Misunderstanding of Online Education

The author in this New York Times article describes the worst of online classes (one-size-fits-all, pre-filmed, “Internet course”, addressed to no one in particular) and compares it to the best of the lecture classes (gifted presenters, spellbinding sessions, engaged students. I suspect his experience is only with MOOCs which are interesting new products in education but which still are not fully developed.  I would dare say that nationwide there are few large lecture on campus classes where the majority of the students would use the adjectives he described. However, the majority of the courses run by reputable colleges in the online world do a fair job of creating a memorable and in many cases individualized learning experience for the majority of their students.

The Trouble With Online Education 

Our Administrative Motives Can Create the Online Haves and Have-nots

Anya Kamenetz of the Huffington Post in her article the “Online Education and the Laying on of Hands”  May 18, 2010 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anya-kamenetz/online-education-and-the_b_580769.html) covered UC San Diego professors, one of whom was an opponent of what we in Connecticut would call fully online education programs. While Ms. Kamenetz herself apparently is not such a Luddite, she thought some points were valid…and she has managed to convince me of the potential problem in at least on area.

Financial and budgetary motives are behind our decisions to build and grow online courses and programs. Over the years I have worked to convince many colleagues at my institution of the value of online courses to our commuter population of students. It is so obvious from the online instruction at institutions all over the world over the past two decades that students can and do learn well online when we design the courses with best practices in mind. It is so obvious that commuter students want and need more flexibility in our course scheduling to achieve their goals in a timely fashion. It makes so much sense for the institution to stop using only what in football would be called its “ground game.” We are gaining yardage this way but it is a grinding slow game; we could improve our overall student success numbers (certificate and graduation completions) with more properly designed and managed online courses. Nothing seems to spark any interest until begin to talk about the potential to generate greater revenue. If online courses can help us here, collectively we show great interest. This is the problem…for our students.

In the past, several for-profit colleges and other entities have tried creating online programs and failed due to the costs of building infrastructure, marketing problems, accrediting issues, staffing and recruiting talented faculty and staff, lack of any experienced online educators, and myriad other more minor problems. A college program must have a mechanism to overcome these problems if it truly desires success online. Ms. Kamenetz expressed concern that in resource-poor institutions the mechanism may include gimmicks, poor content infrastructure (open source?), unedited publisher content, courses that only include assignments, courses with no interaction ,and heavy use of video and audio in lieu of the hands-on instruction. (The best practices in online instruction encourage facilitation and student-student work but, based on constructivist thought, is still extraordinarily hands-on.)

One of the faculty Ms. Kamenetz interviewed expressed the following.

“The less fortunate citizens of our state will make do with underfunded campuses or settle for inferior and dehumanizing ‘virtual’ alternatives.”

The statement, while a too-generalized and flawed comparison between good on-campus courses and bad online courses, should cause those of us who work at commuter colleges to tread more carefully as we make decisions about growing online. We should want to grow online but for the right reasons. Our community college students academically fall into the demographic of the average college student. To the non-academic challenges we should not add programs that are solely profit-driven if we want to avoid creating haves and have-nots online.

Social Media & Preemptive IT Security

In an episode of 2006’s the Masters of Science Fiction television series, called “Watchbird,” flying devices similar to our Predator drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs) are programmed with an algorithm that allows them to detect the intent of the an assailant.  By doing so, the drones can act preemptively. As long as the Watchbirds were only being deployed away from our shores, everyone lauded their performance. When they were brought home to fight domestic crime, of course, things went awry.

Preemption is always a tricky business that harms innocents and dirties the hands of those who are placed in charge of its deployment, whether the dilemma is war or criminal justice. Now in our colleges we are somewhat unconsciously bringing the concept to education by imposing preemptive information technology security on many of our computer systems and restricting the use of those systems.

On the one hand, we have those who believe that security online must trump everything we do or attempt to do online. Regulations from federal (FERPA) and state laws are frequently interpreted in ways that seem to suggest that we need tight control of online security.  On the other, we have those who like me believe that social media, open source software, email, and other Internet tools are so valuable that the occasional difficulties we suffer are simply the cost of doing business in the Information Age.  Obviously, we need to comply with all laws but I remind my colleagues that these laws were not created recently and thus not with technologies in mind. Just as obviously, a system that prevents the use of social media, blocks the downloading of Internet materials, restricts the use of email to internal official business, locks out non educational web sites, allows only established database access, and allows only a small amount of designated  users is extremely secure. This kind of locked-down system, however, fails us by ignoring our mission, educating our students. If we are not using all the relevant tools at our disposal to educate our students then we are failing our society and undoing hundreds of years worth of progress in education. When we know that our society demands a better educated workforce, when we know that this means educating young and old as well as extending the education of many already in the workforce, how can we in good faith think so preemptively? If we continue down this path, of course, things will go awry.

Performance Pay for Distance Educators

Performance pay, educators more for more positive academic results, is not new. It is a concept that has been tried in isolated ways in the United States for several decades. These efforts usually are limited to grade school and usually are short-lived. According to Donald B. Gratz, author of “The Problem with Performance Pay,” most attempts to pay educators based on performance are founded on flawed logic including 1. That educators are unmotivated, 2. That the institution overall is failing, and 3. That measuring the academic achievement of the students is all that matters. Each of these assumptions, according to Gratz, can easily be refuted with evidence. Most educators care about their students. Our schools and colleges produced the society that has created the world of computing, the Internet and convergent cellular phone technology. The society demands that students are literate and understand math, yes, but also that they learn to appreciate the arts, interpersonal communications, and that they become productive citizens, things which are not measured on standardized tests.

At the community college level I also feel that my colleagues care about their students and do a good job of educating them. However, President Obama’s belief that community colleges are a key part of the economic well-being and growth of the nation will likely mean greater scrutiny of student success on-ground and online. I have noted that educators in distance-learning often believe that they should be paid more for developing and conducting distance-learning courses and programs than if they were doing a comparable thing on ground. However, this doesn’t seem to be in any way based on student performance. The belief is that teaching online requires more work and more time than teaching on ground. I am puzzled that efforts to garner more pay are not connected to performance. It is not clear to me that an individual should be paid more merely because it takes more effort or time to teach. If that was the case, should we pay more to a person on ground if they took more time to develop a course? Individuals should be paid more if the results are significantly better than the results in a traditional face-to-face class. In college we tend to look at two primary measures of success, grades and retention. Currently, in our online classes these two measures are statistically the same as face-to-face classes.  So as of now these cannot be the bases for performance pay. However, what if we begin to look at other measures of performance? Do students online retain knowledge longer or better? Does the predominant cooperative, collaborative, and discussion-based style of the online class increase interpersonal skills which makes for a stronger workforce? Admittedly, these types of things can be hard to quantify. Yet they are likely the exact kinds of measures that if totaled could justify performance pay in distance-learning.