Well, to quote Ronald Reagan, here we go again! Schools in various places across the fruited plain are moving toward more rigorous anti-COVID measures; sometimes it’s just masks, but a few schools have closed, at least temporarily. That means returning schools back to online status may be just around the corner.
We might avoid that, either because of sheer luck, or because more people get vaccinated and slow down the spread. (Yes, I know many claim a personal right not to be vaccinated, but colleges and schools have required certain vaccines for decades.) If not, prepare for children sitting in front of their computer terminals again.
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The schools will not be enthusiastic. Many declared the last academic year to be “lost” because many students did not perform up to standard. Many students have to live with mediocre circumstances, be it environmental – crowded or noisy – or technical – bad WiFi or lousy equipment.
In addition, much depends on the motivation of the student, as there is a big jump from school with your teachers looking over your work and behavior, and school where you’re on your own, more or less. Parents can hardly replace the role of the teacher. The problems persist even if the classes are “synchronous,” i.e., teachers simultaneously “see” all the students via their computer cameras.
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It’s still not the same thing as a real class. For one thing, there is no classroom atmosphere or discipline. And what about the teachers? Too often they wind up in a hybrid world, having to do both in person and online teaching, which massively increases their workload, without compensation. We are more enthused about praising teachers than paying them.
But there is a more basic question. Is online education good or bad? I accidentally acquired a little experience. COVID-19 closures led me to a year and half of on line and hybrid teaching at the college level. That led me to a few thoughts, mostly regarding college education, but I think some of it could apply at the school level.
Online education does have its pluses. It might drive a number of fly-by-night institutions out of business; the ones that offer courses with local instructors, without too much concern about qualifications, and charging thousands of dollars per course because their programs are easier and simpler to get through. Online institutions can do the same, and probably for less. Online is indeed very convenient. Sometimes you can get a whole degree online. It can also cost less, because you can stay at home and obtain a degree from universities many miles away – or entirely online. And for basic information gathering, the online environment is splendid.
But then there are the minuses. First, there is the learning that simply does not take place in the online environment. At the graduate and upper levels in college, the discussions held in class can never be completely duplicated. Through ZOOM and other methods, you can have a group discussion, but at best you have a pale reflection of an in-person group discussion in which all the non-verbal communications are included. A bigger problem, however, is loss of informal learning. In graduate school, I learned as much from conversations with professors and fellow graduate students as I did in the formal classes. I would have lost all that in an online program.
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But, you say, what about lower levels in college, like core classes, which, of course, have a bit more in common with high school? From personal experience, the problem is worse. Frankly, college freshmen need frequent personal attention because they are making a transition that some of them do not understand. I had several students fail this past spring who would have passed if I could have given them gentle nudges (that’s professorial for come-to-Jesus moments). I have some colleagues who do splendid online courses for the freshmen, but I still encourage parents to send their youngsters to live classes. One of my pet peeves was that the University System of Georgia has never seemed to make up its mind on this issue. On the one hand, the System pushes something called “e-Core,” through which the whole core curriculum can be taken online; but during the COVID-19 crisis, the System actually audited colleges to make sure that faculty were NOT switching their courses from live to online, and legislators wailed about the inadequacy of online learning for students.
The biggest problem with online education is that it requires so much more motivation from the student. Students who have arrived at a direction in their lives can do well; this is why graduate programs function well online. But were you a fully motivated student when you were in high school? Did you know exactly what you wanted to do as a college freshman? I certainly wasn’t, and didn’t. Personal attention can do so much to help students, and that is not going to happen via an electronic screen. Unless, of course, you get real personal attention even via the computer.
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Which brings me my conclusion. Can online education work? Yes – but only if we stop treating it as a convenient and cheap alternative to live education. In my experience, an online class could work really well if the instructor had about 10 students so that s/he would have time to talk regularly with each individual student several times a week. Even when schools are closed, students should be able to go to labs and other places where they could do their online work, to avoid negative home atmospheres. We need statewide leadership (not followership) to stop the constant back and forth about school plans. And finally, we need to understand that there are things that cannot be taught entirely online.
(Drivers’ Ed online? Really?)
Hubert van Tuyll is an occasional contributor of news analysis for The Augusta Press. Reach him at hvantuyl@augusta.edu.
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