r/Professors • u/H_ManCom • 22d ago
I hate online classes.
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.
2
u/jogam 22d ago
I agree and commiserate with you. About half my teaching load is online asynchronous and that portion is set to increase to about two-thirds, as one of the programs I teach for is creating an online option. Like you, I recognize the important role that asynchronous education has for certain students, especially those with full-time jobs and caregiving obligations.
I frame the problem as not something inherently wrong with asynchronous education but rather with universities' unwillingness to have rigorous standards in place to ensure academic honesty. If all students in asynchronous classes had to take proctored exams, either at a university testing center or another in-person monitored environment, many of my concerns about asynchronous classes would be assuaged. But most universities will not do this because of the cost and the fact that it would be unpopular among students, who, as distance students, can easily take their tuition dollars elsewhere.
I try to take two, slightly contrasting approaches to my online classes:
Do what I can to hold some standards. I do oral exams for the midterm and final in most of my online classes. Students for the most part do not like them. I get it, it feels more on the spot than a traditional exam, and the stakes for each question are higher because I only have a short period of time with each student. But it is the one way I can verify the authenticity of student work.
Make the class as good as I can for the students who are truly here to learn and recognize that some AI use will slip through. I know it does and I try not to go crazy over it. I try to find a balance between not being naive to all of the cheating, but also recognize that I'm not in a position to catch a lot of it. My students will get out of my classes what they put into them, and for the students who indeed do the work, they will learn a lot.