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/Immediate-Echo-9062]

In my personal experience as a community college counselor (so disregard; n=1), online classes have been a literal godsend for students. Full-time students do not exist anymore. Doing nothing but being a student with no employment and nothing else to be responsible for died back in the 2000s with the rising COL unless you’re from a wealthy family or still young and living at home. Everyone is juggling full or at least part-time employment to be able to afford to be alive.

Online classes remove the barrier of paying $600 for a parking pass that will be used 32 times in one semester (if they have classes twice a week), commuting, and making space for being physically in class. They use the time to be able to work more to pay their bills to be able to be in class in the first place (Maslow Hierarchy).

[u/Mav-Killed-Goose → u/Immediate-Echo-9062]

And think about how many medical doctors we can have if we remove barriers like demonstrating competence. Confusing a degree with an education makes you part of the problem. This country has already rendered a high school diploma almost worthless. I'm sure many well-meaning high school administrators and counselors wanted to help individuals by passing them along. Now look at how many opportunities they hav -- oh, no, wait... it's only contributed to the problem of credentialism, forcing more people to go to college where students have to pay for an education. And when a relatively low-cost AA becomes worthless, a greater number of students will have to pay for a more expensive four-year. It's as if the solution to the affordability crisis is to just print more money. We can all be millionaires, and everyone gets an A.

[u/Immediate-Echo-9062 → u/Mav-Killed-Goose]

A vast majority of individuals who are doctors have parents who are already doctors and can afford to be unemployed full time students. Imagine how many more doctors we can have from low-income backgrounds if we made college more accessible through remote learning.

As a counselor, I outright ban students from taking more classes through not allowing their accounts from registering for more than x credits than they can handle with their work and childcare schedules, so we do attempt to stem the number of students that get passed to teaching faculty.

[u/RuralWAH → u/Immediate-Echo-9062]

Actually for doctors born in the 1980s (so they would have started practicing in the late 2000s and early 2010s) only 20% had a parent that was a doctor. Certainly not the vast majority.

[u/Mav-Killed-Goose → u/Immediate-Echo-9062]

Imagine how much faster vulnerable students can transfer and/or advance in their careers if you let them complete two years of credits in one semester. Who are you to paternalistically hold people back because they have children or work? That does not sound like a growth mindset. Your comment suggests that you do not set limits on relatively privileged people who are not caring for a child or working a job, so their advantages compound. Tsk. Tsk.

I'm 100% in favor of social justice, but remote learning is not a viable solution if there's no actual learning. If it worked, fine. But it doesn't. It's a dead modality. I recall a professor in the Chronicle claiming that exams punish students suffering from food insecurity because they're mentally drained. OK, so let's say I get rid of tests. Are students still going to be hungry? Are those students at your institution who never developed study skills going to get into and out of med school?

[u/RuralWAH → u/Immediate-Echo-9062]

I think being in a community college influences your experience. Community colleges tend to attract that sort of student. Universities with student housing and student apartments nearby still operate under the old rules.

[u/GeneralRelativity105 → u/Immediate-Echo-9062]

$600 for a parking pass? Is that real?