Toward the end of last semester, I got an email
from my department chair. Well, not exactly from my department chair, whose
messages are usually brief, often cryptic missives set from his iPhone. This
email was a forward from a disgruntled applicant in the part-time faculty pool
at Snowflake College. Apparently, I was
being asked to address his concerns.
The applicant wanted to know why he hadn’t been hired. Reading the attached c.v., I
learned his chief qualification was a master’s degree from a well-known online
graduate program which is well known because it advertises on TV. No classroom experience. He once attended the state Republican
convention as an observer. He was a
veteran who earned a Good Conduct Medal.
And that was about it.
I pondered the gentleman’s situation for a
while, then wrote an answer choosing my words carefully so as not to
offend. I told him the academic job
market was tight due to falling enrollment, and to seek other avenues to beef
up his resume until things got better. After
clicking “Send,” I fretted that maybe I was a little condescending but he wrote
me a rather gracious reply a few days later.
The incident got me to thinking. As I’ve written in earlier posts, I’m not a
fan of online education in general. I
look askance at those programs which advertise heavily. So, I was gratified when Corinthian Colleges
shut down a couple of years ago after years of investigation into its shady
business practices, and was pleasantly surprised when ITT Tech abruptly ceased
operations late last year.
Our belief in our own shrewdness and common
sense notwithstanding, we’re babes in the woods as consumers. We will believe any claim as long as it’s
stated authoritatively enough. We’re
told that studies beyond high school, which for most people means job training
tarted up as “education,” is essential to getting ahead. Public
community colleges such as the ones I work for absorb much of the demand. However, many folks can’t spare the time for
in-person schooling due to work or family obligations. That’s where the “virtual classroom” comes
in.
Distance learning is an old idea. Online classes are the latest manifestation
of the correspondence course, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. For generations, correspondence courses afforded
its ambitious students the opportunity to learn everything from shorthand to TV
repair to law. Traditional universities
had their own correspondence programs; living in a small rural town growing up
it was common for people to take agriculture courses via our land grant
university’s highly regarded extension program.
Britain’s Open University is considered a very successful experiment in
affording higher ed to those excluded from it in the past.
Enrolling students who in an earlier time would
never have considered college is big business.
P. T. Barnum would approve of the business model: Raise unrealistic
expectations, take the money, then move on to the next bunch of suckers. Speaking of P. T. Barnum, his latter-day
incarnation faced controversy last fall when the revelation that Trump
University had defrauded its students led the news for a couple of hours before
the next lurid Trump tale took its place. TU wasn't an online program, but it welshed on its implied promise that at least some of the proffered seminars would feature The Donald himself. That particular example is an outlier, but many consumers are being sold a pig in a
poke just the same when it comes to their postsecondary schooling options.
I suppose my sour attitude on this topic has
been aggravated by the fact that I’m teaching an online course for the first
time this semester. It’s an honor on its
face. It’s a brand-new course, never
before offered at Snowflake College, and I was given a free hand in its design
and content.
It’s not anything all that grand in
practice. The subject is the one in my discipline
with which I have the least experience. Except
for a couple of hybrid classes which went dreadfully, I’d never taught anything
but in-person lecture courses.
I got the job for two reasons. The first is that my department has never
seen me as the ideal public face of Snowflake College, in spite of consistently
good student evals. But they can’t force
me out due to seniority and would prefer me to teach online as a consequence. The second is that the new course is required
for the transfer AA degree in the discipline but several of my colleagues already
teach specialty courses they’d rather concentrate on instead of piloting a new
one. Since I like paying my bills and
having a place to sleep, I accepted the assignment.
Its petty annoyances aside, I prefer the
personal touch of an on-the-ground class.
I get to know my students as people instead of as names and email
addresses. My principal contact with the online students
is to post brief comments on their discussion threads and written work and to
troubleshoot the inevitable glitches with the LMS. (These are more numerous and more
consequential when the class is online than with in-person classes where I use the
LMS mainly for posting study notes and grades.)
The absence of feedback in an online class is offputting for me.
Then there’s the odd cliquishness surrounding
the distance learning people at Snowflake.
I took a preparatory training—online, of course—last summer. We were hectored to drop our old-fashioned
classroom personae. We were informed in no uncertain terms that distance learners
are different from those taking boring old traditional courses. They don’t want a “sage on the stage,” we
were told, they want a “guide by their side.”
The training was scattershot, but by August I felt ready to tackle the course
shell.
Actually, I was ready well before that but the
online programs director was out most of the summer due to a personal emergency
and so did not create a shell until there were less than two weeks before the
mandatory first review. Add to that the
fact I was creating course content from scratch and you can imagine how the
first review went. The evaluators, one a
nutrition professor and the other a kinesiology ( ! ) professor, were not at
all complimentary of my frantic efforts of the previous fortnight. Much of it was nitpicking over the wording of
certain passages in the syllabus and the absence of something they referred to
as “instructor presence.” Nutrition
Proffie was especially scornful, concluding with a damning, “This instructor is
not ready for the distance learning program.” Ouch.
I pled for mercy with the program director who
was partly to blame for the situation in the first place and got a re-review a
few weeks later. The course passed and
now here I am. Eight weeks in, and there have been only a
couple of minor hiccups. My fingers are
crossed for the second half concluding successfully.
I’ve acquired a few insights concerning online
classes based on my newfound experience.
Simply put, they’re a cash cow even for not-for-profit institutions like
Snowflake College. Once the 40-seat course
was announced in January, it filled and waitlisted within days. I was deluged with pleading emails from
students desperate to add. When the dust
settled two weeks into the term, I still had 40 students but had experienced a
turnover during the add/drop period of close to 20%. When I read
the discussion thread where I asked the students to introduce themselves, I
learned nearly a third were not majors in the discipline at all despite the course
being specifically intended for transferring majors. No matter, they paid their fees, right?
Now we’re at the midpoint of the semester, a
certain number have abruptly stopped submitting work. A few more turn in stuff sporadically. Several never attempted any work at all, which
means I’ll have to cut them before the drop deadline so it won’t be my fault
for their failing the class. No matter,
Snowflake College will keep their money anyway.
I’ll spend the next couple of months catering
to the remaining, disembodied students who have persisted. (Actually, a couple are students who took a
class with me before whom I see around campus.
Even then, it’s hard for me to connect their online presence to our
occasional real life interaction.) I’ve
been given my schedule for the next academic year. I will be teaching the new course again in
the spring.
Brick and mortar institutions benefit from
e-learning because the ancillary costs are lower. They still have to pay an instructor, true,
but online classes reduce demand for physical facilities such as classrooms and
offices, as well as saving on expenses for facilities maintenance, utilities, and
campus security. On the other hand, it
creates opportunities for the burgeoning administrative class to advance their
interests at the expense of students and the professoriat alike.
Back to the existential questions surrounding
online instruction. I’ll say what I’ve
said numerous times on this subject. For
a growing segment of the public, higher education is a dumbed-down commodity hawked
by cynical hustlers to take their money in exchange for goods of questionable
value. Even for the comparatively small
number of students possessing the self-discipline to complete an online degree,
the credential may not get them as far as they hoped.
Even in the much-maligned liberal arts, which
do not have any immediately practical application and are thereby presumed to
be readily communicable in the online format, distance learning has serious
shortcomings. Discussion threads
facilitate peer-to-peer communication, but the asynchronous nature of the
discussion hinder the sort of in-depth dialectical analysis of abstract ideas
needed to foster critical thinking. (Not
that critical thinking is a skill particularly desired by employers, mind you,
but I was always told that this was the lasting value of a liberal arts
education.) Real time classroom discussions are essential
to an in depth understanding of the curriculum.
None of this is hinted at in the TV ads for
University of Phoenix (the reigning king of nontraditional higher ed), National
University (“national” despite U of Phoenix having greater market penetration),
Southern New Hampshire University (my favorite—who knew tiny New Hampshire had
an identifiable southern region?), and Grand Canyon University (for
Christofascists wanting an online experience that won’t challenge them or their
superstitions). There are others as you
know, but these are currently the worst offenders.
I think of the spurned applicant from time to
time. How does a person lacking
experience in mainstream academia but possessing the requisite paper qualifications
break in let alone survive in a game whose nature he in no way
understands? It’s bad enough when your
paper says you’re qualified in a particular field like my own where the
economics of the game lead many well-qualified individuals to move on to more
lucrative work. But what if you have a degree
in, say, nursing or clinical psychology without much (or any) field
experience? I’ve read of cases like
these, where the students couldn’t find work in their chosen vocation and yet
were stuck with crippling student loan debt.
Caveat
emptor, some might opine. The casualties of the education bubble are no
different than those of the housing and tech bubbles before them. The distinction is that while the previous
market crises involved the relatively affluent and educated who should in fact
have done their due diligence, the prey of the higher ed hucksters are more
vulnerable and easily manipulated. I
doubt if this factored into their moral calculus, however.
It’s just business, they’d say. True, but it’s a shameful one,
© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar
