subject is very complicated. Cryptography in my opinion isn't that subject at least for me but subjects which require really profound changes in thinking style or which are heavy in mathematics in my opinion benefit from in person context/contact. Even if you are highly intelligent there are some forms of mathematics which you just don't know and which aren't simple and easy no matter how smart you are.
As far as cheating goes I would say these online classes are harder to cheat in than the offline classes. In offline classes when you take an exam it's not at a professional testing center. In the online classes exams are at professional testing centers which seem designed to prevent any kind of cheating. They put a camera on you Vegas style and watch your every move as you take the test. You basically can't cheat as they also make you empty all your pockets etc.
So I think online classes don't really have a problem with cheating anymore. It's just a matter of certain kinds of students can learn by teaching themselves and certain kinds of students can't. If you're self motivated, and if you want to learn, you'll gain as much from online classes as from offline. If you need to be pushed you will probably flunk out. If you're not highly intelligent you'll probably funk out. Online classes seem to have no mercy because every mistake you make is magnified too.
" online degrees are a high-priced joke"
Your experience shows a US bias, though my understanding is that distance education provision is often of low quality in your country. It looks as if you still have distance learning which has quality control and pedagogical models from 100 years ago. I'm not sure whether this is to lack of regulation, "the invisible hand of the market" driving quality down or other reasons?
Teaching over distance creates specific challenges, though does not imply poor-quality per se.
In other countries, there are higher quality distance learning systems. Check out The Open University in the UK for example. Degrees from this university are considered to be equivalent to a good quality face to face university. In Europe and other places the idea of using technology for learning purposes is considered valid and not necessarily a joke. There is more of an acceptance perhaps of the concept of "lifelong learning", that studying at a higher level is not necessarily something that can only be done fulltime when one is between the ages of 18 and 25.
Experience tells me that there is a third problem, that of institutions watering down courses so that more people can "pass". This mentality results from profit motives and a mentality that says "every child deserves a degree". Maybe the "education" community thinks that more degrees will put America ahead in STEM. But, the thrust of today will only put us further behind and will ultimately make anyone who graduates from an American institution automatically thought to be unqualified. One only has to look at "diversity" goals leading to the targeted groups being taken as unqualified by the general practitioner community. Having assisted in hiring decisions, I can tell you that some companies keep a black list of institutions whose graduates will not be hired. Other companies keep a white list of institutions whose graduates will exclusively be hired. Of those that maintain a white list, some even publish that list in the job posting. That is where America is at the present time given the overall weakness of its "education" pipeline.
And the problem is not that the online courses are "bad". It is that online courses have to be incredible excellent to be on par with mediocre traditional ones, due to the inherent limitations they face. First, in traditional courses, students form bonds (if temporary) with the other students and the lecturer. This helps them pay attention and stay motivated. Second, it is easy to get help for small problems in traditional courses, just ask fellow students or the lecturer before/after/in breaks. It is also very easy to form study-groups. Then, traditional courses give you a specific environment: The lecture hall. These are conductive to paying attention, because you cannot actually do a lot else (although bringing networked communication devices has eroded that somewhat, as any students are not smart enough to turn them off). And lastly, traditional courses have a regular rhythm and turn into a ritual. Again something that helps average students to get through them.
None of these things exist in online courses and they basically cannot be re-created. That is well known and has been for decades, at least to those that have looked into it and are not hypnotized by the fetishes of "online" and "modern". So, lets face it: Online courses are pretty worthless. Those that can actually deal well with them could just work through a book by themselves with much the same result. The 90% others need traditional courses and nothing can be done about that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's a great rant, but if you RTFA you'll notice that while the lede mentions Stanford's success in enrolling a large number of students in a non-credit MOOC, the rest of the article (which is the basis for the first paragraph dismissing the significance of Stanford's MOOC numbers) isn't about non-credit MOOCs, it, including the problems identified with high drop-out rates, etc., is about studies of traditional, for-college-credit, online college courses. For which the incentive you are talking about is present, and yet they are not keeping students.
There is not a complete sequence of courses for any discipline yet in the three MOOC companies. Thats OK for someone like me who already has a grad degree, but not for basic students.
"Are you really an expert "
The definition of an expert in a field is someone who has shown mastery of the skills required for that field and at least 20 years of work experience in that field.
I have met way too many "experts" who just finished college and have zero work experience.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Cost and accreditization.... do I win?
Any time there is a big pile of money somewhere, there will always be people who will try their best to get some of it in their pockets. The availability of medical insurance has jacked up medical costs. Anything the government subsidizes always costs somebody more than it otherwise would. For most of us that increased cost comes in the form of taxes.
Sadly, your comment is superior to a lot of online college essays (you know, the ones that aren't plagiarized).
IT needs a apprenticeship and journeyman program and not a Big block of pure class room up front