[Vision2020] The Trouble With Online College

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 06:26:01 PST 2013


 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
February 18, 2013
The Trouble With Online College

Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair
of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around
the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial
intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role
online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College
administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like
freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues.

First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online
courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when
compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered
solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but
they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant
portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors
to succeed.

Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the
record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community
College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about
a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center
describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25
students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with
students. Over all, the center has produced nine studies covering hundreds
of thousands of classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture
the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing.

The research has shown over and over again that community college students
who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or
withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend
hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still,
low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional
classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.

A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in
Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who
took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees
or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well
known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college)
unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master
basics like math and English.

Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students need engagement
with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed. What they often get
online is estrangement from the instructor who rarely can get to know them
directly. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them
widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial
education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate
success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those
that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed
as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses
are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and
time-consuming.

The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access
to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses
can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130219/fd7dc1f2/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Vision2020 mailing list