Online classes take teaching from stage to screen
09/05/2017
University and college students will soon be back in their classrooms. However, more and more students now study online, rather than in a classroom. This is both positive and worrisome. I know, as earlier this summer I taught my first online university course.
Online education is a transformative disruption in teaching and learning. Freed from physical constraints, learning becomes more accessible and teaching techniques more innovative. More than one-quarter of post-secondary students in Canada have registered in at least one online course.
I began teaching my class with mixed feelings about the value and effectiveness of online instruction. Prior to the availability of wired courses, a university education was homogeneous: a classroom with students and an instructor. Online education adds many more flavours to the previously standard formula. But is this a good thing?
As a digital professor I felt like a stage actor forced to star in a film. Classroom teaching is visceral live drama with unanticipated questions and debates, doors opening to admit late students, and only one opportunity to reach students and ensure learning.
Online teaching resembles movie making: I recorded video lectures by superimposing my face onto the corner of presentation slides and graphics. The recording sessions happened mostly in my home office at all hours of the day and night . . . just like film production. My students, located across the globe, watched and listened at their convenience.
Unlike lecturing in a classroom I was far less sure of the reaction of my online students. Did they follow the logic? Was the analogy clear? I rehearsed, edited and prepared more than for a classroom lecture, but the result was less spontaneity and interaction.
Most surprising was how well accustomed most of my students were to learning online. Many had taken previous web-based courses. I should not be amazed by how familiar young people are with learning by staring at a screen. Many days my 11-year old twins return home from Grade five with, “I need to log in to do my homework.”
More and more online courses will be offered in the years to come. Many students find them appealing in the flexibility to combine studies with other activities. Post-secondary education institutions find the courses attractive because fewer physical assets like classrooms and parking lots are required. In fact, there is a marked decrease in the building of new classrooms in universities and colleges across Canada.
At the same time, as I initially feared when becoming a virtual professor, online courses have the potential to be paler versions of classroom-based courses. Online dating works well at the start, but at some point the relationship progresses to in-person meetings. The same applies to the relationship between teacher and student, or between classmates. Much can be done electronically, but not everything and not all the time.
Online courses are effective for only some students, and least effective for students beginning their post-secondary studies. In their first year of studies, students need in-classroom courses to learn how to learn at an advanced level, become familiar with conducting research, and express themselves in a face-to-face setting.
Students who need, or like, informal interaction with colleagues and instructors don’t do well in online courses. Online education places a premium on written communication: email, chat, blogs and written assignments. The students in my course who did poorly had weak grammatical and writing skills.
Just as classroom students are not all the same, the same applies to online programs. There is dramatic variation among online courses in regard to technology. Options for online learning include podcasts, blogs, Wikis, audio/video lecture recordings and online discussion forums. Blended or hybrid courses combine in-class, face-to-face instruction with learning via electronic media. Some online programs require students to come to campus for some activities such as lab work or tests.
The potential of online learning is huge, including hefty profits for private educators, especially as technology advances to include options such as virtual reality. However, for the promises to come to fruition, more needs to be done to monitor and direct the growth of online education. To date, this has not happened.
Governments have failed to set guidelines related to online education, for example whether the tuition fees should be the same for in-class and online courses. Universities and colleges have few standards for online programs, or rules about the copyright problems that arise when teaching material is made available electronically.
Most glaringly, research is lacking on which types of online education are most effective for specific groups of students. Lastly, no one knows how employers regard credentials earned online.
At the moment, online education is like the internet in its infancy: surely a good thing overall, full of hype, but not well understood and riddled with perplexity. For the sake of the students returning to class, more effort is required to ensure their online learning is as valuable as possible.
By Thomas Klassen