As an online educator and instructional technology grad student, I have a great interest in distance education.
From my experience, good online classes have three characteristics:
- Clarity
- Community
- Organization
I have been a student in classes where the expectations were unclear. I've had classes that seemed like independent study with little to no interaction with the instructor or peers. And I've taken an online class that was so poorly organized that it was nothing more than a random pile of poorly named PDF files.
While some of those courses had redeeming qualities, those were not good online courses. And this is not very complicated. Everyone already knows the desired characteristics of online courses. So, why are there still so many poor online classes out there?
No matter what we may say about our higher ed system, you have to be intelligent to become an instructor. And most schools offer online pedagogy information, training, and support. They offer expensive learning management systems and software for communication and creating instructional materials. Yet, the problem continues.
It seems to me that the two biggest factors limiting the quality of online classrooms are time and technology.
Instructors don't have enough time
In 2007, The New York Times reported that nearly 70% of faculty were adjuncts. By 2009, the percentage of grad students and adjuncts teaching made up 75% of all teaching staff in the United States.
While schools trumpet the advantages of having working professionals teach their courses, many of these adjuncts have very little time left in their schedules for creating quality online courses.
As an adjunct myself, I realize the difficulties. The one advantage that I have is my technology skills. Knowing how to implement a new feature or master a software program comes easily to me. However, I teach technology courses. What about the English instructor?
Instructors aren't tech-savvy enough
From my experiences as a student, I know this to be true. Many of the instructors don't have time to read a 100-page PDF manual about exporting content into a D2L shell and...blah blah blah. And it takes most people longer to pick up a new software program than us techies. In fact, some don't seem to ever have the ability to truly master the technology they are expected to use.
The technology is a barrier. Smart people are creating less than desirable online classrooms because they don't have full control over their classrooms. Easy-to-use, powerful, and flexible software programs are badly needed in education. I continually hear the hype and promises with each new offering, but I'm yet to truly see these characteristics in software for this market.
In a future post, I'll get to the giant drooling gorilla in the room known as Blackboard.
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Comments
3 comments postedOnline classes suck because students don't apply themselves. Period.
[THINKS] Oh, my God -- did I just type that out loud?
Actually, it's not always about whether or not students are applying themselves. I am taking my first online class right now, and the professor has not been clear with her expectations. I guess this is an issue with lack of clarity and disorganization on her part. She will assign a paper, and only after we submit it will she say "You needed this, as well." No where in the assignment did she mention that we needed anything else but the paper. OR during the first week of class she told us our weekly discussion posts are due Sunday night. Then a couple weeks later she complains that many of us are submitting posts over the weekend and will deduct points since people are waiting until the last minute. So if she wants discussion posts before Sunday, why tell students that Sunday is the due date? I think there's a problem when students are doing what is asked of them but then the professor begins to nag because students can't read her mind and know what she really wants us to do.
Raymond, I think you are on to something here, especially when you talk about the use of grad students and adjuncts to do work that used to be performed by full-time, tenured faculty.
In a factory, you can increase productivity (which is measured by output per worker) by working people harder or by giving them more or better technology (i.e. tools + knowledge) to work with, so that the same number of workers can produce more.
But with a service, it is much harder to increase output per worker. Education is a service. So is being a barber. Can you imagine trying to increase haircut output by telling each barber that they had to cut the hair of four people per hour instead of two? The quality of service would decline. Or maybe you could introduce an automated haircut—it has been tried to ill effect. Or you could try to hire a lot of part-time barbers who hadn’t finished barber school—with the inevitable decline in quality.
Education is the same. If you try to teach more students by stretching faculty thin and thinking a fancy web-site will make up the difference, I think you are bound to fail. I’ve had some great online classes (one from you). I’ve had some bad online classes. In every case the good classes had instructors with the time and the willingness to provide the students with the extra attention that is needed for a quality service.
It is no different in face-to-face education. Go visit a freshman survey course with 200 students at a major state university. Then go to a quality small liberal arts college freshman survey course with 25 students. You will see the difference.
There may be an additional layer of tools to learn for the online faculty member—but the root of the problem lies in trying to squeeze out so much “productivity” that service declines.
Bob
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