I’ve felt it myself, and I’m pretty much the opposite of a people person. I really enjoy working by myself, studying by myself, and solitude. I was an early and huge enthusiast for online learning. So I was very surprised to discover, even in me, that strange flat sense of disconnection. I’d never felt it in “real” classes, even ones I disliked.

If this is a real factor and not just something peculiar to a few of us, then it’s endemic to distance learning and can’t be cured by “doing it right.” We’d need a lot more research to find out how to compensate for it.

I’ve been busy working the last few days and missed this.

For the record, (I solemnly swear) I grew up in New York and am currently an undergraduate student at McGill University (though McGill is not where I gained my online course experience). I study History—mostly American—and Economics. Jonathon Booth is really my name. Another long story, but the short version is that it was my father’s name, and he grew up in Canada.

I’m going to be doing a History MA at McGill next year, and then hopefully a Ph.D., [shameless self promotion:] if any readers feel like accepting me.

While I think that it is possible for online education to be done well and be educational (ha!), the way it seems to be shaking out in reality is far from that, and I really think only serves to exacerbate inequalities. I somehow doubt the future of Ivy League/Expensive Liberal Arts College education is online. It will be (the vast majority) of students, those at state schools, community colleges, and so on, that are stuck taking online courses. Obviously, many people defend this as a way to give more people low cost education, but the problem is that it will end up giving all of these students a low quality education. All the ways to make online courses good cost money, which throws off the calculation that makes them so popular among administration types. The economic logic that makes online courses appealing makes them bad. So yeah, we could spend a lot of money to create high quality, professionally edited lecture videos for online classes, or we could have real lectures and seminars.

The most likely development for online education will further pry apart the two (or three or four) tiers of the higher education system, leaving the rich to pay $70,000 a year to take seminars on Proust, and everyone else to take HR management courses online. And, as many of you have said, the students forced into the online courses, are often the ones with the worst preparation who would benefit the most from good, intensive, real life instruction.

As for online discussions, in my experience they are a total waste of time. Students post as much as they are told to post on the discussion boards (and the keeners post an extra time to get their A+). Since the “discussions” are generally weekly, 90% of students post the day before the discussion is due, which really makes anything approaching a real-time discussion impossible. The online courses I took were business courses (which are a combination of common sense and jargon. Business education is an incredible waste of time). I can’t imagine taking a course online that actually required thoughtful analysis and criticism. I have no idea how a history seminar could run effectively online. Though I guess many online ed promoters wouldn’t mind eliminating the subjects that don’t do well online, but that’s another topic for another time. But even the kind of vocation learning that online education seems better designed to teach requires hands-on experience that (obviously) isn’t available online. (The one exception to this—not surprisingly the subject of most feature articles about online education—is computer science. The only tool you need is your computer, and even more in-person computer science classes involve memorizing and practicing coding. But again, the difference between paying to take a computer science class, and buying a C++ textbook is minimal.)

As for articles about TED talks, my personal favorites are http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/ted-conferences-2012-3/ and http://www.downloadtheuniverse.com/dtu/2012/06/the-demise-of-guys-why-boys-are-struggling-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-by-philip-zimbardo-and-nikita-duncan-ted-books-ki.html Though I’m still waiting for something as caustic as I feel about it…

Sorry for not really reading through all the comments, I guess I’m a bit late on this one. oh well!

On some level, there’s the assumption that “I’ve helped my kind with their totally obvious homework. That’s got to be the same as keeping a class of thirty six year-olds orderly and interested while they learn how to read. Any bozo can stand in front of a class and point to the alphabet.”

Whereas every bozo is fairly clear that trying to fix their own plumbing leads to floods and high repeair bills.

I wonder if it would help if we lived in some utopia where people had to actually, say, teach third-graders for a day before they were allowed to say anything about education or teachers.

I’d like to add two things to the discussion:
1. One group of students — the original online market — were the older, returning to college students. Many of them have the time management skills, if not always the study skills. It’s the focused time to get to and from campus that they lack. For them, well designed courses work. Badly designed ones allow them to get a degree.

2. This, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s story of U Va’s “Painfully Public Lesson in Leadership”, about online ed done right:
“At the University System of Maryland, for instance, professors have spent the past five years meticulously redesigning courses, often using technology to accommodate ever-larger undergraduate class sections. The guiding principle of “first do no harm” is central to Maryland’s project, which greenlights a course only after a pilot program demonstrates that students perform as well or better in the new format.

Some of Maryland’s course redesigns have demonstrated significant cost reductions, but improved learning outcomes have always been the central goal, says William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the Maryland system.”

And then there rate the consultants who will get paid an enormous amount of money to come in and tell us how to implement this and offer “support services” to the faculty teaching.

Historiann, Perpetua, and Northern Barbarian, however, all pointed out what seems to me to be one of the most important issues lurking behind the enthusiasm for online education: that it’s exactly what struggling students (and perhaps especially those at non-elite institutions) who haven’t yet learned how to “do” college *don’t* need. Yet it’s those students who are being most heavily encouraged, or given no alternative other than, to take online courses in formats pioneered by institutions like Stanford and MIT. You rarely wind up at a place like Stanford or MIT–and you even less rarely make it through all four years–unless you’re quite good at playing the college game. And if my similarly fancy-pants undergraduate institution (which, incidentally, is just starting to experiment with online) was anything to go by, part of being good at doing college was being *so* good at doing college that you didn’t have to go to class to get As. (Whether you actually *learned* anything was another story.) Whether the lecture notes are posted online or not, or even whether the class is a lecture or not, success at these schools is very often contingent on seeing how good a final paper or exam you can pull out of your posterior after having not kept up with the coursework at all over the course of the semester. And so an online class, where you can choose only to watch the lectures that you need, and can choose to watch them while doing other things; where evaluation is standardized or self-administered; and where there’s not enough resources for real student-faculty contact, is not going to hurt very bright students who already have enough privilege to conduct their “real-life” educations in that way, and maybe would be a positive extra addition to the life of a motivated student looking to gain some very specific skills or knowledge that are teachable in that format.

But the problem is that these very privileged students *also* have the privilege of being at places where, if they do screw up, someone will notice, catch them, pick them up, and give them a second chance (and a third, and a fourth…). That’s not an opportunity shared by students at other universities where cost-cutting is the prime directive and contact with faculty is already very impersonal and growing more so by the day. I wonder if this is a situation a bit parallel to that of grade-school education reform, in which people like Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee who didn’t themselves go to public school misguidedly think they know what’s best for children in an inner-city public school–but in fact end up making things worse.

The course was about average (plus or minus); never taught that course or such students before. Next time the online course will be better. There are more questions than answers, but the experience was positive. I can be extreme specific.