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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.
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?
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.
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.
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!!
Taking online courses for credit requires self-discipline that not everyone has. Film at 11.
Life needs more saving throws.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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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Forgot to mention one last thing: assimilation of information. One thing that many educators fail to realize is that it takes time to assimilate information. People require time to learn. In between learning, they need to relax and think about the subject. Sometimes, it just means not even thinking about it for a while. They may need a couple of days, just to let it all sink in.
A typical course is presented over a period of months, a couple of days per week and only a couple of hours per day. It gives you time to assimilate the information. Crash courses typically fail because they cram the same information in the same number of hours but all at once. It becomes overwhelming!