I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The New York Times has a terrific piece today with the title of this post, written by a professor at the University of Virginia.
Sure, there are times when it is useful to take a course online.
But there is a downside.
The best learning is what happens when minds rub together, exchanging ideas; when a teacher can gauge what her students understand and can respond to their reactions. The best learning happens when there is a community of learners, thinking together.
I know, I know, this is really old-fashioned. And I’ll plead guilty to having old-fashioned values.
But there is something having the eye-to-eye contact, the face-to-face contact that is really better for purposes of teaching and learning than sitting alone in front of a computer.
I am not saying this to put down technology. I understand how wonderful it is to see visualizations, dramatizations, to see famous people giving famous speeches instead of reading them, to see events rather than reading about them. All of that can be incorporated into lessons.
My gripe is with the very concept that you can learn just as much sitting alone as you can in a group with a live teacher. It may work with adults (although the author of this article doesn’t think so). But it strikes me as developmentally inappropriate for children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Language can’t be developed in a vacuum and is geared toward comprehensible information in both listening and reading. How can a teacher ascertain what is comprehensible and what is not without communication? Kids don’t learn language from TV or just being immersed without connection to meaning and understanding. If you think about it, learning is always like that. I learn about subjects by reading, discussion, and more interaction. It isn’t a process that ends at 21. In teaching my students about WWII I had to learn even more information than I knew before and my understanding becomes deeper every time I revisit the topic and learn more. My students or other people bring up questions or provide information I never knew about.
A major learning experience for me was working with students from Kosova one year. Kosovo is the term from the Serbian language and I was teaching Albanian students so it is Kosova. They told me about the Illyrian civilization that they are descended from and the how it was one of if not the first major European Empires. Even when under subjugation under other empires, my students taught me about how the Illyrians contributed to those empires. Of Rome, where there were several emperors of Illyrian descent who held the empire together for years when they threatened to fall apart. The Byzantine Empire had Illyrian emperors also, and Illyrians greatly contributed to the Ottoman Empire too. Over the years, I learned more about Ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire because I enjoy history and I teach it to my students. My Kosova students contributed to my understanding. When I find the information they provided to me in outside sources, I feel grateful to them for teaching me something I never understood or knew about. If I had not met them, even if I had run into the name Illyria or its history I would not retain it nor would I recognize it. They gave that gift to me. I didn’t set out to learn their history nor did they set out to teach me. It happened over time and through interactions we had in the classroom. I needed to understand them in the classroom in order to teach them but more than that I had to learn about them so I could understand where they were coming from as people.
The father of one student had been considered one of the greatest living writers in Albanian and had met President Clinton. He had suffered under communism and was imprisoned for many years. After he was barred from working or being near the students his wife had taught as a teacher. The Serbs in the 90s closed schools and made them unusable by dumping poison on them from the air or destroying them. The Albanians were barred from teaching how to read their language and Serbs burned books In Albanian, even burning people’s houses down to burn their libraries. People made books from presses in their basements and gathered together to pay out of work teachers to form schools in their homes. The passion of these refugees who had come to the US moved me and though I don’t see them or know where they have gone their memory stays with me. We learned together in that classroom and they did well as students. How could this have ever been replicated online?
I could relate to your comments easily, lellingw. I was approached many years ago to teach state history classes in the middle school where I had been teaching. Honestly, I about fell out of my chair. I was not educated in the state. Had never taken a state
history course. I did accept the challenge, however. At the beginning of each year I always said to my students and parents that everybody was going to be involved in the learning process. Doing that, provided for all of us, especially me, so much information from students and their families through the sharing of their experiences and backgrounds. I looked forward to learning something every year. Don’t think that would have been the case if the course had been on line. Verbal conversation and interaction is good.
“Sitting alone at a computer” can be an incredibly engaging experience. Who’s not to say the learner isn’t completely enthralled with the content? Eager to interact and engage in ways not possible in a F2F setting. Not all learners benefit from the traditional learning experiences in which many “educators” did enjoy. We’ve got to broaden our mindsets in regards to online education. If designed well (collaborative, dialogue-rich), then it is hardly an isolated experience. The problem is that many online K-12 schools belong to business ventures rather than those who understand education and learning. Instead of realizing that online is NOT created equal, we hone in on the bad and neglect to celebrate the potential of online.
I sit alone in front of a computer most of the day, so I can’t put it down
But you can’t convince me that a 1st grader or 4th grader should do the same.
It is child abuse for-profit.
If a parent were to put a child in a completely online school at such a young age, there would be additional opportunities for the child to interact with other children – perhaps in co-ops, playdates, field trips. I think about my friends who home-school (with or without online courses), and their children are very engaged in social experiences because the parents ensure those opportunities take place.
Often times, parents can take advantage of community events, library outings, and other opportunities for social interaction with peers. I would have a hard time believing that all kids sit online for hours upon hours at a young age.
Parents need options for their kids, and online can be one choice. To say it’s child abuse is the far extreme from what I’ve seen from those parents who have chosen it as an option. The children who work online can spend the day at the museum vs. sitting passively in a classroom setting, waiting for the teacher to call on them, etc.
I don’t agree with the ways in which online “schools” are using the system, but I think ultimately the flexibility and new ways of experiencing learning can prove beneficial to the children who have the right supports in place.
Some small number of children benefit by enrolling in online home-schooling. Most don’t.
lellingw, you pointed out so well how teaching is about relationships and the interaction between people. As a special education teacher, I found that face to face contact was critical. I can’t imagine plopping my students in front of a computer as a substitute for a real classroom.
My daughter took a course online for convenience and cost saving reasons. She is very disciplined, and she passed the class with flying colors, but actual interaction with the professor and other students was extremely difficult. Questions might take days to get answered after posting. She was frustrated by the lack of real time contact.
A good friend who has been struggling to complete an online degree in education has faced many of the same issues. She has learned more than most because she has taken a leadership role in group projects where someone always shirks their responsibility. We worked together and talked about what she was studying on a regular basis, so at least she has had some immediate conversation with a professional. Fortunately, the program she is in has required quite a bit of field work, and she will be doing her student teaching this fall. I hope there will be a job for her.
Hi,
I’m a retired math teacher. After 35 years I had to retire for health reasons. I didn’t go willingly and so I’m happy to say I’m a failure at retirement. I still work with teachers through our county office of ed as a consultant and I occasionally get my “kid fix” in various classrooms.
As for online courses, a month ago I would have agreed with this post. Since then I’ve had an opportunity to participate in a pilot course for teachers on the Common Core standards in math. I did not feel like I was in a vacuum by myself, because we had rich online discussions with the moderator and the other participants. As part of the course work, we were expected to post our assignments by Monday and then expected to comment on other participants’ work the rest of the week until Friday, when the new module was presented. It was designed so well that I felt I was in a class yet I was also in my pjs comfortably at home. There was also the advantage of being able to look things up on the internet and trying out links suggested by the others. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. This coming year all middle school teachers at my old school district will have a chance to take the course and I hope to be a moderator.
So I guess it depends on the design of the course and the moderator’s willingness to interact with the participants.
My post did not refer to online “courses,” but to online schools, in which case the student is at home with his or her computer for all courses, with little or no face-to-face contact with other human beings, excluding perhaps a parent. I suggest that this is not healthy for children. There are developmental issues here that do not apply to adults.
To answer the “kids sitting home all day on the computer is bad” argument, I can see states allowing the construction of charter schools with nothing but computer labs for classrooms. Since the “highly qualified” teachers are online in the cloud, the schools can just hire paraprofessional-type workers (for minimum wage) to supervise students and provide them with socialization experiences through recess, the cafeteria lunch, an occasional field trip, etc.
Oh man. I better not give them any ideas….
I think they have thought of that. The highly qualified teachers may be in India or in a barn in Kansas. No one will ever know.
What’s wrong with “being in a barn in Kansas”? And that’s coming from Missouri, or is that Missourah, boy and there is usually no love loss between the two states.
Got myself a barn too-said with a good country accent-with a mobile home inside-the prior owner used the mobile home as a woodworking shop and didn’t have to heat as much space as is in the barn.
Please leave the digs at us rural folk out of the conversation. But then again, I’d have to quit referring to educational deformers. Go ahead poke us rural folk, we’re strong enough to take it!
No dig intended. You could turn your barn into a workplace for 30 teachers monitoring 1500 computers. A barn in Kansas is a lot cheaper to rent than office space downtown anywhere.
Dang, am I now going to have to cut you in on the fees since you thought of the idea???
We’ll know that the english teachers have been outsourced to India when certain idioms slide into teen speech. “Please do the needful” is my favorite.
Most of the tools used today for online learning are pretty primitive, and there really is nothing like the face to face informal contact between students to facilitate learning and understanding.
But there are some great opportunities out there. Your classroom can collaborate with NASA scientists in picking targets for telescopes and other remote instrumentation! You can video-Skype a classroom speaking spanish or french or mandarin on the other side of the world. You can have ‘pen pals’ and read and write… much as we do here. A vibrant (and well designed) bulletin board system that allows people to interact (note: WordPress isn’t it!) can create all kinds of learning and stimulate questions and ideas.
But! to use these tools, you already need to be pretty adept as a reader and writer. That suggests upper grades. And, it’s very easy to lose target and focus, continuing a fun conversation when the calculus assignment is due in a few hours.
(Mmmm. Well, maybe in that it’s exactly like real life school. 🙂 )
Diane, When you said this, “it strikes me as developmentally appropriate for children”, didn’t you mean to say “inappropriate” instead, since kids need more human contact and less screen time?
yes, thank you for catching my typo. I wrote that at 1 am this morning, and didn’t proof read. Always an error to do that.
Despite cutting $284 million from higher education, Florida allowed a branch of an existing university to become its own school (USF-Lakeland is now Florida Polytechnic University) and has now hired an outside consultant to look into expanding online learning options with the goal of creating a completely online 13th state university.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/consultant-hired-study-online-learning-state-university-system
Well said.
Notice that none of the arguments we’re making here refute the reason actually advanced by hedgefunders connected to the UV Board for forcing the University to accept online courses: they argue that Harvard and MIT are doing “it”.
Even though President Teresa Sullivan was reinstated, she was forced to accede to their demand to divert her university’s public money to online vendors. Professor Edmundson needs our help to protect the integrity of Virginia’s university from pillage and academic degradation by politically connected entrepreneurs like Coursera.
Two years ago, the California Community College rescinded a politically-driven agreement to allow predatory Kaplan University to vend onliine courses to its students. We need to support our excellent academic arguments with democratic muscle to do that in every state. Unbelievably, our entire public higher education system is also under threat of a politically leveraged hostile take-over by the venture finance sector.
At a school like MIT and Harvard in particular, the real benefit is to be on campus rubbing shoulders with other smart people. You learn as much, perhaps more, from the other students and from casual interactions at parties as you do from going to class.
Without knowing more, I am opposed to for-profit programs (such as Kaplan) that approximate, in tuition costs, what a student would pay for classes at a brick-and-mortar program. And it is very troubling to see this as any area where private equity firms are moving into. No, this is not an area where those who have wealth should profit off the backs of the have-nots. Also, I am not aware of any studies that show that Internet-educated students in any specific area approximate the competence of a person educated in a class room setting. Obviously, if a person has the money, smarts, stable family, love, nurturance, etc. that would land them into a top college — we certainly need those programs to continue. But is there a reason why access to those teachers, the course notes, the books – can’t also be made available to others at a nominal cost? Imagine.
The for profit online universities are notorious for ripping off low income students.
I think there is also the issue of how we implement technology in our schools. There is no real rhyme or reason based on the lack of support and learning teachers receive. On-line schools are only one of the issues involved in reforming our schools and making them somehow better through technology. This is a deep and multilayered problem.
From lellingw: “Language can’t be developed in a vacuum. . . ”
Exactly, human interaction is much more than words, pictures and sounds on/from the computer. True human interaction takes place on a face to face basis with all the accompanying raised eyebrow(s), body posture, hand/arm movements, emotions, tone of voice, rapidity/slowness of speech etc. . . . Those who seek to replace the real live human interaction that is classroom teaching and learning are mistaken to believe that computer learning is anywhere near comparable. Can “screen” learning have a place, yes, but it should be a very minor one more geared toward rote leaning (and I’m not condemning rote learning/memorization with that statement).
And although learning, to me is, by definition, a very singular personal experience it doesn’t occur in a vacuum so that decent social interactions must take place in the teaching and learning process.
When people say that online is the same as in person, I like to ask them if they read to their kids and take them to story hour at the library, or do they find it equivalent to set them down in front of a TV playing “Reading Rainbow” for an hour or two?
Class differences are exacerbated by access to education. For starters, on the most simplistic level, not everyone can go to Harvard or MIT because only a certain number are accepted — how large is an entering class? But thousands of students cannot go because there is no money in their family, or they played around in high school and didn’t take their classes seriously. Or, growing up, their home life was a battlefield with an alcoholic father and a mother living in fear of violence. Maybe there was only one, very stretched parent who could not supervise homework, or maybe the child or adolescent was bullied in school and this affected their performance. Or the child/adult has a chronic illness that limits their mobility. Economically, there are students who cannot even afford the cost of junior college. But offering free or low cost access to college classes over the internet, with varying levels of access to instructors or teaching assistants could change the landscape of education and our society in general. It could allow people to “try on” various career avenues to see if they might like computer science, for example, without spending a small fortune on tuition. Students whose education stops at high school might be able to go on to college. It might also allow the U.S. to catch up to other countries where we are clearly lagging. There are so many plusses here, and I have merely scratched the surface in this paragraph. I vote an emphatic “yea.” (I am a person with two advanced degrees — an MD from the U Illinois, and a JD from U Chicago. I trained as a psychiatrist at Yale University. I come from a family and community where the “road didn’t go there,” and I only was able to succeed by strength of will. Yes, my college and professional education was better because of interpersonal interaction, but if all I could access was an Internet program, I would have grabbed the rung to escape the conditions of poverty and ignorance that would otherwise have been mine.)
Maybe this is not about old-fashioned values/ideas, but a necessary discussion about learning at the center of higher education vs technology as a panacea… we may realize (again too late) that this was a false promise and a terribly naive approach to education.
Louisiana has an online voucher plan called Choice Course that will begin this next school year. Read the numerous questions asked by blogger Michael Deshotels in his blog Louisiana Educator http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/2012/09/follow-up-on-choice-course-program.html?spref=fb and the answers he received from an LDOE official. Many of us in the state have the same questions.
What has happened in Connecticut is that Special Education, faced with huge increases in costs, is dumping ill and sick kids into cheap and ineffective online courses in order to save money. Instead of providing support or tutors ( their claim is that they don’t work) , they are cheating the parents and the kids of a equal education. They are covering themselves under the Individuals with Disabilities Act by giving the kids ,’an education’. What happens often is that the kids aren’t followed, they are told to do it on their own, and are being abandoned by the school. Basically they are being sent to ‘Siberia’ educationally by people who have as their motive , saving money for their salaries and perk packages. It’s happened right here in Fairfield Connecticut with the approval and sanctioning of the head of Special Education and with the blessing of the most expensive Superintendent of Schools in Connecticut, whose mission is to preserve the bloated salaries that he and his administrators are screwing the taxpayers in this town out of.