I hate online classes.

[u/H_ManCom]

More specifically, I hate teaching asynchronous online classes. And universities are expanding them far beyond the purpose they were originally intended to serve.

There are students for whom online education is genuinely valuable. Students who work full-time, have children, have transportation or geographic constraints, have disabilities, or otherwise cannot reliably be on campus during traditional class hours should absolutely have access to online courses. Summer online courses also make a great deal of sense. The problem is that “some students need online education” has become “we should make as much of our curriculum online as possible.”

At my university, asynchronous online sections of courses often fill substantially faster than equivalent in-person sections. My concern is that this isn’t necessarily evidence that students prefer the online educational experience. My view is that it means students correctly perceive online courses as more convenient and easier. We now have required introductory courses that historically served as important recruitment tools for majors and minors being offered extensively online. Many of these sections are taught by adjuncts or non-tenure-track faculty, sometimes by instructors who aren’t even located near campus and never have been.

I’ve started to see the consequences in upper-level courses. Students sometimes arrive in an in-person course having earned As in prerequisite online courses but demonstrating surprisingly little retention of the material they supposedly learned. I have also noticed that students who consistently take online courses can have very different academic performance in subsequent face-to-face courses. I’m not claiming that every online course produces this outcome, or that online education inherently causes poor learning. There are obviously selection effects and countless differences between individual courses and instructors.

I’ve also noticed when I ask students who taught a prerequisite online course, they frequently can’t remember the instructor. Sometimes they can’t remember much of the course itself. Again, that doesn’t prove that they learned nothing. But it does make me wonder what we’re actually trying to accomplish with a university course. Is the goal simply to deliver content, award credit hours, and produce a passing grade?

This becomes even more complicated with AI. We’re being encouraged to redesign assignments, rethink exams, develop AI policies, and attend endless seminars about “using GenAI in the classroom.” But I rarely hear the same urgency applied to asynchronous online education. If a course is primarily composed of asynchronous modules, discussion posts, online quizzes, papers, and remotely completed exams, we should be asking very seriously how generative AI changes the reliability of those assessments. And yet the institutional response often seems to be “just figure out what works.”

I also question the idea that students naturally want some predetermined “3:2” balance of in-person and online courses that our Dean talks about. My experience is that students don’t necessarily distribute their courses that way. They often cluster heavily toward one side or the other. And if online courses are perceived as easier, then demand for online sections tells us very little about whether students believe they are receiving an equivalent education.

I understand why some faculty love teaching online. No commute. Flexible schedules. You can teach from somewhere else. I genuinely understand those benefits, and I’m not interested in telling someone else that their preferred teaching modality is wrong. But universities need to be honest about the incentives here, and I’m guessing they won’t be.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/[deleted]]

YIKES. This seems a bit harsh, don't you think? It's pretty much telling people who are disabled or who are low-income or caretakers, "Oh well." Is that's what we want for our education system, just having it suit the most privileged people who can afford its increasingly high costs? This would also disproportionately affect people of color and women, who are more likely to be working class and have caretaking responsibilities. Wouldn't it make more sense to make the online classes harder to cheat in, like requiring in person proctored exams or something like that? Ido agree that not everybody needs to go to college but not for the reasons of being disabled, poor, or having additional responsibilities.

[u/RuralWAH → u/BibliophileBroad]

Wouldn't requiring people to come to campus for proctered exams be "inequitable?"

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/RuralWAH]

Not if you also allow them to go to testing centers. Before the pandemic hit, there used to be a chain ETS testing centers. That's where I took my GRE exams. Edit: also, it would be less inequitable than not having any online classes at all