Online
classes detrimental to student interaction
Sara Tenenbaum
It’s hard to sit through a bad lecture. Your eyes droop, slowly shut and
then jerk open. You wish you could be anywhere else but there. As you leave the
classroom, thanking the stars above that you don’t have to go back until
the weekend has passed, you see a solution to your bad-lecture problems tacked
innocently on a bulletin board: Your boring lecture course is being offered ...
online!
The number of online courses offered by colleges has risen steadily since 1999,
when, according to The Washington Post, a small company called Blackboard — run
by a handful of 20-somethings — produced software that would help colleges
put courses onto the Internet.
It was a breakthrough; with this technology, universities
could expand their student bodies exponentially but avoid the strain that would
be placed on their personnel and facilities if these students were to physically
attend the college.
It also wouldn’t affect admissions percentages and
the amount of financial aid given out by the school, meaning the budget could
(theoretically) remain intact.
That was January 1999. Now, seven years later, the Sloan Consortium (a research
group associated with New York University’s Sloan School of Business) estimates
that about 3 million students take online courses, a number that has been rising
roughly 25 percent each year, according to an April 2005 article in The Washington
Post.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of colleges that offer online classes:
large universities and those that exist exclusively online. The latter are not
my primary concern, because an exclusively online degree often serves adults
who are updating skills or continuing their education while also holding a job.
The multitude of online courses being offered by normal colleges is something
that I do find disturbing, however. There is a practical reason for these courses
to exist. Large state schools often have groups of “distance students” who
live too far away to commute to campus.
But, when resident students begin to take online courses because it permits them
more time to “do things they like,” then I think that we’re
seeing a serious erosion of the meaning and purpose of higher education.
I got the “memorize and regurgitate” method of learning out of my
system in high school. College is the time to work on making your thinking more
sophisticated, which cannot happen through a class that promotes rote memorization.
To grow in the ways intended by higher education requires social interaction.
You must learn not just from books and notes, but from people.
I have sometimes learned more from the students than my professors; they ask
questions I want answered but never thought to ask, they push my thinking in
directions that would have been unfathomable even days before and they force
me to realize that even though I thought everyone at the table was a snobby,
careless person, I was completely wrong.
The personal interaction offered in a class environment is priceless; no online
course, no matter how easy or convenient, could ever provide me with such a rich
education.
This is not to say that online classes should be abolished, or that they don’t
have a place in higher education. I am able to support myself, thanks to my parents,
on only a part-time job; those in other financial situations may find online
college to be the perfect solution.
But if you are going to physically and financially
commit yourself to higher education, especially a liberal arts education, then
shouldn’t you take advantage of the full scope of the college experience?
That means not through a computer screen, but in a classroom. To give that experience
up for a few more hours of free time is a horrific waste of time, money and opportunity.
In a world increasingly dominated by technology, full of people who now only
communicate through Bluetooth headset or Blackberry e-mail, by text or instant
message, college is one of the last times in our lives when constant social interaction
is enthusiastically supported.
If we’re going to shirk that privilege in
favor of online convenience, then we may as well not go to college at all.
This article originally appeared in The Justice at Brandeis University.
|
