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Garbage In, Garbage Out

I don’t say it’s beautifully written, but it’s one of many studies we can anticipate that state the obvious: Online classes are the poor white trash of university education.

[via the chronicle of higher ed]

Margaret Soltan, 6:37AM
Posted in: poor white trash

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15 Responses to “Garbage In, Garbage Out”

  1. shunted Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 7:46AM

    Online classes might be the poor white trash of university education but they are also the future. Increasingly governments are not willing to pay the cost of educating students the ideal way. This has caused colleges to raise tuition and to utilize cheap labor in the form of adjuncts. The next phase is to increase efficiency in an economic sense. This means more students per class and lower operating costs. Online classes are the way to go.

    At many college tuition constitutes the bulk of revenues. Since state funding is not the primary source of income colleges are rightfully viewing students as the client and not society. This changes the perspective of the college and not is a way that benefits society but this is the reality. Students want flexibility on when and where they learn. They do not want to sit through boring lectures. I know lectures don’t have to be boring but most of them are. In this way too, online classes are the way to go to meet the needs and desires of our clients (the students).

    I agree it isn’t ideal but my response to the trend is to embrace it and to try to improve online teaching. I need a job and I think it is the future.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 8:28AM

    You describe the situation correctly, shunted. But this is a rich country, despite the current shaky economy, and the cynical cut-rate approach to education you describe doesn’t need to be the reality here.

    I expect you’re wrong, by the way, about students and all that flexibility and stuff. Soon they’ll discover they’re not learning much of anything online that they couldn’t teach themselves; and, after all, it’s not clear that at most universities online classes are any cheaper. They’re certainly cheaper in pedagogical terms — in the sense of trashy — but they often cost just as much.

    I think a – what to call it? – market correction will happen eventually with the online scam. There are already instances of grand online educational projects (one in England, for instance) biting the dust. As students figure out what an insult it is, we’ll see more of that.

    By definition, I don’t think online teaching can be improved, since I don’t think it’s teaching. But I admire your sense of reality about the situation, and your desire to improve things.

  3. Cathy Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 8:56AM

    Margaret,

    Why don’t you think that online teaching is teaching?

  4. Bonzo Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 9:17AM

    Well shunted is certainly right about the general direction of things. At our place the Daily reports today that we now are 45% adjuncts (and having done my time in a non-tenure track position, I am not criticizing adjuncts) and this while our fearless leader proclaims:

    Bruininks said students feel the impact of the top-three initiative in the sense that it’s a "different approach for education."

    "In nearly all of our fields, I think students benefit from learning from faculty members who are on the cutting edge of their fields," he said. "It makes the education we provide distinctive and very special."

    And the next phase is, indeed, on line education. Our Academic Health Center is enthralled by it. Just think, if we can develop these courses then we can SELL them…

    But Margaret is fundamentally right. This is not teaching and there will be a backlash. Why it is not teaching I will leave for her to explain. She can do it better than I.

    Best, Bonzo

  5. shunted Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 9:41AM

    Margaret I agree that this is a rich country and we certainly have the resources to do education right but I don’t see government soon returning to its role of properly funding education. You are right that the cost to the student of taking an online course is the same as a face-to-face one but the cost to the college is different. That is why colleges will continue to push them. It is a reality that doesn’t need to exist but it does exist. How does it get changed? I don’t see it changing in my lifetime since we continuously elect intellectual bumpkins to office.

    Students who go to Princeton, George Washington, and similar colleges and universities will rebel against the fraud but most students are in it for a the piece of paper that leads to a higher paying job. I teach at a community college and most of my students just want to get their degree in the shortest possible time with the least amount of effort. Most of them work full-time jobs and/or have children and their perspective is different than what I suppose you get at George Washington.

    I think we are headed to place where colleges sell their courses on dvd or as a download. Faculty will become mere online tutors. There will be fewer faculty and costs to students will decrease correspondingly. Governors will be happy because they can cut taxes and their sophistication is such that they won’t see any problems with this. I think we are headed for JIT learning (just in time learning). Students will learn only what they ‘need’ to learn and nothing more.

  6. Cathy Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 11:38AM

    I wanted to repost in case my question wasn’t taken seriously — I’m honestly interested in knowing why the argument is being made that online teaching is not teaching. And I ask as someone who has adjuncted at the UD’s school (GW) and who has just taught an upper division online course for a reputable state university. I have also taught full time at a liberal arts college.

    I saw this blog post (and I really enjoy this blog, by the way, particularly SOS) a while back but there were no comments on the online teaching post last I saw, so I was suprised to see the topic revisted again today.

    Is online teaching different than face-to-face classes? It obviously is. However, I felt that there were certainly benefits to teaching online that face to face classes do not provide. The largest, of course, is the amount of writing practice and feedback that the professor can offer students, and the fact that the class can be conducted on a convenient schedule for individual students. I ran my discussions on a weekly basis, such as I have done and will continue to do in traditional classrooms. I felt that the time commitment on my end was comparable to teaching face to face classes, and my interaction with students outside the classroom was also comparable even though it was conducted over email instead of face to face.

    I only skimmed the first part of the attached article because of time constraints, but I felt that it did not reflect my own experiences with my (albeit one) online class. I only had one problem with inappropriate language, and that was quickly resolved. I found the students to be hard working and interested in developing their writing skills, critical thinking capabilities, and knowledge of the field that we were studying.

    The students who, in my opinion, would have most likely earned a D or C in the course stopped logging in part way through the course so I had the added benefit of conducting discussions with students who had actually done the reading and had opinions about what they had read. I enjoyed it.

    I don’t think of myself as the poor white trash of teaching, and I hadn’t thought of the online platform in that way before, either. So I’m curious — why is it the platform as a whole and not individual teachers that are being summarily dismissed?

  7. Margaret Soltan Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 1:29PM

    Cathy: I’ve been out all morning and afternoon, and only now have a chance to read comments and respond. I’ll be responding to yours soon. Just wanted you to know. UD

  8. superdestroyer Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 2:46PM

    Certain parts of the DoD use a system where the reading, powerpoint, and video lectures are done using the internet/DVD etc and then students attend a course for a couple of weeks where they demonstrate what they have learned. Such as taking a businesses management class on-line and then taking a one or two week intensive business management seminar to demonstrate that you have learned something. On-Line universities have not followed this line but directional state universities could easily do chemistry, biology, engineering, and business classes this way.

  9. Margaret Soltan Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 3:19PM

    Hello again Cathy: Thank you for the detailed description of your online teaching, and your thoughtful comments and questions.

    I think the comments from ’shunted,’ a person who seems fully within the online world, begin to answer your questions. There are no real advantages to students in online learning (I’ll get to why in a moment), and tons of grossly obvious disadvantages, but the great thing about it from the point of view of universities is that it’s real cheap. Eventually, if students don’t figure out how exploited they’re being, online will triumph, and will significantly do away with the bother of hiring expensive professors at all. (shunted also makes this point.) As Bonzo says, adjunctification is bad enough; online is the next step down on a very low rung.

    Why is it a low rung? Why is online activity not teaching?

    Let me first distinguish between transferring information and teaching.

    If you want to pass your CPA exam, you go to a Kaplan center or whatever and sit there reading their screens, which have the facts and equations and whatever you need to stuff into your head to pass the exam. Real Estate Agent exam, same thing. You go somewhere, get the information, stick it in your brain, pass a test based on it.

    If you want a boring real-time lecture (shunted says most lectures are boring, and he may be right, but this doesn’t mean we should give up lecturing), you go to a big room with tons of students in it. In front of the room a semi-comatose person stares sadly at PowerPoint slides which list the different sorts of volcanic eruption. The sad person reads what it says on the slide. Then he says Get out your clicker. What was the second kind of volcanic eruption? Click in the correct answer…

    None of this is teaching. It’s data-transfer. With – whatever – a passive feedback mechanism.

    Teaching, at the college and university level, involves a professor who models and encourages, through active human discourse with her students, living thought. Whether the subject is volcanoes or Volpone, the professor who teaches has in her own research and reflection learned to assimilate information into higher-level thinking about information generally.

    In this scenario, information isn’t downloadable bits. It’s one element in a contested intellectual landscape, a player in a never-ending drama of scientific and literary and philosophical inquiry. If there’s no dialectical play in a university classroom between a professor’s mind and her students’ minds as, provoked by what she says and suggests about a subject of importance, they respond challengingly to her, and she to them, there’s no teaching going on.

    This lively dialectical play of minds can only take place in real time, between real people sharing a physical space. Online advocates forget not only about the crucial importance of a flesh and blood embodiment of the life of the mind in front of a classroom, a person spontaneously responding to texts and to her students’ questions and comments; they forget also about the equally crucial importance of a student’s fellow students, grappling in the same room at the same moment with the same intellectual challenges. All of this dynamism and dialectic is flattened into email when everything goes online.

    Again, I think ’shunted’ says it well: Professors become “mere online tutors,” directing traffic on the information highway. A university educated person can approach any subject — really, any subject — and bring to it disciplined habits of analysis, an attitude of lively skeptical inquiry, and a sense of the larger intellectual history out of which any subject has emerged. She can bring to almost any subject the ability to argue intelligently about it.

    And not merely the ability — educated people often convey a sense of the pleasure of intellectuality for its own sake, the delight one can take turning over by yourself or with others the complexity of this or that subject. Professors, in their own pleasurable intellectual play in front of the room, convey this ethos of delight in thought for its own sake, the play of the engaged and informed mind.

    There’s just a huge gulf between this fundamental university classroom drama which intends to inaugurate students into a lifetime of intellectual reflection, and the silent screenworld of online.

    You say few actual university classrooms look like this? Sure. This is an ideal, realized in a few places. But just because we often fall short of exemplary intellectual exchange on campus, I don’t see why we’re supposed to declare defeat and consign our already internet-addicted students to yet more hours on the computer.

    The best thing to do would be to be honest about things. If your university is mainly about online data-transfer for career-minded people who, as ’shunted’ says, “want a higher-paying job,” then it is not a university but a vocational school. Such students do indeed, as ’shunted’ says, “want flexibility on when and where they learn.” The vocational school revolves around them and what they want in terms of career-enhancing information and convenient hours.

    But the university pre-exists careerism. Its students aren’t looking for the 7/11 of education. They will go to class not when it’s convenient, and not when it’s customized just for them, but when, and under the circumstances, that a university, as an ancient institution with evolved traditions of gathering and talking for the sake of higher knowledge, thinks best.

    Is this elitist? No – what’s elitist is the assumption that most people don’t deserve the chance – don’t have the ability – to clear their minds and evolve toward serious thought about life.

  10. Bonzo Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 4:38PM

    Hmm..

    I am not really sure that method would work, superdestroyer, for, say, organic chemistry.

    Some years ago I had a student who wanted to do all of his chemistry courses, from scratch, in a year. He was a graduating senior. This was at Carleton, and those people are bright.

    Long story short – he was totally excused from lecture, because of class conflicts. He had a reading assignment and we met once a week. First he asked me anything he wanted and then I did the same for him. He took the exams with my regular students and was in the top tier of the class.

    This method worked very well for him, and yes I know that this is one form of the old English system.

    Point: Lectures are NOT absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I think that he did much better than he would have in taking a canned video course – but that is just my opinion. We were able to identify fundamental misunderstandings and get them straightened out in a way I doubt a passive system could.

    I realize that your idea above is not entirely passive. But you really need to go through a course like organic slowly, methodically, and with some degree of interaction to clear up misunderstandings.

    Best,

    Bonzo

  11. shunted Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 9:47PM

    Well stated Margaret. I think a copy of what you wrote ought to be sent to every Secretary of Education in the country. I hope your view prevails over the online hordes. Love the blog, by the way.

  12. Peter W Says:
    May 7th, 2008 at 1:16AM

    With regard to the data-transfer point:

    A while ago UD linked to a story about a professor at Syracuse University, Laurence Thomas, who adopted (and acted on) the policy that if he saw a student texting in his class he would stop the lecture and leave.

    Inside Higher Ed published an article on the story. In the course of attacking Thomas, many of the commentators on that article gave voice to the pernicious conjunction of the consumer model and the data-transfer model of education. Here is one of those commentators approvingly quoting another:

    "We the students are the customers, the consumers, the ones who make the choice every day to pay attention or not. I pay approximately $30,000 to go here, whether I text in class or not."

    This person has it exactly correct. The professor is mearly a provider of information, and as long as the person is not disrupting the class, then they are free to ignore the professor if they so choose, including text messaging.

    "The professor is mearly [sic] a provider of information." As someone at the beginning of a career teaching in higher education, I found the sentiment chilling. Are there really college students and college graduates who think that the job of a professor is to be a live version of a book on tape? Apparently so.

  13. superdestroyer Says:
    May 7th, 2008 at 7:35AM

    Bonzo,

    In graduate school I TA’ed a class in radiochemistry and it was non-traditional. The students viewed the lectures on video, were given textbook and article reading assignments, and had homework. It took a traditional semester but then during the summer, they attended a two week on campus lab session with nine six-hour labs, daily lab write ups, and an exam on the last day. All of the students worked for EPA/DOE contractors and could never have taken the class in the traditional format. They had the advantage that most of them could talk to co-workers who had taken similar classes.

    Chemistry, Physics, advanced biology, and engineering could work for people working in the field but you do have a point if the student is sitting in his parents’ basement.

  14. What is Teaching? « Prone to Laughter Says:
    May 7th, 2008 at 9:12AM

    [...] Somewhat oddly, University Diaries only ever posts real philosophical claims in her comments. But here’s a good one. Some excerpts. In front of the room a semi-comatose person stares sadly at PowerPoint slides which [...]

  15. Margaret Soltan Says:
    May 7th, 2008 at 9:25AM

    In the link to his or her blog above, Prone to Laughter notes my odd tendency to hide philosophical claims in my comments. I probably do have this tendency, and will now attempt to fight it by lifting some of my longer comment in this thread about teaching and putting it in a blogpost.

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