Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments The Trouble with Online College

Found this opinion piece in the New York Times:



Some of the online courses my son has taken have been fantastic. They include classes where there was a lot of instructor time and enrollment was on the low side. So, CTY essay writing classes, EPGY English, and AoPS fit this bill. That said, he's doing a self-paced CTY Java course and is learning a lot in spite of relatively low instructor time.

Alternatively, he's doing a self-paced physics course at the University of Missouri High School this semester. He'd probably be lost without me. Example: an early exercise gave him data for a ball rolling in a straight line with constant acceleration. He was supposed to plot the data. Turned out that the constantly accelerating ball stopped for a couple seconds, reversed course, and then continued on its way as though nothing had ever been amiss.

I wrote to the guy who developed the course, and he replied "I wrote the course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it. The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted mathematically." Uh-huh. I did this experiment in school, and I don't remember the ball stopping, reversing course, and then magically regaining its lost acceleration.

My son would have been completely confused if I hadn't been able to explain things to him. I wonder how many students out there don't have access to someone who can a) recognize errors like this and b) explain them.

Ditto.

Yes. SMALL classes, frequent synchronous/live/interactive expert instruction. THEN it works. It works better for humanities than for math/science, however. Aside from computer science, which is obviously well-adapted to the medium.


The online model is flatly not very well-suited to math or science instruction. Period.

It's okay for math-- among autodidacts, that is, and understanding that this can be a developmental problem even for highly gifted youth. It's nearly insurmountable in anyone with executive function deficits.

In that population, the organizational and time-management skills needed and assumed are simply not available to be tapped without real-life supports. I really question whether or not online/virtual instruction in a conventional educational program can work for those students. In K-12, and with the support of parents who are supervising day to day, yes. But for post-secondary? No way would I encourage my ADHD college student to try this. No way.



The MOOC model is a disaster for anything below post-baccalaureate level teaching of math or science topics, honestly.

I can't really speak to how well it might work with humanities topics, but my guess is that the model itself could support a pretty great history or psychology course-- assuming semi-expert (e.g. grad assistant) facilitation/moderation. But what little I've seen suggests that these courses tend to mostly operate without the necessary level of support there.

Developers are focusing so heavily on the delivery model and the "how" of it all that they are forgetting to examine whether the model itself is inherently flawed when it comes to human learning.

I suspect that it is.

Oh, this is just.... sad and misguided in the extreme. Maybe if one conflates "education" with "training" this is true....




My question is-- what's HIGHER (order thinking, I mean) about using scarf-and-barf methods for assessing learning, hmm?

Honestly, I've done distance learning through online courses, through correspondence courses, and I've also done traditional, small-class lecture courses. And I've been thoroughly unimpressed with offerings in all delivery channels.

I totally fail in B&M school, and despite the fact that I find my current online U hist/anth courses more rigorous, I do drastically better on them.

It's just a better model for me.

re: HowlerKarma
There is very little multiple choice in my online courses, but when comparing my 200level intro to anth course with a 4th yr top-tier Canadian university anth student's 400level courses, our multiple choice questions covered wider ground, required more complex thinking to answer, AND were more specific (despite my course being general, and hers being a set of specialist courses).

She'd have failed my exam. She didn't even recognize many of the subjects covered, though she had great algorithms for answering very specific types of questions within those areas, just not a lot of deep understanding, or connected understanding from one area to another. So... somewhere in there, I think I said something like... there ARE differences even between multiple choice question sets.

I'm always shocked by the superficial way in which most B&M courses expect readings to be done. It makes those courses _harder_ for me, because I find it hard to read that way... I tend to try and actually understand, which means I find errors in the texts, come up with novel lenses, and generally, fail to report what the teacher though were the easy answers, having assumed I was supposed to go deeper. This happens despite the fact it's a known problem.

My online courses usually expect you to have basically memorized the texts, and to be able to actually draw conclusions during the exam, even for multiple choice sections. (for example, IDing traits on skulls never covered in the texts based on an understanding of terminology presented combined with the exercises in IDing other traits)

Now, essay questions are often given in advance (you get, say 100 questions, 9 of which will be on the exam, pick 3 to answer), which I also find useful, because you can really write a much better essay that way, and it encourages you to really delve into the stuff that applies to multiple questions. It becomes a rewarding game to see the underlying patterns.

PS: for people for whom this is NOT a good modle, it seems like they don't use the same study strategies I do, and so they don't reap the same benefits. Often, they find the marking a bit bewildering, especially in the history courses, where you really are expected to present real higher-order thinking on the exam, since YOU KNEW THE BLOODY QUESTIONS. A LOT of people flunk out of hist at my school for that reason (and because they just don't grok that they need to reference EVERYTHING).

I don't think it's about study strategies, per se, Michaela.

I think it's about being more or less autodidactic.

True autodidacts do tend to struggle in conventional/Socratic models because their ONLY means of understanding material is top-down and entirely internal and idiosyncratic.

They really can't use someone else's "system" for understanding a series of concepts or a body of work. They have to see all of it, then pore over the material themselves, then figure out how to mentally organize it into a coherent (to them) whole.

I've seen students like that, and yes, online education is perfect for them.

Those people are rather unusual, however-- particularly among 18-22 yo's. We all develop some ability to teach ourselves information, and most college students get better at it as they get older, which suggests to me that it may be a matter of a modality of learning which tends to emerge along with mature executive skills in those who are not truly autodidacts by nature.


It seems really foolish, though, to think that a model which is structured so specifically for the autodidact (which is, IMO, at most about 10% of the population even among adults)... would be a good idea for the general population of children or adolescents.

This is why I suspect that the entire model may simply be flawed for 90% of students. MOST of them are like my DD and Val's DS.

It's not that they can't learn, or that they aren't ready to learn the material. It's that they need a human being interacting with them in order to get the most out of it.

People criticize large lecture settings in universities, but I have to say, most of those people haven't ever DONE that. They really don't appreciate that even a lecture section with 200 students in it is a unique, and collaborative environment. Ask yourself this-- is seeing Kenneth Branaugh's many fine films of Shakespearean roles the same thing as watching him live on the stage? Of course not-- but people who haven't ever attended truly great theater don't know the difference.

Canned instructional modules are the film. Live lecture is theater-- the pros respond to the audience every second of it.

You've just described me, though I also think that quality of teaching is very important. In general, I learn best when I teach myself, but I think part of that is due to teachers who aren't super-talented at what they do. When I was lucky enough to be in a class taught by an incredible teacher, most of the kids in the class got enthusiastic about the subject. So, for example, most of the kids in Mrs. S's Spanish class talked to each other in Spanish outside class. It was a completely natural thing to do. So it wasn't that she was just on my particular wavelength; she was just really good. That said, I was also inspired to learn additional related material on my own, so perhaps she also contributed to my ability to teach myself.

I agree about the importance of well-developed executive function in autodidacticism. Motivation is also important. IMO, the thing about teaching yourself is that it's all really fun and exciting at first, but you have to be able to keep working when things get routine. I taught myself as a kid, but my abilities were relatively limited and I didn't start to really refine these skills until my twenties.

I also pretty much think that smarter people benefit the most from online classes, primarily because smarter people are better able to teach academic subjects to themselves.

If college is a filtering device to identify the intelligent and self-motivated, online courses that are only passed by such people are a good thing, and the fact that residential colleges provide more support and enable less motivated or intelligent people to pass is a bad thing. If college is about learning, the best mode is the one that enables the most people to pass.

There is much more discussion in the media and online forums on how to get into Harvard et al. than on whether students learn more at Harvard, suggesting that the filtering role of college is primary. If so, we should move much college instruction online, fire many professors, fire almost all administrators, and save a lot of money.

One thing about online classes is there might be someone with some knowledge of education helping to develop courses.

Think about this... take an autodidact who spent the last seven years of their life focused on a single subject to the relative exclusion of other people. They've drilled in to the depths of knowledge in their field. Now with not one minute of coaching, no course on education theory, etc. are dropped in front of hall of 300 people and are expected to teach them about an element of their subject six years behind where they are.

I still remember Tommy Chong walking into my freshman calc class and talking 44 minutes straight to the chalboard as he wrote upon it. Never once pausing or looking towards the 300... oh wait 200... oh no... 120... oops 41 er 17 students remaining in his lecture at the end of the semester. (ok not literally Tommy Chong, but with every salient feature matching him.)

No insults intended to the professors in the crowd.

Shiny new knowledge is so tempting... that first 80% ability in a subject comes so fast and the rest is increasingly less efficient to build out to never reaching 100%.

Hmm. Only if their role is to help present it, not if their role is to determine content. We've seen what happens when "educators" take over the content side and sneer at mathematicians, engineers, and other subject experts who object to spiral math/whole language reading/math with no right answers, etc. You can't teach something if you don't know how to do it really well. You also have understand the theory behind what you're teaching and what comes much later.


But for many people, Harvard and other IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS are not about learning or intelligence or self-motivation. They are about status and making connections so that you get a high-paying/high-status job. And a lot of this stuff is driven by Mom and Dad, who feed it to their kids.

I went to a prestigious school and am not saying this out of a sense of sour grapes. I'm quite annoyed about the situation and the crassness that underlies it.