Dear Commons Community,
The NY Times is reporting today on the expansion of online learning in K-12 education. It indicates that several states are now requiring that students take a minimum number of online classes in order to graduate. Idaho for instance is about to adopt a high school requirement that students take at least four online classes. The major question with online learning at the K-12 level is whether it is being done to expand course offerings or simply to save money. Karen Aronowitz, president of the Miami teachers union says online learning ”[is] a cheap education, not because it benefits the students” . The research on online learning at the K-12 level is modest. In higher education, there is a good deal of research, most of which indicates that there is no significant difference in student outcomes in online v. face-to-face instruction. A recent meta-analysis conducted by the US. Department of Education concluded that classes with online learning (whether taught completely online or blended) on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction. The mean effect size for all 50 contrasts was +0.20, p < .001. However, the authors of this report also caution that this increase in learning might be due to an increase in class time in the online and blended modalities. The NY Times article also refers to a national study which Jeff Seaman and I conducted two years ago for the Sloan Consortium. A more recent study that Jeff and I completed on online learning in American high schools is available at: http://www3.babson.edu/ESHIP/research-publications/upload/Class_connections.pdf
Tony
Thanks so much for posting your insightful comments on my blog. As you correctly identify, the way online courses are being portrayed is not in the best light. Furthermore, we are getting away from the instructional/pedagogical arguments and concentrating on other issues. For many of the school districts, cost and funding are driving the move to online learning. Credit recovery is a school performance issue. For-profit online service providers are working closely with conservative-leaning school choice, merit-pay, and anti-teacher union groups to promote their products and services. This will open up rationales for many of our faculty colleagues to criticize if not outright denounce online learning as part of a larger “plot”. None of this is good for those of us who promote quality in all of our teaching – online or otherwise.
Joe,
Thanks so much for posting your insightful comments on my blog. As you correctly identify, the way online courses are being portrayed is not in the best light. Furthermore, we are getting away from the instructional/pedagogical arguments and concentrating on other issues. For many of the school districts, cost and funding are driving the move to online learning. Credit recovery is a school performance issue. For-profit online service providers are working closely with conservative-leaning school choice, merit-pay, and anti-teacher union groups to promote their products and services. This will open up rationales for many of our faculty colleagues to criticize if not outright denounce online learning as part of a larger “plot”. None of this is good for those of us who promote quality in all of our teaching – online or otherwise.
Always good to hear from you!
Tony
Thanks for posting this, Tony. I found that article to be an example of a very troubling pattern in reporting about online learning. It takes examples of the worst cases, and (at least implicitly) lumps all online classes into that same category. Yes, it’s absolutely true that a bad online course is a bad thing. But that’s true about any bad course. The article pays little or no attention to the fact that there are many excellent examples of online courses, even for k-12 students. Most of those courses, though, are not any less expensive (they may be more expensive) than a good face-to-face course.
The assumption that an online course is always cheaper (and usually worse) than a face-to-face course needs to be questioned, and it was too bad that the article didn’t do that.
Even the lead paragraph makes clear that the problem is not that these courses are online, it’s that they’re skimpy, not very rigorous or engaging, and not at all consistent with accepted academic standards or learning theory.
In ANY English 3 course, if students only read a brief biography of an author and a few single-paragraph excerpts of the author’s work, then copy and paste a summary, that is a bad course. It doesn’t matter whether it’s online or not. It’s not bad because it’s online, it’s bad because it doesn’t even do what any literature course MUST do, as the bare minimum–require students to actually READ the literature. Discuss the literature. Write real analytical and critical essays about the literature. All of that certainly can be done in an online course–and any course that doesn’t do that doesn’t deserve credit (not remedial credit, not makeup credit, not any credit).
(I know I don’t need to tell you any of this!)