… quotes Wendy Brown saying what I’ve long been trying to say about online university education. As I sometimes do, I’ll interrupt her thoughts with some parenthetical responses:
As is well known, no matter how “high touch” it is, on-line education inherently isolates and insulates students, deprives instruction of personality, mood and spontaneity, sustained contact, and leaves undeveloped students’ oral skills and literacy. [Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic – and one of the most frequent – is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so introverted, that they will never open their mouths in class… Yes, with online we can make sure that no mean professor ever gets a chance to bring that introvert out of herself and incorporate her into a verbal as well as intellectual world! Bravo, online! … Do you know how many students UD has had over her years of university teaching who said nothing in the first few weeks of her classes, and then, gradually, began to contribute, began to come up to her after class with ideas, etc? Do you know that these awakenings constitute perhaps UD‘s proudest teaching moments? But by all means nip this problem in the bud by leaving those students at home and putting them in front of screens! What a favor online is doing them!] Countless studies reveal that on-line courses necessarily dumb down and slow down curriculums. They reduce as well the critical, reflective and reflexive moments of learning, moments of developing thoughtfulness, navigating strangeness and newness, and of being transformed by what one learns. [This is the heart of my rejection of one of my readers’ claims that online allows professors to “share their insights” with students. No it doesn’t, and Brown here explains why.] On-line education necessarily emphasizes … “content retention,” rather than what liberal arts education has long promised: the cultivation of thoughtful, worldly, discerning, perspicacious, and articulate civic-minded human beings. Thus to substitute on-line for on-campus education, especially in those first two years of college when students are initiated into university level inquiry, is to spurn the enduring Socratic notion of learning as a “turning of the soul.” It is also to privilege those courses that conform best to large-scale cyber teaching, those with the most information-based content. It would thus further orient students and the future of the university toward education conceived simply as job training and credentialing.
In her longer remarks, Brown mentions many other appalling aspects of online: Its sky-high drop-out rates, with the attendant debt … And why are the drop-out rates so much higher than on physical campuses, where they’re already pretty damn high? Because its such a blah, isolating, atemporal, nothing experience… like reading Waiting for Godot, very slowly, every day, over and over again… And of course because intellectually its also nothing; there’s none of what Brown calls turning; you’re a passive recipient of data, a memorization-machine, no human beings anywhere in sight, no professor to get you excited about ideas because she’s so excited about them. Who can get it up for that mindmush on a regular basis? No wonder so many onliners cheat! Anything rather than drag yourself through this soulless routine.
As one of my readers, a math professor, writes in a recent comment:
Learning mathematics can be done easily online. Provided a student is motivated. That’s the rub with online education in mathematics. It’s hard to be motivated. There is something about coming to class – even a boring lecture class – that keeps more students on track. In online classes they tend to fall by the wayside.
(You know one thing UD thinks is funny? UD has always found the way-popular motivational speaker phenomenon in the United States embarrassing and absurd. You can’t run a convention without hiring some clown to whomp everybody up first? Yet in its tacky clownish way the motivation industry tells us some baseline truths about organizing people and focusing their energies.)
(Oh and here’s a business tip from old UD: Start a company that hires actors, motivational speakers, students, to precede online classes with motivational speeches! Like that lady who talks to Winston Smith through the telescreen:
‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’
Maybe a little nicer than that.)
Online is a boon in one way. Since it so dramatically represents the opposite of a liberal arts education, it helps us clarify the nature of authentic higher learning, helps understand exactly what we’re defending, and why we defend it so fiercely.
November 13th, 2010 at 11:01AM
And if you actually have a slave driving prof who gives a weekly short quiz and returns it to you personally at the next class…
Kinda hard to do that on line.
November 13th, 2010 at 1:16PM
A confession. In the sense that UD uses the word ‘teaching’ she is correct about online classes.
These days my work load is primarily online and hybrid courses. I am not a teacher. I am a gatekeeper and a tour organizer. I tell the students in which order they ought to study the topics. I tell them where to go to get the information. I even provide them with the information itself in the form of my own video lectures. I help them when they ask for it. Lastly, I ensure that those who don’t have sufficient knowledge of the rote operations of algebra don’t get through.
This is not teaching. It’s mere conveyance of how to do certain algorithms. The students don’t want me to teach. They don’t want to think, they just want to get through the class. There is a piece of paper they need and math classes are one of the hurdles.
I don’t begrudge the students for their lack of pursuit of knowledge. Many of my students have crappy jobs and their goal is a better life. The believe, rightly or wrongly, that whatever degree they are pursuing is the means to achieve this goal. Ideally, we should strive for a society in which one doesn’t feel they have to go to college in order to have a decent life.
It is true that often times the students say they want to know how math is used or to really understand the concepts. I’ve come to realize that this is a lie. When I tell them how to solve a real problem – like calculating how much a mortgage will really cost – they roll their eyes and go back to texting. They really aren’t willing to go through the process of understanding. There are counterexamples to this generality but they are rare.
I’ve given up on teaching and the pretense that I am a teacher. The last time it can be said that I genuinely taught a course was the Spring semester of 2000 at the University of Kansas. It was a vector calculus class.
From the perspective of the president of the college and my dean I’m a bad gatekeeper because too many don’t get through. At my college 40% of the mathematics students each semester will get a D, W, or an F. They want more to pass.
So strong is the desire that I pass more students that administrators no longer have the courtesy to add, “But without lowering standards.” One administrator told me that I should give extra credit to students if they come to office hours. I hated the idea but tried it out. I stopped doing it when it was clear the students came to office hours just to get the extra points. They didn’t think they should actually do a math problem to get the points. I stopped the practice after one student texted even during a one-on-one office hour session.
A few years ago a member of the Board of Regents wanted to make my pay dependent upon the percentage of students that I pass. To me the message is clear. Society does not want teaching in the way UD describes. Society wants automatons who have a sufficiently high level of programming. Society does not want liberal arts education.
Well, if I’m not really a teacher and am mostly a conveyor of facts then I might as well do it online. I need to preserve my sanity.
November 14th, 2010 at 6:07PM
[…] Reader over the weekend before I forget about it. This essay by Berkeley’s Wendy Brown (via UD) is an absolutely brilliant smackdown of online education: As is well known, no matter how “high […]