Thoughts on a Good Education Online
I am deliberately trying to talk about a good education online instead of a good online education because I believe the latter creates a false dichotomy. Although we might be using a technological platform, a good education is a good education, and a bad education is a bad education. I think that it is possible to have a good education online, but some people automatically segment online education as categorically inferior. I don't think that needs to be true. However, I also know that what makes an education good online is not identical to what makes an education good in person. Therefore, I am going to try to share with you some elements that have made my online educational experience good.
In order for education to succeed online, professors need to be committed to a high level of involvement. The best professors online are the ones that actually engage with their students. If online discussion board postings are part of the class requirements, then the professor needs to be engaged on that discussion board. Utilizing a technological platform necessitates that most of a class's discussions are going to take place in this environment. You would never have a classroom where the professor never shows up. Similarly, if this is where the discussion takes place in the virtual classroom, then the professor needs to show up there as well.
If students are just posting to meet the class requirement, then who says they actually have to think? I'm just as guilty as anyone else. I posted things on discussion boards during my time as an undergraduate, and I am not convinced anyone ever read them. I might be wrong. However, I know that I had many classes where the professor never responded to what I shared. I know I posted some things that were not that great, but they met the requirement, and I never had to think about it. That is not a good education online.
While I am advocating for a higher level of faculty involvement, I fully understand that that level of engagement is not always possible due to institutional policy. Some universities make huge profits off of education online. They are able to put hundreds of students in a class with very minimal faculty expense. That does not lend itself to good education online either. In both of the online programs I have been a part of, class sizes were small. Perhaps it is not the most cost-effective way to do education online, but it is the right way. I felt like I knew my professors, and I felt like they knew me. I knew that if I posted something they would read what I posted, and if my logic was incredibly faulty, they would probably respond to me and try to get me back on the right track. If one of the primary purposes of education is to pursue truth, then professors need to use their experience to help students do that to the best of their abilities. A good education does that, and keeping class sizes small with professors committed to a high level of engagement can help make that happen online.
Education online eliminates geographical boundaries. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is obviously a blessing because it makes high-level programs available to people who might not be able to be on the traditional campus. I am grateful for that. However, as our recent experience with coronavirus has made so painfully clear, we are incarnational beings. We desire a human connection that cannot be fully satisfied on a screen. Therefore, when we are considering education online, we have to consider the relative blessings and curses. Is it better for me to be able to be a part of a high-level program virtually, even if I have to interact through a screen, or would it have been better for me to never have had the opportunity whatsoever? Clearly, I think the first is the better outcome, so the question then becomes how to maximize the benefits while reducing the costs.
Online classes should have some type of synchronous component if they are going to try to be as incarnational as possible. As I was pursuing my doctorate, we had a 90 minute online session every two weeks. Again, our college had strictly limited class sizes, so that made this possible. I don't think this could be done with hundreds of students. However, it felt so much better to be able to hear and see my classmates. You began to discover parts of their personalities that don't come across in text alone. In short, they began to feel a lot more like actual human beings than just names on a page. That is a good thing.
Also, I suggested above that the coronavirus has made us realize how much we desire to be around people physically. That is true. However, this desire, at least for me, is felt most strongly when I can't be with the people I am used to being with. When I cannot see my friends in person, I miss seeing my friends in person. Part of enrolling in a doctorate program delivered online comes with the realization that you are probably not going to meet those people in person. Consequently, you do not miss them in the same way. In fact, I don't really know that I ever missed my classmates at all. Instead, I was grateful for the relationship I was able to have with them that I would not have had in any other way. Without this program, I would not have met these people at all. Consequently I think when we think of education online, we have to recognize that we can be satisfied in a way that we would not be when something is taken away from us.
Having a synchronous element to class certainly presents challenges. It might make a program less appealing to students who are on the other side of the world. I had some classmates from around the world who would wake up at ridiculous hours just to be a part of our class. I'm not saying that it was easy for them, and I always admired their spirit and dedication to be a part of the program. That said, because it was an expectation of the program, people did what they had to do. They knew what was required going into it, and they made the decision to join. I mention this because I think this is one of the most common objections to synchronous education online. It removes the "anytime" convenience of education online. That's true, but I think that the benefits of getting as close to an in-person experience as possible while allowing people to access the program from around the world outweighs the costs of potentially excluding certain students who cannot participate due to this time requirement.
Thirdly, when we consider education online, assignments need to be almost exclusively written. Practically, any exam becomes open book if you try to administer it online, and I know that when I have the luxury of using my textbook, I am going to use it. Maybe that means I am a bad student, but I think most of you would agree with me if we are all being honest. Therefore, if we want to maximize student thought and challenge them to engage with the material, papers will do that much more effectively than exams online.
Naturally, that returns to the challenge of enrollment that plagues so many educational programs online. They see the cost savings and the potential profit to be made. Reading hundreds of papers is a difficult enterprise, if not impossible. This model can only work when class sizes are reasonable. That said, the question before us is how to do education well online, and if it is going to be done well, the aim needs to be towards student learning.
At this point, I have danced around the topic of cost enough that I probably should talk about that a little bit more directly. I recognize that the type of online program I am suggesting is going to be more expensive than many online programs. It requires a lower ratio of students to faculty members, and faculty members are not cheap. That being said, there is one very simple adjustment that universities can make to help them move in this direction much more effectively. Cut out a lot of the administration. Everyone talks about the rising cost of tuition in person and online. Lots of that money is going directly to administration and not to the activity of directly educating. Everyone in an online program ought to teach something. Administrative burdens can even be divided between several people, but everyone should teach something. Cutting out administration as much as possible removes a lot of fancy titles, but it also reduces cost and directs a majority of the money towards the classroom. This will not be a popular suggestion, but I think it is a first step to handling the question of cost. We need to figure out where those tuition dollars are going, and if the majority of those dollars are not directly going towards educators, then we have a problem.
Finally, in order to do education online well, you need to attract the right kind of student. I know that this is largely outside of any university's control. There is a degree to which, no matter how much energy the professor pours into class, the student is ultimately responsible for receiving a good education. You can be presented the best education, but if you do not receive it, then you do not possess a good education. Education online has a tendency to present itself as an professional steppingstone. Get your degree online, on your own schedule, and get that promotion. That is certainly part of education. I got my Ph.D. because I want to teach at the university level, so it would be very hypocritical of me to say that professional concerns have no place in higher education. However, that cannot be the only reason you are there. You have to want to learn. Especially when you are looking at advanced degrees, there has to be a level of passion somewhere. You have to want to receive this material, and there needs to be an intrinsic motivation that goes beyond your professional interests.
If you consider a classroom environment, the teacher is very important, but the students are also vitally important to the success of that classroom. Maybe you had a class in high school where you had a bunch of classmates who liked to cause trouble. That brought down the rest of the class, no matter how hard the teacher tried. Your education may have been damaged by the actions of other people. Education online is not immune to that. The model I have suggested for online education requires students who are enthusiastic and engaged. Perhaps it even requires more spirit than education in person because you cannot feed off of the energy in the room. They need to have enough excitement to convey that through a technological tool. Students have to play their part. If they don't, this exercise is not going to work.
Education online is only going to become more common as we move into the future. If we are going to continue to move into this field, we need to do our best with the tools that we have at our disposal. Do I think that education online can entirely replace in person education? No, I do not. However, I believe that is ultimately the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking how we can do online education well. Of course it will look a little bit different than bricks and mortar education, but that does not mean that it is categorically bad. In fact, it can be a wonderful experience.