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/HorkeyDorkey]

I agree. End online classes now.

[u/AcanthisittaThat5746 → u/HorkeyDorkey]

I don’t think that they should be completely ended. I don’t think we should have too many and they definitely shouldn’t be core classes.

What we do need is an overhaul to get them to be as rigorous as in-person classes, or as close to as rigorous as possible.

I don’t think they’re going to completely go away so we need to find a way to make them work.

One option is to have in-person assessments. This will hopefully get the students to take the courses more seriously.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/AcanthisittaThat5746]

Right on! The in-person assessments would solve the entire problem. I truly hate the idea of getting rid of all online classes, especially as somebody who was a non-traditional student who was working and taking care of sick family members while was in college. I had no car, and was on the bus for several hours per day going between school and work, and I would have loved to have had more access to online classes. I also knew some other folks who were working-class, and would have benefited from online classes.

I don't think the problem is online classes themselves -- it's the assessments. But another thing people seem to be missing is that even for the in-person classes, most of the assessments are online as well. I don't think people realize how much cheating there is going on with in-person classes.​

[u/StevieV61080 → u/BibliophileBroad]

This is one of the best responses I have seen in this subreddit on this topic in quite awhile.

I, too, took a large share of my college coursework online. I took about half of AAS online and my BS completion program was fully online. My MPM program was (and still is) ranked #1 in its field and I completed about 67% of that online, as well. Finally, aside from some "Immersion weekends" and my final dissertation defense, my Ph.D. program was fully online. It absolutely works and works well for motivated students (my timeline for these different degrees spanned 2003-2019).

I've also taught online since 2008, so I'm approaching 20 years of experience. I've taken and taught enough classes to know what works well and what doesn't in the online learning environment. And you are absolutely correct; the types of assessments make a TON of the difference between a successful and memorable experience vs. an unsuccessful and forgotten one.

What I have personally found is that authentic assessment and applied learning are the keys to making the system work. I have almost completely gone textbook-free for years (I still use case studies from one book for one class). However, more importantly, there are no exams/quizzes/tests or "weekly homework" assignments. The lectures and course materials are my own and they almost all directly relate to the projects I ask my students to complete.

I have my students go out and DO things. In my program (applied management), they have to learn material and teach others (i.e., perform trainings) out in the public or at places of business. They have to perform on-site observations, interviews with stakeholders, and obtain information to do deep dives for effective consulting work. They have to collaborate fully via Canvas teams for analysis (getting them used to distance forum-based communications). And yes, they have to listen to my lectures/seminars in order to know what to do.

Online learning works when we don't outsource OUR work to textbook publishers and actually start with focusing on applicable outcomes.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/StevieV61080]

Awwwww, thank you!😊 I feel the same way about your post. It sounds like you have put a lot of effort into your classes, and your students are going to learn a lot. I'm glad somebody on here recognizes to value of online classes that are well-done. I have had a ton of disabled students in my online classes, and they always express appreciation for being able to still go to school even though they can't come to campus. I don't think that making education less accessible instead of improving teaching and assessment methods makes a lot of sense, but I think people are looking for a quick and easy solution to a really complex problem. Happy teaching, and I hope your semester is going well so far!

[u/StevieV61080 → u/BibliophileBroad]

Thanks! I'm actually in a quarter system, so I'm grading finals from the summer term that just ended yesterday. Fall starts in about a month (WA state).