Tamar Lewin’s recent article in The New York Times,“ After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought,” throws a wet blanket on the enthusiasm accompanying online courses. According to the article, linked here, “A study (linked here) of a million users of massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, released this month by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education found that, on average, only about half of those who registered for a course ever viewed a lecture, and only about 4 percent completed the courses.” Perhaps just as disturbing was the fact that 80% of those people taking MOOCs from the University of Pennsylvania had already earned a degree. Based on this fact, the notion that online learning offers a way to reach people who would not ordinarily take a college course may be open to question.
Most likely, some form of online learning is here to stay. We are in an era of experimentation where educators will throw many things on the wall and some of them will stick. Years from now, we will look at this time as a period of innovation characterized by both successes and failures. Not long ago, I read Richard Holmes’ history of hot air ballooning, Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air. Holmes’ review of the 18th and 19th centuries’ obsession with taking flight and trying many different ways to do so could serve as a historical analogy to today’s world.
At Bosque School, we have been “testing the waters” by offering an online-hybrid dual enrollment course with the University of New Mexico in computer programming. The students follow the lectures online, and once a week, they meet with a Bosque teacher to review what they have learned and make sure they are on track. So far, the results have been mixed: the Bosque teacher is finding that she’s teaching more than was intended, and the students are wrestling with the concepts they’re learning from the lectures.
When I floated the concept of another online course with my junior son, his response was blistering. He explained that what makes schools like Bosque unique and inviting is the relationship the students have with teachers; in typically logical fashion, he counted up the few minutes that each student would have with a live teacher during the week and said that this kind of class posed a fundamental break with our core value of community and the school’s emphasis on relationships. (Bear in mind that this is a young man who spends hours on the weekend playing multi-player video games with friends.)
Though we educators may desire to offer students more classes online, we may find that students crave even more face-to-face time with adults and classroom environments as they spend more time in their private lives on the internet. There may be an inverse reaction occurring as people seek out more human and humane forms of communication as a respite from their time in cyberspace. It may be that the classroom comes to offer a refuge from our teenagers’ constantly plugged-in lives. A classroom, with a teacher and fellow students, provides them with a way to connect and converse with each other in an unmediated manner. While some form of online learning may be permanently with us, how we balance the desire to disseminate more information to a greater number of people with the need to preserve ourselves as social beings remains open to question.
