Online classes: The coming scandal

Walking the halls of North Lake College at night is rather disturbing of late. Once the classrooms were full. There were as many students at night as during the day. Not now. The push to online classes have diminished the number of students actually coming to a campus class to the point where one wonders why we are planning to build two buildings on the grounds, and open other campuses in Coppell and South Irving. But never mind.

Aside from this issue, I’m not a big fan of online classes. I’m not opposed to them per se, but I am under no illusion that they offer the kind of educational opportunity that is afforded by in-class instruction. In short, here’s why:

1. Disembodied cyber-space exchange is not the same as actual person-to-person exchange. In fact, if we remember our Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” What online classes teach more than anything else is the technology of online classes, and the creation of an online persona required for such a class.
2. We cannot be sure the person on the other end of the class is the person they say they are. In other words, who’s really taking the test? I imagine that some enterprising folks have figured out to make a good living by taking online tests for people. They get paid, the “student” gets the credit, and no one is the wiser (literally).
3. Online classes destroy the transference of the instructor- student relationship. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know that part of the classroom process is the relationship between student and teacher, and the psychodynamics between the two. There were teachers I hated, who I came to love, because of how they were in the classroom.
4. The instructor is the “living textbook.” No online experience can give you the same feel as a real, living, emotional, physical, thinking person can, even if that person is behind their own keyboard typing away, with interesting videos, entertaining graphics and special effects.
5. Online classes are inauthentic. As Jean Paul Sartre once suggested, real life requires getting your “hands dirty.”On-Line classes offer convenience and increased opportunity to people who might not have the chance to take classes at all. True. But, they also strip the encounter from being the person’s intellectual struggle it needs to be in order to be authentic and real. I’m not suggesting that we do away with all on-line classes. That would be impractical. What I am suggesting is that on-line classes be limited. I suggest that a student not be able to take more than 10% of their college courses online. After all, if SACS accreditation is the slightest bit interested in maintaining educational standards, as they say they are, then they must know that on-line classes are a scandal waiting to happen. Sure they make money. Sure they are convenient and open the field to more people. But let’s be honest – they are simply the modern version of the old correspondence course offered through the mail years ago. I wouldn’t want someone operating on me who went to school over the internet, or got a degree through the mail.

Here’s another thing: perhaps, just perhaps, Higher Education should be a little inconvenient and require some sacrifi ce. Most of us who have suffered through years of the educational process would say: “they were the best years of my life.” Let’s not take that away from the generations to come, who, by the way, are going to need the best education we can give them.

I think a scandal is coming. I don’t know when or where, but it’s coming. If we are smart, we will get ahead of this curve and make some hard decisions that may save us and Higher Education in the end. It is not an appropriate argument to say, “well, someone is going to offer them. It might as well be us.” Let University of Phoenix go down in fl ames, and offer degrees that are at best suspect. Let us do the best job we can in offering online classes, but let us limit this offering to the benefit of our students and our institution.

— Christan Amundsen is a professor of psychology at NLC.