Althouse: "What does all of this mean for colleges suddenly forced to move online because of the coronavirus pandemic?"

March 15, 2020

"What does all of this mean for colleges suddenly forced to move online because of the coronavirus pandemic?"

"The only thing they can create right now is distance.... They do not have the time or resources necessary to map out the rest of their courses and build online versions on the fly that can accommodate large numbers of students. They will not be able to train their teachers how to teach or their learners how to learn. There will be little personalization.... [I]t’s a mistake to say that colleges will be 'moving to online education.' All they’ll really be doing is conducting traditional education at a distance. That will be hard enough."

From "Everybody Ready for the Big Migration to Online College? Actually, No/One consequence of coronavirus: It will become more apparent that good online education is easier said than done" by Kevin Carey (NYT).

Carey is the author of "The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere" (2016). He's for on-line education.

66 comments:

exhelodrvr1 said...: No, thanks. I’d rather pay 50K a year!; 3/15/20, 6:22 AM
stevew said...: I was with DIL yesterday, she works in the administration at one of the Little Ivies. Their bigger issues are not how to complete the year's course work online - they've pretty much given up on that. More concerned, as are the students, on dealing with Commencement. Also, lots of issues getting students home, particularly the foreign born ones. There will be a subset of students, somewhat sizable, that will remain on campus forcing a number of on-campus services to remain open.

Her general sense is that this academic year is ended. The next will begin as scheduled in late August.; 3/15/20, 6:27 AM
gilbar said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 3/15/20, 6:40 AM
gilbar said...: but!
If you're going to school online; How would you be able to use the
..luxury dorms
..world class fitness centers
..five star dining halls
That the schools have spent So Much money on?
WHY would a student spend 50K a year, for 4 or 5 years, to take online classes?
This is a Lose Lose for university admins!; 3/15/20, 6:41 AM
iowan2 said...: The mechanics of education haven't changed in centuries. Teacher facing students in chairs. Teacher lecturing about the material, students listening and trying to guess whats important so they can pass the upcoming test.

It has to be time to change the mechanics. I'm not smart enough to invent whatever that might be.

It is clear the more tax money that is spent on education, the more is spent on non-education endeavors. Since tax money is footing the bill, this passes. If my education $ was out of pocket, non - essential persons would quickly fad away.; 3/15/20, 6:42 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: I’m hoping that the move is semi-permanent and marks the start of dismantling the corrupt milking of the guaranteed student loan programs to pay for feminist, black and homosexual Marxist indoctrination.

Maybe this is the beginning of the end of six figure salaries for diversity apparatchiks.; 3/15/20, 6:47 AM
gilbar said...: serious question
If/When? universities go to all online learning,
will universities continue to have more administrators than professors?
will the majority of classes continue to be taught by TA's and Instructors; not Professors?
will there be Any point in elite Ivy league schools; if you aren't there to be able to build a network?

Aren't The REAL Reasons students GO to college...
Partying and Getting Laid?
Meeting people that can get you jobs?

If you're just going to build a skill set though online classes; aren't WAY better, and WAY cheaper options than a 'traditional' university that is now online?; 3/15/20, 6:54 AM
Drago said...: "They will not be able to train their teachers how to teach or their learners how to learn."

Oh, is that what has been lost?

Something tells me Allen Bloom et al might disagree.

I doubt the transmission and receipt of pure propaganda will be much effected.

Meanwhile, watch the STEM students just keep rolling along.; 3/15/20, 6:56 AM
MayBee said...: Online education has to be done the right way. Otherwise, it's just make-work to fill hours.; 3/15/20, 7:04 AM
MayBee said...: I know college students staying near their universities in their apartments rather than coming back home. Actually it's pretty smart. They are staying among a population unlikely to get seriously ill from Coronavirus.

I also know our governor closed schools without letting the districts (and unions) know what the plan is going to be. Are they to do online learning now, and not make up time in the summer? Or are they going to make up the time in the summer. It has to be one or the other, or they'll have to pay the teachers for both.
A little planning might have been a good thing, Gretchen Whitmer. You didn't have to do it at 11 pm. THere's no coronavirus hotspot in Michigan. And now the kids have to be somewhere.; 3/15/20, 7:08 AM
Roger Sweeny said...: Online education has to be done the right way. Otherwise, it's just make-work to fill hours.

Of course, the same thing can be said for in-class education.

In fact, it could be argued that much of school is inevitably "make-work to fill hours", aka day care, because there is a fairly limited amount that most people will be able to learn. Most is just memorized, then quickly forgotten. (Ask yourself, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually remember?); 3/15/20, 7:10 AM
gilbar said...: (Ask yourself, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually remember?)

f=ma and you can't push a rope; 3/15/20, 7:14 AM
pacwest said...: One semester might not make much difference, but if CV19 runs into the fall the will be a sizable migration to online. Do online universities offer gender studies? Starbucks hardest hit.; 3/15/20, 7:16 AM
Sally327 said...: One of the benefits of leaving home to go to college is that it gives teenagers a secure environment in which to learn how to be an adult, taking responsibility for your life on a day-to-day basis. Just getting out of bed to get to classes on time without Mom yelling at you from the kitchen, that's lesson no. one. There are other benefits as well that don't involve just what goes on in the classroom. It's an integrated educational experience really, the classroom and outside the classroom, that's what a college education is or should be. Concentrating on how to accomplish one aspect of it, that's missing the point and the value of a college education.; 3/15/20, 7:25 AM
Jersey Fled said...: After I retired from my Corporate job, I taught at one of the online universities for 8 years. I taught online courses, on-ground courses,at one of their larger "campuses" in a large urban city, and some hybrid courses which combined elements of both. I taught both undergraduate and graduate courses.

The course work for all delivery methods was the same. So we're the outcomes. I felt that my online students understood the material every bit as well as my on-ground students, who met with me live four hours a week in a classroom. In some ways I thought the online students even did better because they had to read the assigned texts and materials. My in-ground students rarely did. They just waited for me to tell them what they needed to know.

Keep in mind that this was at a well known online university that has been doing this for decades. Their tools for delivering college level learning online are very well developed. Class discussions were handled via forums like we have here at Althouse, only without the trolls. (Well, almost. I remember this one student from Virginia ...). The went on 24/7.

The only downside I remember was that sometimes I would wake up in the morning and find that the discussion had gone totally off track and it took me hours to herd the cats and correct the things that they had gotten wrong.

The instructors like me had to do six weeks of training before we could teach an online class. Probably twice a year we had to take additional training and be recertified. One of the characteristics of online classes is that evrything that went on in the classroom could be monitored. Every paper that we graded could be evaluated. Once a year a senior instructor would review and critique a class for each instructor at random.

You can't implement a system like that in a few weeks. I'm not sure you can do it in a few years.

Many universities currently offer online programs so they have a leg up. But scaling up to handle every student will be a daunting task.

Have to go now to attend my church's new online service.; 3/15/20, 7:26 AM
LakeLevel said...: One of the great untold stories/scandals of the Obama administration is it's attack on, and destruction of, For Profit Higher Education. If online education takes hold, the giant edifices of public and non profit colleges and universities will be in danger of quickly being replaced. We can't have that can we.; 3/15/20, 7:30 AM
stevew said...: (Ask yourself, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually remember?)

Birthday Problem

Makes for a good bar bet.; 3/15/20, 7:40 AM
Howard said...: My son the librul elite college professor just finished creating his lectures for next week. Apparently it was a giant pain to get right but he's learning a new skill that will probably be in demand more in the future; 3/15/20, 7:51 AM
Paco Wové said...: "Her general sense is that this academic year is ended. The next will begin as scheduled in late August."

What happens to Spring Semester 2020? Do students get credit for the courses they're "taking" now, or will the have to repeat them at some point in the future?; 3/15/20, 7:58 AM
Renee said...: My daughter's college went in the opposite direction AWAY from online instruction (except for the current situation) as their long term mission. Students in residential colleges will have the upper hand in terms of networking/mentorships, that's the true gold in educational institutions. A strong committed alumni group and professors/deans that can offer guidance. Her college actually goes after those who the best the soft/social skills with decent SAT scores. The college figured that can't get the top academic kids, but what about all those high school students that do well/ok and they get along with people.; 3/15/20, 8:00 AM
Jaq said...: We are comforting ourselves that the virus only kills the elderly, but two facts have come out of Europe that are related, I think. Half the people in intensive care in France for the virus are young and healthy. Most of the deaths are of the elderly. They are choosing the young to live because it’s a Sophie’s Choice situation. They have to choose to let a young otherwise healthy person die, or an elderly person maybe past their sell by date.

We keep comforting ourselves with stuff that is simply not true. We need to self isolate. I think the British approach is a recipe for disaster.; 3/15/20, 8:05 AM
Lurker21 said...: Yes, it will be harder and we'll find out that colleges aren't doing it as well as they could, but this could also be the moment when online or distance learning comes into its own. This is the "Get a horse" moment when it sputters along and buggy whips look like a better investment, but who's to say how things will look 20 years down the road? Pioneering is always difficult, but the difficulties are only a smallish part of the big picture of how conditions evolve.

A thought, maybe: With big name universities establishing campuses abroad, Americans who still want the traditional college package may go overseas to take advantage of lower costs if educational entrepreneurs are willing to provide that. The traditional schools aren't that into pioneering and aren't going to cheapen their brand by charging less, but there's an opening for enterprising upstarts.; 3/15/20, 8:15 AM
Michael said...: Well, and is good for lecture courses. However, the hard sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, etc.) require laboratory instruction as well. Hands on experience is required and labs have special safety equipment as well as supervision to prevent injury to oneself and others. I have seen students having fantastic book knowledge of theory, but couldn't boil water to boil eggs.

BTW: I have a Ph. D in physical-organic chemistry and worked in energy industry for 32 years.; 3/15/20, 8:24 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "In some ways I thought the online students even did better because they had to read the assigned texts and materials. My in-ground students rarely did. They just waited for me to tell them what they needed to know."

How did being on line cause them to do the reading?

My method of forcing students to do the reading was to teach at a level that would only work for a person who had done the reading. Not surprisingly, many students told me I was too hard to understand. There was pressure to do the class in a way that would free the students from doing the reading. But I am the kind of person where it took only one student criticizing me (in 1985, I think it was) for "spoon-feeding" to steel me to that pressure.; 3/15/20, 8:27 AM
jeremyabrams said...: My wife took the NCLEX nursing board exam at an exam center where you show passport/birth certificate-level ID, and take the test in an isolated booth under the watchful eye of a proctor.

That's the only aspect of any college course that needs to be done in person.; 3/15/20, 8:27 AM
Howard said...: Renee, high people skills and SATs, Are Frats and Sorority popular there? Sounds like a great match, NTTAWWT; 3/15/20, 8:32 AM
Paco Wové said...: "I think the British approach is a recipe for disaster."

You may find this interesting: Is Boris Johnson's "controlled burn" policy wise?; 3/15/20, 8:32 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “ No, thanks. I’d rather pay 50K a year!”

That was 10 years ago. Maybe $65k now.

The whole thing has gotten out of hand. Price is going up at 2x faster or better than inflation, while quality is falling. 4 year on campus attendance has become a luxury good. Part of the problem is that the left has gained control over most schools, and they now run them for their own benefit. Money is essentially being removed from education, and appropriated by administration, which is now a slush fund for left wing causes. The bulk of teaching is now by temporary, underpaid, staff (adjuncts, lecturers, and TAs). Tenure track positions are disappearing, at the dame time that administrative deans and their bloated staffs take more and more of the money. Far easier to get a six figure income on the administrative side, than the academic side, in many 4 year schools. Do they really add to the academic experience? Not that much. But what can you do with “studies” degrees, except work for corresponding departments at the schools that taught them? Meanwhile traditional department after department are shut down as uneconomic, even with paying many of those teaching sub minimum wages. It isn’t sustainable.

The Millennials and their parents got suckered into taking on six figure debt to fund this sort of thing. Debt that stays with some of the students for decades, while preventing their parents from retiring. They did it with the expectation that this was the route to middle class success. Looking back, it was a colossal mistake in many cases. They all believed the hype. Many would have done better going to community, for profit, or even online schools. Seeing that the entire system, that supplies much of the left’s intelligentsia, tottering towards economic collapse, no surprise that most of the Dem Presidential candidates fell in line behind federal taxpayer funding for college education. You can be pretty sure that this will be at the top of their legislative wish list, the next time that they take over both Congress and the Pesidency - creation of a permanent system to fund the college administrative state, while restricting the expansion of online and for profit college education.; 3/15/20, 8:39 AM
chuck said...: Nothing changes, everyone will get an A regardless. Who knew grade inflation would prove so prescient?; 3/15/20, 8:41 AM
Roger Sweeny said...: (Ask yourself, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually remember?)

f=ma and you can't push a rope

You can't push a rope because the rope can't push back. Newton's Third Law.; 3/15/20, 8:42 AM
Howard said...: Althouse: I don't do any of the reading beyond a scam of the visible text and select comments. I spend more time looking at all of the pictures. That's why the Crack MC was always my favorite blog.; 3/15/20, 8:47 AM
chuck said...: Actually reminds me of spring 1968 when many schools had been shut down or disrupted by demonstrations and building occupation. My sense at Columbia was that the school graduated the lot of us to rid themselves of their turbulent students.; 3/15/20, 8:54 AM
stevew said...: 'What happens to Spring Semester 2020? Do students get credit for the courses they're "taking" now, or will the have to repeat them at some point in the future?'

They are working on figuring that out. Inclined to count it as completed. Allow seniors to graduate and be awarded their degrees.; 3/15/20, 9:05 AM
Amy Welborn said...: My son is a freshman in a small midwestern Catholic college. We are in the south, about an 11-hour drive away. His spring break was this past week, and they have extended the break through this week, with more decisions to come. They have said to prepare for online learning through Easter, although as of last week, they were saying that after the extended break they'd have campus open. I wouldn't be surprised if this changes and they just give up, in that sense, on, the rest of the academic year.

Now, what those who aren't involved in secondary or higher ed may not understand is how much of this level of education is already online, for good or for ill. (IMHO for ill.) A friend's daughter was admitted to the U. of Florida a couple of years ago, to be told, upon registration, that - surprise! - for whatever reason, she was going to have to do *all* her first semester classes online - they didn't have the resources to do in-class instruction for everyone. And so on - much of the writing submission and a lot of the quizzing/testing for my son's classes since high school have been online.

Even in this small, liberal-arts oriented school that's true, but of course, his humanities classes are lecture/discussion based and he's taking a science class with labs.

I'm on a parent discussion board, and the feeling is overwhelming, both from the parents and from the kids via the parents - let them go back. Please. And not just because people are driving each other crazy. It's practical reasons. Engineering students have projects. Seniors have projects and presentations. Kids in science classes have labs.

My kid, shockingly, did not bring all of his books and notebooks back home for spring break. So if they do go online, I sure hope professors will understand and be able to put texts that aren't already online up. One of my son's friends is on campus this weekend retrieving books, and she said she saw a professor who told her he would, indeed, be teaching at the regular time, and he indeed expected everyone to be logged on to the software from noon-one (or whatever) every M-W-F.

It's a mess. But yes, an opportunity - to get a sense of what kind of learning really needs to be done face-to-face, what doesn't, and how we're all being overcharged for all of it.; 3/15/20, 9:05 AM
wild chicken said...: Meanwhile, watch the STEM students just keep rolling along."

Because they've been taking the hard courses all along.

What on earth will the lazy lightweights do now?; 3/15/20, 9:12 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “My method of forcing students to do the reading was to teach at a level that would only work for a person who had done the reading. Not surprisingly, many students told me I was too hard to understand. There was pressure to do the class in a way that would free the students from doing the reading. But I am the kind of person where it took only one student criticizing me (in 1985, I think it was) for "spoon-feeding" to steel me to that pressure.”

Let me suggest though that you taught in a subject were the primary purpose was to teach students to think and do so in a specific way. You couldn’t teach students the law itself, because it is too vast, nebulous, and quickly changing. If all that you taught was the law, as it is today, within months of graduation, their knowledge would be obsolete. Instead, what is needed in a lawyer is being able to understand the law by reading the cases, summaries, treatises, etc. indeed, being a good lawyer means reflexively going back to sources and researching specifics, any time you get involved in a different part of it, where you don’t practice every day. Many of us really didn’t enjoy the hide the ball that good legal education required, but you weren’t teaching us what color the balk was, but rather how to find it ourselves when we didn’t have a kindly law professor pointing the way.

Sure, there is some of that in other disciplines, learning to think like a physician, an engineer a historian, etc, but it is less key to the mission. Take Calculus. For most who learn it, it isn’t all that important why it works, but rather how to make it work. Those of us who go on in mathematics very quickly figure out the why. For me, coming from a family with, now, four generations with math degrees, teaching why it worked wasn’t really useful, and was maybe even confusing. I got it twice in HS, both times taught more theoretically than I needed. Then freshman year in college, I had a prof who simplified it, and one day, I woke up knowing how it worked. I went through my math degree that way, either the prof made it easy to understand, and I could move on quickly, or we got bogged down when they didn’t. I think that I got lucky - by taking Calculus in HS, I was able to skip the first semester in college, allowing me to take Linear Algebra freshman year. It was taught y a guy who made it easy. The next year, it was taught by the guy who would be chair of the department, and my advisor, who should only teach upper division classes. He did too much Hide The Ball, and that it became the flunk out class. We got along ultimately just because I matured enough to understand him (and I brought my GF along one time, and he was in love with her, from when she had him for classes).

Many areas of study have a corpus of knowledge that is required before specialization. For a physician, that means an immense knowledge of how the body works, from chemistry up through physiology. We know what that basic corpus of knowledge is for law school - because that is what we need for the bar exam, and it can be summarized quite succinctly. I kept my bar exam books just for this reason, to be able to understand the basic structure of one facet of the law, before diving into the specifics. Very different from having to know every bone and every muscle in the body, in just one subject, among many required to operate as a doctor.; 3/15/20, 9:24 AM
Renee said...: @Hoawrd

No frats/sororities, but definitely a unified culture/community the students are investing in.; 3/15/20, 9:31 AM
RichAndSceptical said...: The beauty of this is it demonstrates that brick and mortar universities are a thing of the past.

A handful of universities could offer all Americans an extremely low cost education. The majority of college classes don't require a physical presence and many of those could be done using simulations. Once a single course is developed, that course can be offered to millions of students at a minimal cost.; 3/15/20, 9:39 AM
Jaq said...: I think that most of my, undergraduate level, I admit, courses in physics and math could easily have been taught from the texts and through existing YouTube stuff to supplement it. Designing the exams to discourage cheating would be all but impossible though with text messaging. The liberal arts oriented stuff was heavily weighted to class discussion even though there was a lot more reading to do there. Discouraging cheating would be easier though. In the STEM case you are looking for a single answer, which can be shared, in the liberals arts side, you are asked to defend your own unique answer with logic and evidence. Or at least that’s how it was when I was in school, where it was about teaching you how to think, not what to think.; 3/15/20, 9:48 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "Althouse: I don't do any of the reading beyond a scam of the visible text and select comments."

Just a quick "scam." Okay. It's your brain.; 3/15/20, 9:52 AM
Michael K said...: Now, what those who aren't involved in secondary or higher ed may not understand is how much of this level of education is already online, for good or for ill.

My last few years of teaching medical students I was amazed at how many students did not go to class. This is medical school, not gender studies. The lectures were all on line.

Now, they did go to the classes I taught because it was all patient contact. How to take a history (which took a semester for them to get right), do a physical and understand a bit of patient psychology.

For a year, I worked on how to put more teaching on line. I took classes on creating automation to teach some things, like hearing heart murmurs. At that time, someone did a study that showed 30% of cardiology fellows could not hear simple hearty murmurs. They all get echocardiograms, which is OK if you have the machine handy.

About the time I was getting it to work, WebMD bought another guy's program for $300 million. Oh well.

I think everything that does not require labs should be on line.; 3/15/20, 9:55 AM
Sebastian said...: "Very different from having to know every bone and every muscle in the body, in just one subject, among many required to operate as a doctor."

But is this knowledge (still) "required" to do a good job as a doctor?

If so, will it remain the case as AI makes further inroads in diagnosis?

Based on reports of med school teaching, my impression is that, apart from some hands-on instruction, high-quality online courses would be preferable to what is offered now.; 3/15/20, 9:56 AM
mccullough said...: Basically all college students now will be attending The University of Phoenix.

So it’s Harvard University of Phoenix. The Ohio State University of Phoenix. The University of Wisconsin at Phoenix.; 3/15/20, 9:58 AM
chickelit said...: What after all are these study halls now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of learning?; 3/15/20, 10:00 AM
Michael K said...: But what can you do with “studies” degrees, except work for corresponding departments at the schools that taught them?

I fear corporations are filling HR departments with them.; 3/15/20, 10:01 AM
Michael K said...: "automation"

I meant animation.; 3/15/20, 10:02 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “Meanwhile, watch the STEM students just keep rolling along."

“Because they've been taking the hard courses all along.”

“What on earth will the lazy lightweights do now?”

A lot of people just don’t have the mind for STEM. We got lucky. We have had four generations now who were good at math. I had my kid doing derivatives in maybe 6th grade. I taught them it as a natural extension to Algebra - you just apply rules to the equation, and transform it just as they did with the Associative, Communicative, and Distributive property rules in Algebra. By the time they took Calculus in HS, it was easy for them. But, as I mentioned above, they are at least the fourth generation to have mastered Calculus, by early in their college career (in their case, by the end of junior year in HS). For most, it isn’t that easy. Most of my family does well with numbers - 4 of 5 boys were either math or EE majors in college, all with extensive physics on the side (kid had a double major in physics and math). Our mother was a math major, and her father was a chemical engineer and an artillery officer, with a sister who got a MS in math fro Columbia in 1925. Just runs in the family. My guess is that it was 2/3 genetic, and only 1/3 environmental. We got lucky. My kid ended up two years ago with a STE PhD and a very good paying and challenging job. And I will admit that I have a math degree because, for me, it was the easiest degree In the college.

But I live with someone who probably couldn’t have gotten a STEM degree if her life depended on it. Her last math class was Algebra which she hated. She saw no use for it in her life, and she was right. Her undergraduate degree was in dance, and then became an interior designer, where she was very talented. She had to know drafting, of course, but did it without using Algebra. She might have survived in biology, and maybe gotten through medical school, but she probably couldn’t have survived in math, physics, engineering, or even chemistry. Her mind just doesn’t work that way. While my mind is calculating all the time, she is seeing and blending many more colors than I can see all the time. She is extremely creative. I mentioned that 4/5 of us bouts found math and numbers easy, the fifth did not. His degree is in history. He had the same privileged background in math that the other four of us had, but struggled in higher math. But he was good in history, and loved it.

I would suggest that there are many more people like my partner and that brother who just don’t have any affinity for STEM. If they had to go that route, they would struggle mightily, not excel, and then hate any STEM related job they may get afterwards. It’s like ponding a square peg in a round hole. It just doesn’t fit.; 3/15/20, 10:07 AM
Mrs. X said...: I’m teaching two courses at a local college that will be going online next week. One of the two is a gen ed course that fulfills a requirement, the other is an advanced writing course. I anticipate rates of success that correlate to the students’ interest, either in the material or in doing the work to earn good grades. One course will work out just fine; the other will be anywhere from barely acceptable to disastrous. For the engaged students, I don’t think there’s much difference in online vs in-person for learning outcomes, but I can do a lot more with marginal students if I have them in a room with me.
If the truth is that the semester is really over already, per stevew, I wish they’d tell me so I could stop making these powerpoints.; 3/15/20, 10:11 AM
Paco Wové said...: "Inclined to count it as completed. Allow seniors to graduate and be awarded their degrees."

I suppose I'm inclined to be cynical, but I guess they figure the students weren't really learning anything in class anyway, might as well drop the pretense.; 3/15/20, 10:12 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “ Based on reports of med school teaching, my impression is that, apart from some hands-on instruction, high-quality online courses would be preferable to what is offered now.”

I don’t doubt that for the core of, say, Medical school. I was contrasting law school (where Ann taught apparently using the prevalent “hide the ball” technique) to medical school, the later requiring a large corpus of knowledge, while the former does not. And that large corpus of (currently) necessary knowledge, the physiology, etc, is the part that could very possibly be taught better online.; 3/15/20, 10:16 AM
Jersey Fled said...: "How did being on line cause them to do the reading?"

Because there was essentially no lecture. The model was directed self learning (my description). I typically gave my students PowerPoints on day 1 of the week which were the same ones I used in my for my on-ground students. These were basically a roadmap and a listing of key points. At the same time, students were given three to five discussion questions, which they were required to respond to. Every student. They couldn't respond to the questions without doing the reading. Besides tests and papers, students were given points for participation.

Students were encouraged to respond not only my questions, but to each others responses. I would guess that probably 50% of the learning that took place was student to student.

I typically checked in two or three times a day to comment on individual responses, direct the discussions in the right direction, or add new questions if certain topics were not being adequately covered. They could also question me at any time on areas that they were having trouble with.

The big difference between my online and on-ground classes was that I wasn't there all of the time. There was no big authority figure at the front of the class. If they needed to know something right now, they had themselves and their peers.

We had good, lively discussions in my classrooms as well. But it was a different vibe. As I said earlier, different, but equally effective.; 3/15/20, 10:19 AM
mccullough said...: Just give the students refunds; 3/15/20, 10:24 AM
rcocean said...: Every thing college related should go online and be computerized. Get rid of the liberal arts, and cut the time needed for a diploma from 4 years to 3 years. Stop forcing young people to take out $100,000 in student loans.; 3/15/20, 10:26 AM
Mark said...: A few years ago, the Virginia Bar passed a rule requiring that four hours of MCLE (out of 12) be taught live rather than recorded video on-line or by teleconferencing.

The only benefit was to the MCLE providers who charge $$$$ for those live classes, and who likely were the big lobbyists for the rule.

You don't need to be live or present in room full of other people in order to learn or ask questions of the instructor.

Wonder if they'll take another look at the rule.; 3/15/20, 10:42 AM
chuck said...: I fear corporations are filling HR departments with them.

That is how SV tech firms improve their diversity stats.; 3/15/20, 10:51 AM
Roger Sweeny said...: On May 4, 1970, 4 unarmed students protesting the Vietnam war were killed by untrained National Guardsmen at Kent State University. Many colleges and universities then shut down. As I recall, most students got credit. The school year lasted longer in those days, though May 4 was still getting toward the end of the semester. However, for schools on trimesters/quarters, not even half the term had passed.; 3/15/20, 10:58 AM
Yancey Ward said...: These colleges and universities don't appear to answering the real question that will demand an answer at some point if they cancel the rest of the semester- will the tuition and room and board covering the cancelled part be refunded. Funny how they haven't answered that, even hypothetically.; 3/15/20, 12:22 PM
chickelit said...: Cloisterphobia; 3/15/20, 1:16 PM
Yancey Ward said...: Chickelit,

🤣; 3/15/20, 1:17 PM
Unknown said...: I use a learning management system in all of my classroom courses. Although this would be the same basic system I'd use to set up an online course, I'm still not set up for online courses and it would take a lot of work to convert my existing courses to a purely online format. I'm at a two year college where all of the faculty uses the LMS to some extent. Faculty at the local university where I used to be on the faculty were (and I suspect still aren't) enthusiastic about using the LMS available to them. I suspect if directed to go online we'll all do so in a less than satisfactory manner and declare victory.; 3/15/20, 1:21 PM
Jaq said...: Universities should be operated like the Sorbonne. Self directed study followed by oral exams. Do the exams over the phone.; 3/15/20, 2:28 PM
Michael K said...: But is this knowledge (still) "required" to do a good job as a doctor?

If so, will it remain the case as AI makes further inroads in diagnosis?

I suspect we will find out as medical school courses have been diluted, allegedly to find room for more stuff like genetics. I don't disagree but things like anatomy and bacteriology have been greatly reduced.

As for AI, it is good in some things, like diagnosing chest pain by history, but probably a ways off.; 3/15/20, 3:13 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: “Every thing college related should go online and be computerized. Get rid of the liberal arts, and cut the time needed for a diploma from 4 years to 3 years. Stop forcing young people to take out $100,000 in student loans.”

I somewhat disagree. I think that the liberal arts are, ad probably always were, a luxury product. The problem was pretending that they weren’t. That means that they shouldn’t qualify for student loans, because absent some useful training I addition, most of those acquiring these degrees will never be able to pay back their student loans. Indeed, I would suggest that student loans should be underwritten similarly to how other loans are underwritten. They could, for example base loan amounts on repayment rates, based on for example major and class rank. If there are a bunch of Chinese Lit grads defaulting on their student loans, the don’t provide student loans to Chinese Lit majors, and in particular, Chinese Lit grad students.

Then, if everyone knew that you can’t get student loans for a Chinese Lit degree, having such a degree would signal to everyone else that you were from a 1% (or richer) family. You could look down at everyone who was forced to get a STEM degree and actually work productively after graduation.

Being the third of four generations to have attended small liberal arts colleges, I do find use for the Liberal arts. Several times in my career, I found myself working among peers who had, very obviously, spent their undergraduate years burning the midnight oil, doing engineering homework. And, for the most part, they were relatively ignorant when it came to Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Marx, the Federalist Papers, Keynes, Friedman, etc. personally, I think that my life is richer as a result of having bee forced to take Shakespeare and Plato classes, as well as learning Latin poetry from a master. These are the bases from which our society developed. Someone has to understand why we are where we are, and not somewhere else.

What was funny is that as I neared graduation from high school and was looking at colleges, my mother pushed liberal arts colleges (both she and her father had gone to Carlton College), while I was looking at engineering. She put a deposit down at a liberal arts school, and I did at the local engineering school (Colorado School of Mines - we lived in the same zip code at the time). That summer, she convinced me to go to the liberal arts college, and repaid me for my CSM deposit. Four years later, we had both flipped sides. She didn’t like that a math major from a locally well known small liberal arts college didn’t get me a job, while I looked at the environment at CSM, and was very happy I hadn’t gone there. The guys (very few women then, not a lot more now) there studied constantly got drunk for entertainment, and only occasionally dated. On the other hand, I had plenty of sex, had a live in girlfriend, spent a lot of time talking with people with different interests (she was a flautist, graduating in Music). We had almost every imaginable major in our fraternity house, including a blind English major living next door to me. We all got graduate degrees, so mostly did just fine economically, likely as well or better than if we had gone to engineering school. Except for one Philosophy major who ended up building wooden boats for a living. I was far happier having gone that route. But I look back and it was a luxury. But why not? My father could afford it. He was, at the time, the senior law partner in a Law firm. One semester, he had three boys in small liberal arts colleges - but tuition was only $12k a year. As I said, it was a luxury.; 3/15/20, 3:36 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: “Universities should be operated like the Sorbonne. Self directed study followed by oral exams. Do the exams over the phone.”

We tried that in college. I think that it was 20% of my class weren’t required to declare a major. Many did, esp any who were pre-med, because Bio and Chem game preference to their majors for classes. I wouldn’t have done much differently - I declared a Math major after I had finished the class work. One thing that we discovered is that grad schools weren’t all that interested. They wanted students from defined majors. And that extends to some extent to this day. My kid got into a research PhD program, based on their college research, that was from two summers doing NSF REUs (Research Experiences for Undergrads), which they got into as a result of their Physics major, and both REUs were physics based. In many cases, you need to have checked the right boxes to get where you want to go. (Though my kid wasn’t convinced of getting a PhD until in the program - we sold it to them as a way to get paid to get an Master’s degree, instead of having to pay as both of their parents had done).; 3/15/20, 3:51 PM
Big Mike said...: After retirement I picked up extra cash as an adjunct at a local university. I had two experiences there that had some bearing on this discussion. One of my students went to Korea as part of the US winter Olympic team, and I videotaped my lectures for her while she was away. She didn’t grasp some of the material, but had no real way to ask questions, nor was I able to sense that she was not getting it (and if you’re any damned good as a teacher you should be able to feel when the class is having trouble with some topic). So online courses may not be a panacea.

The other concerned a night when the school was closed due to weather and I taught my class remotely using Zoom. Again, no ability to feel the room and know when topics were going over the students’ heads. Not good.; 3/15/20, 6:22 PM
Jaq said...: Maybe people who are not capable of self directed learning shouldn’t be in college?; 3/15/20, 6:26 PM