This reader shared her experience with online courses:
“Several years ago I was required to get an admin certification and one of the courses I had to take was an on-line course. It was dreadful. We were all supposed to be graduate students but the on-line discussions were silly and superficial. I think the instructor could have deepened the discussion but he didn’t. It was one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever had to endure.
“In my district we began an on-line component for our high school students and all students had to take at least one course on-line before graduation. Again, it was horrible. Ours is a poor district so many of our students don’t reliably have electricity much less internet access at home. Schools were put in the position of having to set aside time during the school day to provide access for students. I wasn’t able to examine the on-line instruction but I know that there were constant problems with access. Even students who did have internet access at home had problems logging on and gaining access to the content.
“Any on-line course requires a certainly level of hardware and software so no older computers can be used. In addition to requirements for accessing the on-line software the computer that the student is using to access will need certain supporting programs for the on-line access to work properly. For students who are not computer savy and don’t have parents who are computer savy, the whole operation can turn into a nightmare. I interviewed a teacher who taught one of the on-line courses and she was very impressed with some of the videos involved. However, when I asked her about the long term retention of the material, there was a very awkward silence and she sheepishly admitted that she doubted that kids retained much.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is very good point. I really try to avoid being grumpy about this, but in the real world the problem with technology is that it usually doesn’t work. Very often the students or the district just don’t have access to very good technology, which is needed for the latest programs. If your English or math textbook is 12 years old you can still learn from it; if your computers are 5 years old they’re basically useless to access many current classes.
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I would suggest that a better title of this post should be the problem with one online course and potential infrastructure problems for some students accessing the materials.
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I previously posted information from a major accrediting service about the sham of online courses. Students were allowed to answer the question until they got it right. They looked up the answer or googled it. Some skipped the instruction and went right to the questions because it was so easy to pass the test.
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Some courses are poor some are good online or not.
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That sounds similar to the online training our district had to do for PowerSchool. We had to do seven modules and take a quiz at the end to get a certificate (seven certificates, which had to be finished by end of the year). Our district registered each of us for all seven Pearson modules and everything!
Of course you skip to the quiz. Right??? Not skipping to the quiz is for the silly people who don’t value their time.
Or something like that.
That said, I never missed a single class session in college.
So, yeah. I see the value of person to person, or people to people. Or at least I see the difference in VALUE ADDED when people are involved.
I have done well with online classes, but prefer people.
Yes, TE–I know that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a choice.
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I tend to agree with you TE. I am part way through an online masters, and I am finding it really valuable. We have small-medium class sizes (my largest has 70 students with 2 professors, my smallest has 8), and there are strict guidelines on discussion and assignments, and if the class is also offered on campus, we do identical assignments to on campus students.
I have found my online classes more valuable than a number of my on-campus classes, and have learned significantly more than in my on-campus undergraduate. I also find I need to put more hours in to keep up with the readings and discussion. I find I have more professional discussion this way, as it goes on throughout the week, not simply during class times. I am doing it at the same school I did my undergraduate degree at on-campus, and have a number of the same professors.
In my classes it is difficult to cheat. Most of our assessment is via written assignments, and on the few occasions I have done a test, it is up to me to find an approved test invigilator, who must be some form of notary public and my exam itself is done as a pen and paper exam, under the watch of my invigilator.
I will say though that I am not doing it through an American school (I’m an expat and it’s much cheaper to do it through my home university). Our universities are all state universities, and all run on a not for profit basis.
I understand that there are huge problems with a number of online schools, especially at the K-12 level and with for-profit degree-mill type universities. I also think using them as an excuse to save money and reduce the number of professors is awful (part of the value in my classes is that our professors frequently join in our small group discussion online), but I don’t necessarily think the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater – that there is a lot of potential value in online education done well. It’s not for everyone, and shouldn’t replace traditional learning, but it does have some potential. I also think it needs to be an opt-in thing, and is an inappropriate option for K-12 students who are already at risk.
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Online courses should NOT be allowed in K-12 except in rare circumstances (health issues, rural areas) and closely monitored by school districts. It is an inferior system to live teaching.
Note the privatizers wouldn’t deign to put their kids in these sham schools. Only the “riffraff” of the masses deserve it.
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But it’s not just ONE online course, TE. I’ve found it to be a problem with several. And online courses assume VERY organized, self-motivating students, VERY organized, engaged parents, and students who can understand the material and figure out major gaps in the material on their own. It was a good thing, for example, that I teach geography when my son was taking his online geography class, so that when there were gaps and other problems, I could help him.
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It is also not just one traditional course that is bad.
Online courses are not for every student, but they can work when the material is well suited for the format and the students are comfortable with the format as well.
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Once again, TE, you need to realize that this is a small subset of students who can handle and actually learn something from these courses. And yet states are REQUIRING students to take an online course to graduate. Most kids get next to nothing from these so-called “classes.”
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Right, a small set of students who are part of the “all” our discussion is about.
What did you think of First Grade Teacher’s post?
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First, while online education works for some kids, what do you think of MANDATING it state-wide, which is being discussed in lots of states, including mine?
Second, I’m glad firs-grade teacher had a great experience. I will concede that there are a FEW quality online classes. I doubt YOU will concede, TE, that most online classes are far inferior to face to face learning. Not disrespecting your personal online class, of course.
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I believe that we will figure things out. I choose to teach the my class online because it is well suited to that kind of format and, as it is over the summer, allows students the opportunity to take a class when they might not be able to take a traditional class.
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Louisiana Purchase,
Here is the reason that online courses are mandated. The big corporations selling hardware and software are lobbying state legislatures to adopt these laws for THEIR profit.
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You don’t subject kids to inappropriate curriculum or deny them the right to interact with adults and with other kids.
Is there anything about traditional public education you even like? Or are you just here to rattle people’s chains?
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I think we are pretty much in agreement here except I would not say that rural is rare. Half of the high schools in my state have fewer than 250 students.
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This is a reply to susannunes: right you are. I just noticed that K12
has been engaging in extensive television advertising (as seen on late night Lifetime channel, several times a night, apparently targeting a specific {!} audience). These advertisements featured a former CPS principal (should’ve written her name down & Googled)
singing the praises of K12! Have any of you readers seen K12 commercials in your neck of the woods? I am sure the advertising here in Illinois comes on the heels of the K12 failure to sell their program to 18 school districts here (we have a charter commission in Illinois that was–no mistake about it–set to override their denials). In the wake of that, the General Assembly recently passed a one-year moratorium on on-line charters in Illinois. However, we know they’ll be back. In fact, they already are.
*Interesting point: when confronted with the question (by two school board members) as to why K12 was taking $8k/student,since they have “no building expenses, no transportation expenses, no lunch or breakfast expenses,etc.,” the K12 rep told them he’d have to look at the line-item budget (which he didn’t bring, of course), and he was told to submit it (which he never did). The two members further commented that THEY knew where some of the money went–$2.5 million to advertising last year.
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K12 is also advertising on the Cartoon Network. I heard the commercial going and I was surprised they were advertising on the cartoon network – now instead of the kiddos bugging mom and dad for the latest toy, they will beg for on-line learning (ABC Mouse ads also annoy me).
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Plus there is evidence of tremendous student cheating as part of online courses.
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I think the access to technology and quality time to study is important but misses the point that, even with these in place, online courses are generally not very good. They can be good at learner-content interaction, but this is only a fraction of the interaction required for properly embedded learning to take place. Learner-teacher interaction and learner-learner interaction is also important and very difficult, and timeconsuming, to organise online, whereas a good teacher will ensure interaction of all these, often in quick succession and in well-structured ways, will take place in physical classrooms as a matter of course. As such online courses are generally very inefficient from the POV of students’ time, fail to embed the learning in sufficient depth, and do not allow students to adapt what they have learnt to different situations.
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The best course I ever took was an online course with Stan Silverman at New York Institute of Technology. The value in any course, online or otherwise, comes from the instructor, and Dr. Silverman was amazing! I have an undergraduate degree and three Masters, one in Early Childhood, one in Instructional Technology and the final in Educational Administration. Teachers are the important piece of any instructional setting.
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Broad generalizations aren’t good TE, but, we can’t pretend that Online courses are “ready for prime time” for all students.
I took 2 online courses approved by my district’s professional development program – it was easy to fix wrong answers to right, and I was only ever really graded by a human being at the mid-term and final exams for both of them.
The videos had to be watched, but then you’d just let them play in the background till they went all the way through which “proved” you watched them. I had to make posts to forums – most of the discussion in those forums were vacuous “what he/she said” posts agreeing with what someone else said.
The blog entries had no rubricized criteria to determine what an acceptable entry was.
It was a joke.
My experience with students does not prove to be much better. If we allowed students to take our tests home and do them at their leisure with whatever resources are available, they’d pass stunningly too.
Some courses try to restrict browser action – in which case a student will work on a laptop next to their computer or whip out their phone to get around that.
Online courses have holes in them you can drive a truck through – and that’s a broad generalization that CAN be made. Every online course has a very good way to game the system because they rely on very “foolable” (if that’s a word) machines with very little human contact to make sure there’s real retention by, say, actually TALKING to the student.
The more you script the interaction, the less the student internalizes the dance you make them go through, so even setting very rigid blogging/forum posting guidelines I doubt would have improved things. It’s a way to try to force a social interaction without it being meaningful because socialization is such a perceived (and truly is) an important part of “live” education.
Before you say “some courses are poor, some are not” – you’d do well to cite some examples of these successful courses that handle most if not all of the paperwork teachers would typically be responsible for (and then for the reduced paperwork, those teachers can be stuck with 60 or more students) and then have demonstrably proved their case that they provided results consistently that very few teachers ever could for that volume of students.
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The question is always what are the alternatives. In my own families case, not being allowed to take an online required course in government (run by K-12 under contract to another public school district in my state) would have meant he could not take several other traditional classes. As a package it was clear that taking the online class was better for his education.
I would look at The Art of Problem Solving for an example of things that might work well and be better than alternative live classes for some students.
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Another great class was the Basics of Irrational Behavior taught be Duke University Professor, Dan Ariely thru Coursera. The discussion format gave students a place to discuss what they did and did not like which was invaluable to learning and critical thinking of the lesson. The class was fantastic and fun. Our public libraries give access to computers that help those that didn’t have a computer at home, but I understand that the plight of some people does not make it easy to obtain access or understand it. Integrating technology into the training is part of keeping up with the times and how students learn and have been learning since they were young.
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All the more reason that children need MORE human interaction, not less. Kids are plugged in for too many hours a day as it is. They NEED to talk and interact with adults and peers. Online education rarely does that. And even with online discussions, the ideas and questions are usually pretty low level.
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PS: This is a sensitive topic for me (if you haven’t guessed). Recently my mother, a music teacher at a local Title 1 elementary school, has had her hours cut because teachers can now choose between having their students take music or MORE computer time (they already have a mandatory 1 or 1 1/2 hours of computer per day). My mom teaches music once a week for an hour per class, and several teachers have decided to put their students into MORE computers rather than giving their students any music. What is the world coming to?
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Learning to make music is an activity that requires human interaction. I cannot think of a worse replacement for music study than an activity of non-human interaction. There’s certainly a level of ignorance among those running your mother’s school.
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Louisiana Purchase,
If my child’s music class was replaced with more computer time, I would definitely have words with his school and teacher. Are the parents at your mother’s school aware of these changes?
I wish my child had more music and art not less!
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“Computer time” in elementary school just makes me gag. What a waste.
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Unfortunately, the school in which my mom works is a school with a lot of poverty and ELL and parents working several jobs just to scrape by. My mom figures that no one will even notice. I sort of hope that at the big school Literacy Night, which usually has a musical performance, that the parents see that their kids aren’t participating and begin to ask questions.
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Right, L.P., although I’d place the emphasis on the words TALK and INTERACT WITH, too.
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And all the good courses seem to be those for adults offered by universities for people who desire to learn. That is very different than requiring all students to take these courses where there is no teaching. And that’s what we have in Florida. No teaching, rampant cheating, and a scam on public Ed dollars. I choose to send my children to the neighborhood school and I am forced to put them in these worthless classes. That’s not a choice. But dumbing down high school.. Good move.
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While I’d rather be in the classroom, the online option gives me access to content I couldn’t receive in Maine. I’m concerned you’re passing judgment based on the experience of three individuals.
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Back at the beginning of the last century, H. G. Wells envisioned a future in which all of the world’s knowledge would be available to anyone, instantaneously, “via wires.” In the 1930s, Vannevar Bush imagined a “memex” device that would store on microfilm, all the world’s knowledge, for ready access–a sort of portable Library of Alexandria. In his wonderful 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Richard Feynman envisioned the equivalent of Bush’s memex on a device the size of a sugar cube.
Now we are seeing the beginnings of the realization of these dreams. Ready access to the knowledge of the world. Wow. What might we be able to do with THAT!!!!
The Net can be an AMAZING tool in the hands of a student . . .
WHO IS AT THE SAME TIME PARTICIPATING IN A LEARNING COMMUNITY, and we have only begun to envision what we might do with this astonishing tool for learning.
But take away the LEARNING COMMUNITY that the student is participating in, and you DESTROY THE VERY HEART OF EDUCATION. What’s happening now looks a lot like this to me:
The children of the wealthy will always have the option to participate in a post-secondary learning community. And we’ll make provision for some few of the best and brightest from the prole class to do so as well. One has to maintain SOME pretense that there’s the possibility of upward social mobility (something like winning the lottery).
For the rest of the proles, however, we’ll have education on the cheap–online training in workforce skills. Mark my word: they will adapt to this and show the necessary grit, tenacity, and perseverance to do their worksheets on a screen. They will have to do that or starve. We’ll have the Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons that we Alphas need. And standardizing this work and making it predictable and monotonous will have an added bonus. It will train the proles to get used to doing as they are told. Very important, that. We don’t want to have to get nasty with them. (Though if we have to. . . .)
Sure, we’ll end up with the Morlocks and the Eloi, but hey, we’re already well on our way down that road. Just have a gander at what’s been happening to the Gini index for the United States if you doubt that. And who gives a damn about those romantic democratic ideals anymore, really? We’ve got more important things to worry about than trying to give the proles a chance at liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We’ll feed them soma, bread, and circuses enough. But four-year, face-to-face, Alpha/Eloi-class educations for bulk of them? That’s a crazy idea. Far too expensive. We have no-bid military contracts to pay for to maintain the empire–trillions of dollars worth. And besides, if the proles continue to take part in learning communities, they just might–one shudders to think of it–try thinking for themselves. Then, where would we Alphas/Eloi be?
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Robert: I have to teach the Gini Index in AP Human Geography this year, and I don’t know what it is. Even my AP instructor doesn’t know. Please, what is it?
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The Gini coefficient is a measure of income distribution. The Wikipedia entry gives a good explination for it. If you want to know more about measuring poverty, I have my students read sections of The Handbook on Poverty and Inequality by the folks at tha World Bank. It is overkill for your purposes, but it is free. Inequality measures are in chapter 6. It can be found here: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:22405907~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html
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The link does not work. You can just search for the title and add world Bank. It will pop right up.
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Thanks, TE!! It was new concept added to APHG this year and we were at a loss.
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The issues here highlight a problem that exists whether online or not: good instructional design. None of the courses described here have that. Sitting face to face is no guarantee that the educator has the ability to design good instruction.
This leads to the bigger issue: Just because you know something doesn’t mean you can or should teach it.
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This year I finished my Master’s in Ed Leadership at Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, NJ. Coursework for the entire degree was delivered and completed on line.
I had significant interaction with teachers and peers; I found the work to be challenging, but I was motivated (mostly) to get it done.
It was not a MOOC, but online does not necessarily equal evil. Given my professional and family commitments, this was the only way I could complete my degree, and I’m grateful it was available.
Mike Kaufman
Sent from my iPad, which likes to change my words and spelling.
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Might anyone have information about online courses for middle school students. Our district is planning to outsource algebra I to a company called edgenuity
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I do. Utah has had an online high school, called Electronic High School, for years now. I always saw it being high regarded, but my view has changed since my son took the 9th grade Geography class. It was useless. He honestly remembers nothing of what he did. Sometimes the instructions were vague, and there was just a lot of “read the link and answer the question” basic stuff that I found VERY low level (I teach geography).
On top of that, the technology at the server site was glitchy. The whole school went down for three weeks in May; no one could get on or do anything. Then, in late May when everything came back up, they announced a deadline of mid-June to finish everything, which made it a major rush job. The final test had to be proctored at the local school, but consisted all of multiple choice with vague questions. It was not cool.
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Online learning learning, in and of itself is not bad. With 20 years experience in this field I assert, if a web based course is developed and delivered appropriately, learning can effectively occur. Unfortunately many higher ed and k12 educational institutions are subbing out the course development process to vendors with the goal of creating as many courses and programs as possible in a short amount of time. Well there goes quality. As well, these institutions are not investing enough time in their faculty to teach them what it really means to teach online. Quite often teachers are assigned a webbased course to teach and they assume the course will take care of itself with the exception of a few discussion posts and grading a few papers. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Courseware appications attempt to run themselves automatically, e.g., at-risk high school students tend to get this method of “non instruction”. But quality web based courses require a dedicated faculty member with appropriate content, technical, and pedagogical knowledge. The faculty must be engaged in the course and in daily communication with the students. A primary reason students don’t complete or succeed in web based courses is lack of direction and understanding of “what to do first and what to do next”. If a course is designed with consistency and predictability and the faculty member is in frequent communication with students, quality online learning can occur. I have witnessed it. Finally I most adamantly state, online learning is NOT a replacement for educators!
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It is for K-12. It is the complete opposite of what kids should be doing in education.
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I respectfully disagree. If online learning offers a self motivated student to acquire, e.g., a 5th math that will count for college credit, then it is beneficial. Is it beneficial for all students? Certainly not. In fact it is often used in ways that is detrimental to learning. DRBONLINE
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Online courses are very hit-and-miss. I took some online classes through my college while I was also attending “real” classes because of time conflicts, and I can say that the main goal of most people in an online class is “get it done”. Not “learn about _____” or “interact in meaningful discussion” or anything else. The discussion boards were full of people quoting straight from the textbook or simply stating the opinion they already held instead of trying to think about something new.
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I respectfully disagree. If online learning offers a self motivated student to acquire, e.g., a 5th math that will count for college credit, then it is beneficial. Is it beneficial for all students? Certainly not. In fact it is often used in ways that is detrimental to learning. DRBONLINE
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I just finished a summer online course, it was mediocre at best. First, let me preface my comment by saying that I was really motivated (it was a PD on Danielson, which I have mixed feelings about how this it is being rolled out as a punitive evaluation process in NY).
The course was horrible on a technological aspect. I couldn’t get the videos to run on my Mac. The course periodically froze up on my older desktop. Finally, by the end, I resorted to going to my local library to finish it.
Now, here is what I did (as an adult). I ran the videos without looking at them (they were boring for me to watch). I then read the transcript and answered the insipid questions. I didn’t read all of the discussion thread because everyone just repeated what the first person said (you have to respond twice to each thread as a requirement of the course).
I’m an adult who was motivated to learn about the Danielson model. This model will affect my job. However, I was bored out of my gourd doing this course and found shortcuts through it.
For all of the adults posting here about taking online courses and having to go get things notarized, remember – you are an adult. Imagine middle and high schoolers doing the same. Not happening! My middle school son is a video game player. Part of the enticement is finding “cheats” for the games. Imagine the “fun” the kids will have!
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Was it run by knowledge delivery systems or a PD 360? That was one of the courses I mentioned earlier.
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This is due to poor instructional design. A quality web based course is not created by recreating the face to face classroom by recording lectures This is ridiculous at best. Students hardly pay attention to lectures in the face to face learning environment. Why would they watch them at home? They find the assignments and answer the questions or write the papers. If web based courses were designed to require student to student and student to teacher interaction and collaboration, designed in a structured and consistent manner, and required the completion of meaningful activities instead of watching a video of a lecture, quality learning can take place. (Hows that for a run on sentence.) Please note: The use of videos is not a bad thing. Recording a classroom lecture and expecting students to watch it is just, well… Nuts! DRBONLINE
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College online classes should NOT be confused with K-12. The latter needs to be absolutely restricted because of the importance of children being able to interact with others in a live classroom with a live teacher. Play is important, electives are important, the arts are important, all kinds of things requiring hands-on experience are important to child development. Online “classes” don’t cut it.
I wish people would quit trying to confuse the issue of college online courses with K-12.
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I definitely agree that K-12 and college online classes have different downfalls, but I think the hands-on experience aspect is what connects the two.
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I think a senior in high school and a freshman in college have far more in common than a senior in high school and a fourth grader.
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Online schools for high Schools: Big Money
Promoted as an alternative to the traditional “brick and mortar” school and for children who do not work well in the public school classroom, K12 Online School is profiting from the instability of our public schools. Children stay at home, communicate with teachers through the Internet, get assignments, and work online. On the K12 website, it advises parents that they must be prepared to help their kids for several hours a day. In order to be successful in this kind of learning environment, a student needs to be very self-motivated. This is a huge problem for inner-city students, who even in high school, need to be supervised and encouraged throughout most classes. While I can think of a handful of students who would benefit from online schools, I think it is dangerous to assume it is an end-all solution for huge numbers of children.
On their website, K12 states that their mission “has remained steadfast: To provide any child access to exceptional curriculum and tools that enable him or her to maximize his or her success in life, regardless of geographic, financial, or demographic circumstance. They go on to say that “K12 offers outstanding, highly effective curriculum that enables mastery of core concepts and skills for all kinds of minds.”78 I challenge them that an online school can work for all kinds of students. This would not work for the student who wants to be class president, because this type of student needs social interaction, discussion, and debate. This would not work for the child who is behind in math and science, and needs to have one-on-one tutoring. This would not work for students like Shanice, who told me last year, “When you explain it to me by myself, I get it.” It would not work for 80 percent of the students at my public high school in Philadelphia, who don’t have Internet at home. K12 is funded almost exclusively by public dollars. The company receives around $5,500-$6,000 from state government for each enrolled student, which means that neighborhood schools lose this money. When we look closer at K12, we find out that there is a huge dropout and turnover rate. Parents enroll their child; they might last a few months, and then withdraw. Pennsylvania’s Agora School (run by K12) reported that 2,6888 students dropped out in the 2009-2010 school year. Parents enroll their child, the school collects the money, and then several months later, the child drops out. K12 makes a big profit.
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As students drop out and re-enter the public schools, does k12 give back a pro-rated amount of the money it stole, I mean, took from the public? I’m guessing…no.
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Nope. We’ve had several students come from online schools back to a traditional junior high. They’ve all been quite behind and lost in the curriculum, so we have to do a lot of catch-up, and the online school keeps all of the money. The same is true for charter schools, at least in my state.
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K12 is sort of homeschooling in which the organization keeps the transcript. Not for everyone, of course, but maybe for some. I haven’t examined their materials, however.
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Some students do well with online learning, especially those that are mistreated in public schools. My children have used the K12 program and have had success. I believe an online class works best if there is a teacher connected with the class that has office hours for online students. This is what our high school is offering this fall.
Attending orientations for high school students enrolled in online schools, I have seen many kids that are enrolled because the social atmosphere of their local public school was intolerable. Online schools provide an option for students who would learn better by removing the negativity they experience in daily public school life.
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So how do these students learn to cope with every day adult life? Do they try to find an Internet job so they can hide at home and not ever have to learn to deal with people they do not want to be around for the rest of their lives? Is it so when they “rise” out of the neighborhoods, they can finally be with their own kind?
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They would adjust to adult life just like homeschooled children…there are all kinds of activities that exist outside of schools for the “socialization” aspect. They also could get what you so condescendingly call an “Internet job”, open their own business from their home, do independent contracting, etc. People who don’t go to brick-and-mortar schools are still capable of having normal and productive adult lives.
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“…there are all kinds of activities that exist outside of schools for the ‘socialization’ aspect.”
Of course there are. One can choose the people with which one wishes to interact after hours–how emotionally safe to “engineer” one’s social environment during a critical time in social development!
However, in public schools, children gain a more diverse social education where they have more opportunities to learn about the plights of others. They get a view of reality that cannot be “chosen” like a social activity outside of the community of the brick and mortar school.
Granted in school buildings, you can also isolate yourself somewhat since you can attend classes based on your academic abilities/tendencies and join clubs with like-minded fellow classmates, but you cannot avoid sharing halls, gymnasiums, and lunchrooms with students in your school. These experiences are valuable in social development. To run from them is to run from an opportunity to learn how to function in society.
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Dianne: I would like to review your new book, but the Knopf web site is so goofy there is no way to order a review copy. I wrote rave reviews of your last book The Great American School System in a number of venues and would like to do so again. I am the senior editor of the Americans for Religious Liberty journal, write a regular column in Free Inquiry magazine (my column in the forthcoming issue is a sharp critique of charters and vouchers and summary of the new CREDO study), and author of the monograph “The Great School Voucher Fraud” at arlinc.org) and review books there.
Thanks for all you are doing
Edd Doerr
President Americans for Religious Liberty
Box 6656, Silver Spring, MD 20916 OR 1401 Poplar Run Drive, Silver Spring, M
D 20016
301-460-1111
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I’ve had the opportunity to experience both good and bad higher education online courses. The good is the University of Florida’s Distance Learning Ph.D. program in Latin and Roman studies. The thing about this is that it tries to recreate the in person experience in a long distance program. I cannot praise this program highly enough. On the other hand, I also was enrolled at one time in a for profit online university (which I shall let remain nameless). This program was hugely expensive (far more so than my Ph.D. level classes) and was a complete waste of time and money. I got the credentials I needed to get my teaching license; however, I didn’t learn almost anything. The difference is in the quality of the professors and the setup that largely created an atmosphere of pointlessness. Moreover, I can attest to the, shall we say, less than selective enrollment of this for profit university. I had classmates who literally didn’t understand rules of citation/plagiarism and ones who could not write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence to save their lives. However, these students would never be turned away, as that would have cut into the profits of the university. Online learning can be done well, but it cannot be done on the cheap (as is being proposed). I would not be thriving now if my current program was like the one’s I’ve seen proposed or was modeled after MOOCs.
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It is all in how the newer technologies are applied. Here is a parallel from medicine : “Residents do not learn how to evaluate patients; The specialty examinations they now take to become certified as psychiatrists no longer require them to evaluate a live patient; they just respond to video tape vignettes.” quoted from Michael Alan Taylor Hippocrates Cried. In an affluent private university the graduates in special education in assessment read what some other person wrote as an evaluation and then they are expected to come up with classroom lesson plans etc. This was purposely done because the college did not buy the tests and said they could not afford to buy the tests so the students could practice (hopefully under supervision) in giving the tests that measure “g”…. or other strengths and weaknesses in achievement etc. (This latter quote is anecdotal from a professor emerita who does not want to be quoted).
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The main trouble with online education is technology because its totally depend on it. So if you choose online education then that education provider must have a good quality service provider so that you can access the data in a faster way.
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