online education

[babalu1997]

nowadays, evry tom dick and harry is getting online degrees

 

i am not convinced that becoming a master or doctor of silly bids can be done from the comfort of your living room

 

and the cost per credit is at least three times as much as it would be in a real university

 

i have resisted pursuing any type of academic degree online because, honestly, upon reading my resume they would wonder why i have gotten higher degree from a mickey mouse school after having attended reputable universities

 

so many of my colleagues are gradually becoming masters of silly bids, although i heard that their degrees are not considered in salary considerations-- but they add letters to their names

 

i do not call them doctors, sorry, those methods in social sciences and educology are hardly science and they call those questionnaires research

 

are you happy? agree strongly, disagree strongly.....

 

ps. let me know if i can use your answer in my doctorate thesis about economic exploitations of silly-bidding lols

[jjbrr]

i agree, i think, but not strongly. would definitely prefer people physically going to class.

 

but education is a business and money is available to the schools if they offer classes online.

[diana_eva]

I tend to disagree. Not strongly, there is a case for corrupt institutions, and people who can graduate without having a clue about what they have studied, but still... On-line education is an option, and the people who need that degree usually learn hard in order to get it. I am not sure how it happens in your country, but here, in Romania, one must pass the master exam in a state university, together with all the students who "physically went to classes"... So in the end there is no difference. Those who study pass, the others dont.

[kenberg]

I have seen both good uses of online instruction and bad uses. Practical considerations come into play but I think what might emerge is some sort of synthesis. I very much like personal f2f contact, I think that it can be extremely effective, I would hate to see it wither.

 

I'll give two examples, one of f2f, the other of online work.

 

f2f: I was teaching advanced calculus. There is a calculational side to this but in essence it is theoretical, and many students are shocked to learn that mathematics involves substantial ideas. A student was in my office insisting that his way of formulating the ideas was equivalent to mine, I was saying that it was not. After ten minutes or so of frustration I calmly said "Look, we could go on like this for another half hour, you saying it is, me saying that it isn't, or you could just consider, at least provisionally, that I know what I am talking about and your job is to understand what I am saying". He thought this over, decided I had a point, listened to what I had to say and became one of the really strong students in the class. It would be hard to have this sort of interaction online.

 

online: I was teaching a linear algebra course with something on the order of 120 students. They would send in questions by email. Every evening I would go downstairs to the computer and answer some questions. Usually it did not take long. Some questions were really very significant and I would take some extra time and write up a page or so of explanation and send it out to the entire class, often mentioning the student by name who had asked this good question. It was great. Thanks to the miracle of the typesetting program LaTeX it's easy to create polished mathematics expressions and convert them to pdf.

 

 

There have to be solid procedures for certifying that the receiver of a degree has actually done the work, no doubt about that. And I really do value personal interaction. But there are some real possibilities out there. During our recent bout with snow, many schools were closed for over a week. Some of the high school teachers, and I believe even some of the elementary school teachers, managed to get lessons out to the students online. Very impressive.

[jjbrr]

I'm sorry for not being politically correct, but I took a semester of online classes as a means of maintaining the scholarships I was receiving at a 4-year institution. I was a semester away from graduating early, so I took a semester off to travel. I signed up for a full-time online schedule, and to be quite frank it was a complete joke.

 

The teachers have only a few options on how the students can interact with one another, and my experiences with this were awful. Whereas I was in lots of advanced classes in a f2f setting, the quality of the average student online is much, much lower. Furthermore, cheating in online classes is completely normal. Everyone I've met who took classes online either took quizzes or tests or did homework with their textbooks open or with wikipedia on hand.

 

So here is my experience: teachers expected students to interact in an online message board, much like this, creating dialogue that mimicked a classroom discussion from which everyone was able to learn. These discussions accounted for X% of the grade. The remaining Y% of the grade was determined by tests, which most students took with open books. The same people who were hopeless at writing clear, correct sentences were passing the class with flying colors, because the expectations were so low for everyone.

 

Obviously my experiences aren't necessarily representative of all online classes. They're probably quite the contrary, as all the classes I enrolled in were 100-level general elective classes. I got A's in all of them despite missing over an entire month of work that I simply didn't have a chance to do because I was in China or Poland or at an NABC or whatever. So really, why are we awarding degrees to people who, in my opinion, are doing a minute fraction of the work f2f students do, at a much lower level, with minimal interpersonal contact?

[kenberg]

As I said, I have seen good uses and bad uses. You got one of the bad ones. But then, you were taking 100 level electives as an upper level student. I recall some of those courses, taught face to face, if you can call a class of 300 that, from my own undergraduate days. We had to take Psych 1 and 2 (or else the even worse Soc 1 and 2). It was available over the summer as a combined five week course, taught in the same huge auditorium the Metropolitan Opera used when they came to town. Classes started on Monday, mid-term 8 days later, final for Psych 1 8 days after that, repeat the scheme for Psych 2. Multiple choice exams, easy if your grammar was good enough to select the grammatically correct choice. I rarely attended class, A and B.

 

Still, I agree that online courses can be pretty ridiculous if used to get a grade or satisfy a requirement. They don't have to be that way but they too often are. The potential, when used honestly, is substantial however.