The online version had:
1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?)
2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it.
3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now.
4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.)
The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.
But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common.
What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
Online courses have several advantages:
1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added.
2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses).
3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material.
4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures.
5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class.
6) You learn at your own rate.
Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.
Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.
Just askin'
The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying.
Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while.
The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.
Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education.
Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content.
Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish.
In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.
In person education beats online education hollow.
Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work.
There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.
For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same.
You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish."
But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.
Conversations here usually shift from the article to some variant of "disrupt education" and college is signalling.
I find Bloom's 2 Sigma problem to be illustrative of the extent to which online learning is a loss to students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Studying in person has significantly different results.
The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
>The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
I'm sympathetic. The students aren't getting what they paid for. It's no one in particular's fault, but the service being paid for is being delivered in degraded form. I'm not sure you can even argue that, in general, the students will still get credit for this semester's courses because some classes probably can't be completed and, for a variety of reasons, many students will probably lose part of this semester and end up tacking on time to their degree as a result.
As a counter point to this, roughly 1/2 of med students attend class in person never or rarely. They use online resources because they think it's more efficient. They still pay the 50k a year for med school because they need the credential and it's the gateway for the clinical instruction in years 3/4 that has to be done in person.
The problem with the MOOC model is that it doesn't serve as a credential that people trust
This isn't really true.
"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/just-41percent-of-college-st...
In contrast, these are MOOC completion rates:
>Among all MOOC participants, 3.13 percent completed their courses in 2017-18, down from about 4 percent the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014-15.
www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-goals
They add:
>Certainly 55,000 people got access to education they might not otherwise have had. But "rather than creating new pathways at the margins of global higher education," the authors write, "MOOCs are primarily a complementary asset for learners within existing systems."
They do allude to a construct called "Verfied Students" which I have no idea about, which have higher but significantly varying completion rates.
> And among the "verified" students, 46 percent completed in 2017-18, compared to 56 percent in 2016-17 and about 50 percent the two previous years.
I have never encountered how that cohort was constructed, however if we are to start breaking down sub groups of students from general numbers, your data shows that non-profit and public institutions have near 60% graduation rates at 6 years.
In general a random student will more will likely graduate from a college, than a random person starting a MOOC.
I don't think I've ever completed a MOOC. When I get what I want out of it I drop it. Now if I was paying for it or if completion was a requirement for a job or promotion I think I'd be more invested in completing the course.
This is one of the reasons that online education will fall behind real world college classes.
Another is whether people learn the same amount.
"The official four-year graduation rate for students attending public colleges and universities is 33.3%. The six-year rate is 57.6%."
Most MOOCs have poor retention because there's no commitment. There's no reason to continue to apply oneself.
I've had a great deal of success with Coursera and a small in-person study group to keep us committed.
I spent 4 hours yesterday on Kahn Academy remembering my calculus so I could help my daughter.
MOOCs are invaluable resources, but those alone are insufficient. Support and study groups are an important adjunct.
*: https://www.cappex.com/articles/blog/government-publishes-gr...
The whole point of things like technology is to make things easier, keyboards and mice make it possible to manipulate tools to increase the amount of actions we can execute by using programmed automation (for example).
VR just makes doing that more expensive.
Generally, professors are not trained to teach at all. They’re trained to research.
That being said, I was already teaching a hybrid online and in person course, so the transition was (at least from my perspective) pretty seamless. We’ll see how the students feel after we receive evaluations.
Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only.
Tools are being built and the experience will improve thanks to this global reset.
Education is a space that hasn't really been disrupted ever. Definitely isn't happening within a few weeks.