College Classrooms or MOOCs?
I can almost
hear my father turning over in his grave.
“Replace
college classrooms with online courses?
That’s just ridiculous!” he would say.
Dad was a
tenured, full time, PhD professor of History at San Diego State University, one
of the “middle tier” universities that is in danger of being replaced by MOOCs
(Massive Open Online Courses), according to a recent article in Business Insider; “Three Trends Are
About to Create a Higher Education Earthquake”, June 29, 2014. Although my grasp of technology and social
media far exceeds any my father ever possessed - a brilliant man who never
remembered to charge his Nokia cell phone and never owned a computer – I agree
whole heartedly that replacing college classrooms with online courses is
ridiculous.
Like many
people, I have experience with real and virtual classrooms. I attended San Diego State University in the
1980s, when the computer science department was teaching Pascal as an innovative
programming language. I have taught 3rd,
4th and 5th grade for 27 years in public schools. I am now taking online courses through a
public university.
My online courses are
convenient, cost effective and enjoyable.
My online professors are intelligent, thoughtful, and capable, and my
online classmates equally so. Yet, the
limitation of technology, its very nature, puts up invisible walls between
teacher and students. Power point presentations,
videos, forums, WIKIs and emails only allow for formal, edited discourse. Each lesson is carefully crafted; forum posts
follow a list of proscribed netiquette rules; feedback is thoughtfully worded
to remain almost 100% positive; and debate is politely restrained. I’m learning a lot, but I miss the classroom.
A classroom is a living
thing, made up of human beings. As my father taught and as I
teach, I improvise, and I engage with my students. I use humor to keep their attention and
energy levels up. I pull examples from
my personal life to draw an analogy, and I draw pictures on the whiteboard to
graphically illustrate a point. Finally,
I offer ongoing help and guidance as they work, to an individual or a group, as much or as little as
needed.
My students are part of the process. They don’t post to a forum. They ask questions that change
the course of my lesson, sometimes taking the class off on tangents to topics of
much more value than what I had planned.
Students debate with each other over their interpretations of what we
are learning, and not in a carefully worded and edited post, but spontaneously
and emotionally. Students befriend each
other over group projects and then carry that friendship out the door to the
playground. There are no walls.
I don’t recall a single
lecture from my San Diego State classes, but I do remember my French professor
bought me coffee and asked me why my grade had slipped from A to C and on
hearing my answer, told me that I shouldn’t tank her class over a breakup with
my boyfriend. I do remember my
Physiological Psych professor evacuated us calmly and quickly when there was a
bomb scare in our building, and then continued our lesson on the lawn. I do remember the handwritten note praising
my essay on the artist Alexander Calder.
I do remember that my Social Psychology professor became genuinely
excited about the results of my experiment on social interaction. There were no walls.
But in my online class, the
invisible barriers go up. Improvisation
ceases to exist. Even if the class were conducted
by Skype, or Chat, technology allows for a pause and replay that real life does
not. A teacher’s humor is there, but not
the sound of laughter. A teacher’s
personal life is a brief sentence in the introduction to the course. And a teacher’s feedback is delivered
equitably and consistently, whether or not it is asked for.
Even more dramatically,
students in an online course don’t interrupt.
They don’t ask questions that change the scope of the lesson, nor debate
spontaneously and emotionally. The rules
of netiquette (made necessary by the invisible walls which silence tone of voice,
and blind us to facial expressions and body language) constrain debate. And friendships? We make offers to add each other to our
Linked in networks, but not offers to go outside the walls and play.
Those relationships,
discussions, experiences and mistakes simply can’t happen in an online
class. The invisible barriers of
technology prevent them. And so no, I do
not think that online courses, no matter how cost effective or efficient, can
or should ever replace, even on a small scale, the traditional classroom. Or the traditional teacher; like me, or my
Dad.
I can almost see my father
smiling.
Copyright 2014 by Laura
Rader, Wise Ambitions College Consulting
