(I submitted this to CHE last year for their essay section, was turned down. Publishing it here, now.) 

Why I Won’t Teach Online (Again).

 

By

 

Mick Womersley

 

In March our small college, like most others, sent students home and told the faculty to finish out the semester online. And so the faculty taught online. We managed. Most of us. A small minority went under for a while and those students suffered, and, as students do, complained to administrators. But most of us managed the transition, even if not in style. I did it, and didn’t mind it at all, except that I missed my students. I set up a whiteboard, movie camera, and tripod in my spare room to facilitate the operation. I held online help sessions and did a lot of one-on-one coaching. I made movies and annotated slideshows of the material. I wrote lengthy “how-tos” on using the statistical package, or making the right graph in Excel. I enjoyed seeing my students on video chat and in presentations. It was good to know they were for the most part safe and well, if not exactly thriving. I didn’t complain. I just did it. It’s just what good educators do. As far as I know, I didn’t get a single complaint. But lack of complaint does not indicate success in teaching.

            A quick perusal of the time statistics for student engagement from our learning management system illustrates the problem. In a three credit-hour sophomore economics class, required for a major, with five weeks left in the semester, the hardest working students studied the online teaching materials provided for just less than thirty hours. The ones that flunked but still attempted the final exam put in less than three. The average was around twelve. Out of twenty-eight students a couple just dropped out of sight and didn’t even attempt the final. Who knows what was going on in their lives? Whatever it was took priority over making progress to their degrees. And my other sections produced similar results. Most students just didn’t try as hard as they would have if I’d been there to chivy them, if the social aspect of going to class had been there for them, if the routine had been there for them. If it had been face-to-face.

The Carnegie credit-hour system suggests that students need several hours of study outside of class for each “contact hour” in class. The same students in face-to-face learning would have spent fifteen hours in class to finish out the last five weeks of the semester, and been asked to do another thirty or more hours of reading and studying outside of class. Even the best students studied for only half the time they should have. Like most faculty around the country, I don’t get full compliance with Carnegie standards for homework, but students typically report taking many hours to prepare for my exams. I coach the students who have difficulty studying on their own, often putting in hours of back-to-back meetings for this purpose, hoping to make up for years of neglect. In all this, I have to act on the assumption that a kind of rough justice prevails, and look forward to the reflection section on the institutional assessment form where I get to try to decide if I’ve succeeded. I look for “Mick made me think”, or “I thought economics was boring but he made it interesting.” 

But my students, most of whom normally report learning success in economics, wouldn’t learn online. Why not? That seems to be an awfully good question for educators right about now. The Covid crisis forced some of us online. But others went online long before. And they too report success. But is this an apples-to-apples comparison? Are they even the same kind of students? Do they have the same needs? Will society, who is paying or subsidizing their education through Stafford Loans and Pell Grants and other aid, get what it wants out of the bargain?

Like many other schools, ours is making plans to offer more online classes in the fall, opening up some of our formal distance education classes to the students in the conventional face-to-face unit. Previously the two were administratively separate, operating under different calendars with different faculty and students. But our administrators have come up with a “hybrid” model that permits the experiment. They didn’t ask too many of the face-to-face faculty whether or not we thought it a good idea. Perhaps they assumed we wouldn’t like it much. I for one don’t like it at all. I can put up with it in an emergency, but I don’t want it to become a norm. I don’t want to drift unthinkingly into a society that does all its higher education online. I want us to keep face-to-face education wherever we practically can. 

Experience seems to show that these particular students don’t seem to want to learn online. Our administrators like to say that online is “more accessible” and tout success stories from the distance education program – a single mother here, a veteran there, to prove it. But these are not apples-to-apples comparisons. They say that it is cheaper, which is true. Our college charges roughly two thirds of the price for online courses than for face-to-face. Administrators want to save a buck. Who can blame them for that? They are generally judged on budget dollars, not educational success. Online faculty are typically less established, more worried about their jobs, less likely to ask hard questions of harried administrators, less likely to belong to a union, or to make an accreditation board complaint. It’s an easy drift, solves a lot of problems. But it’s not a valid comparison. You are providing a different kind of education, tailored for a different kind of student. And we really need to interrogate the facts here. Does online education work for all students? 

So who are these students of mine that won’t learn online? Ours are mostly first-year, first time students matriculating at age eighteen, direct from high school. A few are older veterans under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. A minority have studied elsewhere but typically not succeeded and hope to do better with us because we promise more help and more experiential programming. Their average household income reported is essentially the same as the nation. But when you get to know them, you realize soon enough that they are almost all from middle-class and working-class families, and a significant proportion are the first in their immediate family to go to college. We are a very white, northern state, and so few of our students have diverse backgrounds, but those who do, often seem to come from better-off families. That makes sense too. If you come from an oppressed minority, it’s hard enough to send your kid to a local college, never mind one that’s out-of-state.

Why might online learning not work with these students? Let’s start with the force field. No-one tells you about this when you start teaching. The average developed world teenager comes with a supernatural force-field around them that inhibits communication from any person older than them. Learning to identify and penetrate this force field at will, on a regular basis, is an a priori requirement to be successful in teaching liberal arts classes. There are many techniques to draw upon: the Socratic question, the slightly controversial remark, the humorous aside, the outgoing body language, the tone of your voice, the ways and means of teaching effectively when all your students wish to be elsewhere, doing other things. You have to make them want to be there. Will they want to be online?

Ask them to read aloud. When they matriculate, and even by the time they make it to my second-year economics courses, our average student reads very slowly, like a robot, unable to put in emphasis of dialect or emotion. I would guess many of yours do too.

Ask them to write. Most cannot complete a paragraph of simple error-free sentences. After the “writing-across-the-curriculum” drive a few years ago, which I took to heart, I coach their writing one-on-one each semester. I get results, but it takes time and effort and individual attention.

Ask them to think, especially about the Good Society and what it should be. This often comes hardest. Young minds are more open than old ones, for sure, but not as much as you’d hope. A significant minority have unadjusted racist and/or other narrow-minded attitudes, probably inherited from their families and the communities they come from. We do our level best to counter this with programming in the residence halls and liberal studies classes from the first semester, but it doesn’t always work, or work right away. 

There are exceptions to this taxonomy of failed education, of course. I get some students who are easy to teach, gliding through my classes, loving each new thought. If you’re one of my students and reading this, and have gotten thus far already, you’re almost certainly in this category. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making my daily task easier and more enjoyable. But if you’re one of these students, you know too that you were in the minority in my classes.

Bottom-line, many if not most of our students do not present ready to study college-level material. I’m sure many of yours don’t either, if you don’t teach at a more exclusive place, and do have students from ordinary American backgrounds, from ordinary American high schools. 

Let’s take these in the order I listed them. If you ask a student who reads at an eighth-grade level to study online, they need to read all their course material online. If it is to be expounded on or explained, that may happen through annotated slides – more reading – and if they are lucky, some video. If they want to ask a question, they may need to type it, and then read the answer. If they are lucky, there will be face-to-face office hours or help sessions via streaming video chat in which they can ask that question. You can add all the concierges – how I dislike that hotel-industry word in the education context – and learning specialists you want. The very fact that they read at such a low reading-grade level means it will take them several hours more to get through the material than a student who is properly prepared for college. In face-to-face programming I’ll discover this, and, usually during a writing or some other coaching session, get them to read their own work out loud, and help them improve. I encourage them to read more, explain that reading is the key to knowledge, adaptability, promotion. Sometimes I even hit home. 

Let’s try writing. If you study for an online degree, most of your grade is going to be for written submissions to exams, quizzes, essays and so on. I expect that there’s also a lot of multiple-choice, auto-graded stuff, but even that needs to be read. If you can’t yet write at a high school level, you’re at a disadvantage. The very few students I see who can diagram a sentence went to private school. Most of my students can’t even read their own sentences out loud without stumbling over their clumsy phraseology. If they have to write out paragraph-length or essay-length answers, they have to be coached, or I have to be capable of inferring from their work that they actually understand the economic theory they are asked to apply. It’s a kind of divination. The cure, the only thing that can make it objective is to bring the student in for coaching. You can improve their writing and understanding of economics at the same time. And, after all, that’s what the punters and the government are paying for.

Last but by no means least, let’s address the critical thinking. This is supposed to be the greatest outcome of a liberal arts degree, students who can think critically, to remake and renew society and make it better in each new generation. That’s why we subsidize higher education. That’s what a government of the people by the people needs to get out of this bargain. 

So, what's the cure for systemic prejudice? How do you change a mind that believes it's made up already, and doesn't wish to change at all? That's been on my mind for years, but especially recently. The only thing I've ever found that worked, even imperfectly, was face-to-face, in-person Socratic classroom or similar informal discussion hosted by a skilled teacher and mentor who has the stage presence and moral authority to guide discussion and testimony, even that which is hard to hear, helping students experience what other people have to say and being guided intellectually and emotionally to put themselves in their shoes. Where have I experienced anything like this? In high school, when I had some very good teachers; in some (not all) Christian churches, and at meetings of other religions; but most frequently in liberal arts classes and related college activities with my students and faculty and teaching staff colleagues for the thirty-two years I've been involved in American education. If you want to live in a better world, you need to change minds. 

A lot of people simply don't change their minds when presented with new, better ideas. But that's what good educators do. We change minds. It's not easy. I wish it was, but it isn't. And it only works some of the time. But what kind of a world would we live in if it had never worked at all, ever, for all of history? We'd all be at each other's throats, sitting on each other's necks, one against one, group against group, clan against clan, nation against nation, for all history, whenever we got the chance. I tell my northeastern students, many of whom are Franco-American, that when the Klan first organized here in the 1920s it was to get rid of them! And now they hang Confederate flags on their dorm room walls! Think about that! This is our fault, the high school and college teachers’, for not educating them better. They need to know that prejudice is wrong because it’s irrational, from the font of all unreason: hatred. They need to be told that they are as dependent on a reasoned society as anyone, if not more so. Mine are not from wealthy homes. They can’t avoid struggle. Just because you think you're in the privileged group now doesn't mean it was always that way, nor will it always be that way. Better start treating people the way you'd like to be treated. And be willing to change your mind. 

So we need to support mind-changing education, which for some students will always need to be face-to-face education, because the system has already failed them, failed to provide them with the skills to learn online. Online school has a place, but probably not for those students who are already underprepared, for students at risk. They need face-to-face instruction, face-to-face encouragement, face-to-face learning, with educators committed to reason and to education. It's our only hope. 

I for one cannot reconcile teaching these particular students online with my professional conscience. It’s not enough. It will fail them. They would be better waiting a semester or two if need be, or learning in person using social distancing, than being isolated online. This would actually work. It would teach them, they would learn, For the most part society has already failed them, and the move online just exacerbates the problem.