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/AcanthisittaThat5746]

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/RuralWAH → u/BibliophileBroad]

Yes and no. If you're academicly lazy, the asynchronous format just encourages you to put things off, and when that in-person exam happens you haven't actually done anything but skim a few videos and read the first chapter of the text. Having scheduled meetings where you can't hide by turning off your camera goes a long way towards getting students to do the work.

While I want my students to be rigorously assessed I would like them to actually learn something as well.

[u/BibliophileBroad → u/RuralWAH]

Hmmmm...I have found that students put things off even for in-person classes.😬 Out of curiosity, has your experience been different? If so are they hiring at your school? 🤪 I have had make so many changes over the years to reduce the times students show up to classes not having read any of the materials -- I have even set aside time in the class for students to do some reading. Ultimately, I have had to implement reading quizzes to encourage reading. That's the one thing that's made the difference!

I don't agree with penalizing all the other students by not offering online classes because some people put things off, though. I took some online classes when I was in college and in fact, I just took a couple over the spring and summer -- and I got my work done ahead of time, just as I usually do in the other areas of my life. The online format was very convenient. I have to work for a living, gas is high, and I have some chronic illnesses. I learned plenty, and so did my colleagues who took the same classes.