By many accounts, online education is the wave of the future. For example, in June the Department of Education issued a laudatory study concluding that online education is more effective than face-to-face learning.
The enthusiasm may be justified, but my experience (and my friends’ experience) taking online courses at UNC-Chapel Hill makes me wonder. In my view, the content is too easy, the online discussions are pretty much worthless, and the professors are rarely around.
I have taken two online courses, in criminology and Latin American geography, along with one “hybrid” course. (The hybrid was a math course that combined once-a-week class sessions with online reading and assignments.)
In all three courses the demands were well below the standards of other courses at Carolina. In the criminology course, assigned reading might reach 50 to 75 pages a week; many classroom courses require that for each day of class. Taking that course, I rarely even read the assigned pages.
My weekly routine was the following: I would begin working an hour or so before the assignment was due. I would read the questions, consult the textbook’s index, quickly scan the bits I needed to read, and write down the applicable information. I would e-mail the answers to the professor a few minutes before the deadline and receive an A.
In a traditional class, professors demand much more of their students and help them absorb the material by asking questions, giving pop quizzes, and putting students into groups. In my experience with online classes, no similar tools existed, and students slacked off.
A distinctive feature of many online courses is the discussion forum. This is a virtual exchange in which a professor poses a question and the students respond by offering comments over the course of a week or so. But what started out in my Latin American geography course as a medium of thoughtful conversation quickly turned into a soapbox for students. Mostly, they attacked U.S. “exploitation” of the region, the “perils of globalization,” and the like. These conversations were hardly the constructive venues they were designed to be, especially since the professor didn’t intervene.
It was apparently easy for online professors to shirk their responsibilities. A friend of mine, a public policy major, had a problem contacting the professor. The professor did call him once to approve the thesis of his term paper, but no other phone calls were returned, no e-mails replied to, and no grades posted by the professor for the entire semester. He did not hear from the professor for months.
I had a similar experience with my hybrid course. I was a freshman, still dependent on the regimentation of high school and lacking the self-discipline essential for online courses. But compounding this problem was the fact that the face-to-face portion was almost nonexistent. We were supposed to meet in a class with the professor on Fridays. But Fridays are often holidays, and the professor canceled class a lot. I don’t think we met more than 10 times — slightly more than half of the scheduled classes.
I did have favorable experiences with online learning — but not the way that most people would expect. My Economics 101 and Astronomy 101 were large, introductory classes — traditional courses that met several times per week. Yet the professors incorporated online quizzes, activities, and, periodically, even live discussions. That is, unlike my online courses, these classes actually had live chats with the professor.
Online education has the potential to enhance education. But my experience at UNC-Chapel Hill suggests that it has a long way to go before it finds its proper place in a quality education.
David J. Koon is a research associate at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh (popecenter.org).