On-Line Education Good or Bad?
When I was in college we had to attend on campus and I remember those days very well. Not only did I learn a lot from classes, but being on campus is an experience that really influence my life. I did not live on campus but many of my friends did. These are experiences that were well worth the time and trouble to have. I remember one of my professors making the statement that on our first day on the job, we would find that we really did not know our main subject area like we thought we did. As it turned out that professor was sort of a prophet. Not only did I not know as much as I thought I did, but it took no time at all to be asked questions I had no idea how to answer. Was it possible that I had wasted my time and money on a degree? It was at this time I realized that I did not understand what undergraduate really was. The lesson I really needed to have learned was that, although college introduced me to a lot of information, the real lesson was learning to think for myself. Without a single specific class, I had learned to solve problems by thinking for myself.
About fifteen years later I started teaching at DeVry part time and shortly after that I started my graduate degree. The degree that seemed to match the skills, I saw I needed to developed, was a college that was starting to lead in the area of on-line education. I was not sure what on-line education would be like, from an educational view, but I knew I wanted an on-campus experience because of the previous on campus experiences I had before. So, I did the on-site classes rather than the on-line classes. At this same time compress class programs were starting to become the standard for post-secondary private education. I was seeing this even at DeVry. It was clear that students wanted shorter class times, I agreed with that from a student perspective. It was not until I started a compress class program that I saw the issues from a hiring manager’s view.
From the start I was the exception for my class. I read every chapter and book for a class and it was clear that this was not the standard for my fellow students. I was also finding out the issues with my students was no different; in general students did not read much, if at all. The real influence to learning came from the classroom discussions. At this point, as a student and a professor, I was finding that the more involvement there was in the classroom, the more overall learning success was achieved. This observation was being seen with the different candidates being looked at to be hired. Not only was I seeing a different competency level from on-line students and on-site students, many of my friends were asking about this difference.
During the start of on-line education, at DeVry, on-line became synonymous with discussions. This fact was supported when I was given a book called Discussion as a way of Teaching by Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. I really did not like some parts of the book, but there were other parts that would help change my concept of classroom management. Later Wired Magazine published an article called A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses, October 2013 issue. These two readings challenged the way I approached my classes. What these two resources did was help me to see what an effective educator was. An effective educator was someone who facilitated learning by asking questions, not necessarily giving answers. It was at this point I gave up Power Points for questions on the board. I turned to asking “how” instead of telling “why”. Do not get me wrong, I still had to present answers, but answers were now part of asking questions. The goal became letting the students see there were many ways to solve a problem. Getting students to talk helped open them to other ideas.
In a classroom situation I found that I could have both open ended and closed ended questions and I could get students to engage in class. As the modality changed to what was called on-live, where I had both on-site and on-line students, I found that discussion questions had to be open ended only. In an on-line environment, I found closed ended questions would shut down discussions. Once an answer was given everyone else would repeat that same answer in different ways. There was no constructive learning to this outcome. Brookfield and Preskill stated in their book “discussions work best when a large number of students participate”. This fact was supported as I moved on-line discussions to open ended questions. Students were more engaged as I was able to keep the discussion moving. Sometimes I would even redirect the discussion to a slightly different topic to help illustrate a point I wanted the students to look at more closely.
I found that I had to get on-line students to see the on-line discussions as a classroom. Just like a traditional classroom allows for more in depth look at issues, on-line discussions can allow for this in-depth view by having all students talk about their views. I found the more the students started to joining in a conversation, and not meeting a posting requirement, they would take the conversation to more in-depth levels. This in turn would lead to a better educational outcome. Other resources support this outcome; for example, “the value of interaction between students in an e-classroom setup can’t be underestimated” (https://kpcrossacademy.org/making-good-use-of-online-discussion-boards/).
As I have talked to friends, and thinking about my own experiences, I have come to believe that there is a concern over the quality of on-line education compared to traditional on-site education in many hiring manager’s minds. Currently these concerns, about on-line education yielding lower qualified candidates, are often well seen from a candidate pool I have seen as well. I also think that these outcomes are a product of not remembering our “Why” we started teaching, as Simon Sinek would put it. Today I still view teaching as being given the honor to help change lives.
Over the last year, or so, all educational institutions have had to learn how to make the most out of remote learning, or on-line education. This is not a modality I have ever wanted to do, but we have all had to find a way to make it work. What my experiences have shown me during this time, is that I somehow must find a way to bring the classroom engagement to a remote learning situation. The way I have done that is by changing on-line discussions into an on-line classroom. This move has forced me to be more engaged with my class. I have to make sure I get involved with discussions every day and that I make sure the discussions follow more of an open ended question concept. This is hard because many of the discussion questions are not designed to be open ended, so I have to make the discussion more open ended questions by redirecting the discussions. This has not been easy for some students to get use to, but I have received good feed back about the level of learning from students and that tells me that this may be getting the outcome I am expecting to get.