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The Hechinger Report
Will this semester forever alter college? No, but some virtual tools will stick around
Students don’t want total transformation, but faculty attitudes toward tech have changed
By Jon Marcus
April 23, 2020
A professor at Loyola University New Orleans taught his first virtual
class from his courtyard, wearing his bathrobe and sipping from a glass
of wine. Lafayette College showed faculty how to make document cameras
at home using cardboard and rubber bands.
Hamilton College set up drive-up Wi-Fi stations for faculty members
whose connections weren’t reliable enough to let them upload material
to the internet. And students in a musicology course at Virginia Tech
were assigned to create TikTok videos.
The disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted
cobbled-together responses ranging from the absurd to the ingenious at
colleges and universities struggling to continue teaching even as their
students have receded into diminutive images, in dire need of haircuts,
on videoconference checkerboards.
But while all of this is widely being referred to as online higher
education, most of it isn’t. And as for predictions that it will
trigger a permanent exodus from brick-and-mortar campuses to virtual
ones, all indications – so far – are that it probably won’t.
“Online education is using digital technologies to transform the
learning experience. That is not what is happening right now. What is
happening now is we had eight days to put everything we do in class
onto Zoom.”
Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business
“What we are talking about when we talk about online education is using
digital technologies to transform the learning experience,” said Vijay
Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “That
is not what is happening right now. What is happening now is we had
eight days to put everything we do in class onto Zoom.”
There will be some important lasting impacts, though, experts say:
Faculty may incorporate online tools, to which many are being exposed
for the first time, into their conventional classes. And students are
experiencing a flexible type of learning they may not like as
undergraduates, but could return to when it’s time to get a graduate
degree.
Whether these trends accelerate the wholesale transformation of higher
education is unclear; what is more certain is the integration of
technology into it.
This semester “has the potential to raise expectations of using these
online resources to complement what we were doing before, in an
evolutionary way, not a revolutionary way,” said Eric Fredericksen,
associate vice president for online learning at the University of
Rochester. “That’s the more permanent impact.”
Real online education lets students move at their own pace and includes
such features as continual assessments so they can jump ahead as soon
as they’ve mastered a skill, Fredericksen and others said.
Conceiving, planning, designing and developing a genuine online course
or program can consume as much as a year of faculty training and
collaboration with instructional designers, and often requires student
orientation and support and a complex technological infrastructure.
“Not surprisingly, when we really do this, it does take more than seven or eight days,” Fredericksen said wryly.
If anything, what people are mistaking now for online education — long
class meetings in videoconference rooms, professors in their bathrobes,
do-it-yourself tools made of rubber bands and cardboard — appears to be
making them less, not more, open to it.
“The pessimistic view is that [students] are going to hate it and never
want to do this again, because all they’re doing is using Zoom to
reproduce everything that’s wrong with traditional passive,
teacher-centered modes of teaching,” said Bill Cope, a professor of
education policy, organization and leadership at the University of
Illinois.
This semester “has the potential to raise expectations of using these
online resources to complement what we were doing before, in an
evolutionary way, not a revolutionary way.”
Undergraduates already seemed lukewarm toward virtual higher education;
only about 20 percent took even one online course in the fall of 2018,
the consulting firm Eduventures estimates.
If they didn’t like that, they definitely don’t like what they’re getting this semester.
More than 75 percent said they don’t think they’re receiving a quality
learning experience, according to a survey of nearly 1,300 students by
the online exam-prep provider OneClass. In a separate poll of 14,000
college and graduate students in early April by the website niche.com,
which rates schools and colleges, 67 percent said they didn’t find
online classes as effective as in-person ones.
Among college-bound high school seniors, fewer than a quarter said in
December that they were open to taking even some of their college
courses online, Eduventures reported; by the end of March, after some
had experienced virtual instruction from their shutdown high schools,
fewer than one in 10 polled by niche.com said they would consider
online college classes.
Sentiments like these suggest there’s little likelihood that students
will desert their real-world campuses for cyberspace en masse. In fact,
if there’s a silver lining in this situation for residential colleges
and universities, it’s that students no longer take for granted the
everyday realities of campus life: low-tech face-to-face classes,
cultural diversions, libraries, athletics, extracurricular activities,
in-person office hours and social interaction with their classmates.
More than 75 percent of students don’t think they’re getting a quality learning experience this semester.
“The beauty of a residential education has never been more apparent to
people,” said Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University.
But advocates for true online instruction say that students’ experience
of taking courses on their own schedules over mobile platforms may come
back to them later, when they’re ready to move on to graduate or
professional educations.
Online higher education “is a thin diet for the typical 18-year-old,”
said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures. “But
today’s 18-year-olds are tomorrow’s 28-year-olds with families and
jobs, who then realize that online can be useful.”
Already, more than half of American adults who expect to need more
education or training after this pandemic say they would do it online,
according to a survey of 1,000 people by the Strada Education Network,
which advocates for connections between education and work.
It isn’t entirely students who will move this needle, observers say. It’s also faculty.
Even those who had long avoided going online have had to do it this
semester, in some form or other. And they may have the most to learn
from the experience, said Michael Moe, CEO of GSV Asset Management,
which focuses on education technology.
Along with their students, faculty were “thrown into the deep end of
the pool for digital learning and asked to swim,” Moe said. “Some will
sink, some will crawl to the edge of the pool and climb out and they’ll
never go back in the pool ever again. But many will figure out what to
do and how to kick and how to stay afloat.”
If there’s anyone who’s banking on this, it’s the ed tech sector. More
than 70 percent of such companies have been offering products and
services to schools and colleges free or at steep discounts this
semester, anticipating sales later, according to the consulting firm
Productive.
Cengage, for example, is providing free subscriptions to its online
textbooks, and says it has seen a 55 percent increase in the number of
students who have signed up for one. Coursera is providing 550 colleges
and universities with free access to its online courses.
“Administrators and educators are reframing their attitudes,” said John
Rogers, education sector lead at the $5 billion Rise Fund, which is
managed by the asset company TPG and invests in ed tech. “That
really is the difference-maker. The pace of adoption of those tools
will accelerate.”
People resist new ideas until external shocks force them to change,
said Govindarajan, who cites as an example the way World War II
propelled women into jobs that had traditionally been done by men. “We
are at that kind of inflection point.”
Faculty, he said, will ask themselves, “ ‘What part of what we just did
can be substituted with technology and what part can be complemented by
technology to transform higher education?’ ”
Universities should consider this semester an experiment to see which
classes were most effectively delivered online, he said — big
introductory courses better taught through video-recorded lectures by
faculty stars and with online textbooks, for example, which could be
shared among institutions to lower the cost.
Students who want classes best provided face to face, such as those in
the performing arts or that require lab work, would continue to take
them that way.
“Let’s take advantage of this moment to start a larger conversation”
about the whole design of higher education, Govindarajan said.
“We had better not lose this opportunity.”
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