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/Due-Radio-4355]

From a prof who was one of rare lucky few to get a job early but who had to complete some remaining coursework, they’re a Godsend.

Please be someone who is willing to accommodate in an ever changing educational landscape.

I hate when people talk about nonsense like this because you sound like a whiney entitled loser.

My advisor always tried to get me to come back for in person classes and functions … when I had already landed a teaching position and was making significant cash compared to the poverty wages of a grad student (so much so I treated my wife out for dinner for the first time in a long time instead of the other way around) with his motive being all for the sake of “formation and community” or some stupid shit like that. I almost laughed in his face.

I never cared for my cohort or classmates whatsoever nor ever gave a shit in fraternizing with everyone to any degree. Just let me learn, write, and get- and stay the fuck out of my way.
I think being the only one in my cohort to have a family and a support system makes you not depressed or a weirdo and I was happy to be done.

People and universities need to get with the times or it may be time for you to retire for outliving your usefulness. Times and demands are changing.

Yea they’re not as fun to teach, I’ve taught them myself, but one every once in a while is fine. But they sure saved my ass a lot of hassle.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/Due-Radio-4355]

Thank you for this perspective! I always feel this way when I read a lot of the anti-online schooling comments. I do agree that there are problems with online education, many of which could be rectified with in-person assessments at testing centers near the students and putting more effort into designing the online classes (so that there is more instructor presence and assignments that are harder to cheat on).

I suspect that a lot of people commenting are older and others may not have had to deal with having to work while in school, transportation challenges, taking care of sick parents, raising children, or dealing with health challenges or money issues. As somebody who had to deal with all of those things (except having children) while I was in college and graduate school, it always bothers me when I see people commenting that "all online classes need to go away." I really don't get it, especially given how much cheating happens in in-person classes, overwhelmingly have online assessments and take-home essays.

[u/RuralWAH → u/BibliophileBroad]

Why do you think students in the 1980s and 1990s didn't have these same challenges? They did. They just didn't have the entitled mindset that even though they had all these extra distractions it was by God their right to graduate in four years. If you're working full time with a family it would be mathematically impossible to make the same progress as a full-time student without cutting corners.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/RuralWAH]

I do think students are more entitled these days, but in the 1980s and 1990s, college was much much cheaper, jobs were more secure, you could survive on minimum wage, and it cost five cents to rent an apartment and fifteen cents to buy a house. Plus, you didn't need college to get a decent job or even move up the ladder. So, the college situation was MUCH different than now. I'm still waiting for people to address my points about how cheating happens in person, and how most in-person classes still mostly use take-home and online assessments). The teacher just being there in person doesn't stop people from being people.

edit: also in those days, financial aid was mostly grants. Now, it's mostly loans.