I just finished reading “Are We Migrating Education Online Too Fast?” on Good’s website. In his article, Nikhil Swaminathan reported:
The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Policy, focused on an introductory course in microeconomics in which more than 1,600 students are enrolled each semester. As a result of space issues, many of the students opt to watch online versions of lectures.
“At the least, our findings indicate that much more experimentation is necessary before one can credibly declare that online education is peer to traditional live classroom instruction, let alone superior to live instruction,” the report states.
Wait a second here: “Many of the students opt to watch online versions of lectures.” That’s what they are calling online education? That’s not online education! I went on to read the Northwestern study and found that, sure enough, the misnomer came straight from the School of Education and Policy researchers (repeat: School of Education and Policy).
Sure, one can learn a lot from watching a video. But, one can not receive an education from watching a video. Even the MIT OpenCourseWare website (which offers free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT) states that “OCW is not an MIT education…MIT OpenCourseWare is a publication of the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education.”
Dynamic classroom interactions, that’s the key phrase. It has been shown time and time again that it is indeed possible to create such an environment in an online classroom. While certain lecture capture systems do offer robust interactive video players and they make watching an online lecture slightly more tolerable, students interact with the recorded content – not with the instructor, and certainly not with their classmates.
The Northwestern study, I’m sure, had accurate findings. It’s not entirely surprising what they reported: face-to-face lectures are more effective than recorded lectures. What is surprising is that based on these findings, the authors wrote, “live-only instruction dominates internet instruction.” They also failed to mention that most other researchers in the field have found that it is essential to utilize multiple instructional strategies for online learning (and most of these researchers would be against having students watch entire lectures online).
Traditional classroom-based courses cannot be “migrated” online. There have to be significant changes. In tandem with comprehensive faculty development, courses have to be redesigned from scratch.
Maybe we can chalk this story up to poor wording. Maybe the authors didn’t mean to imply that online education is inferior to classroom-based education because videos of lectures are not as effective as face-to-face lectures. Since this report came out of a school of education and policy, I sure hope this is the case.
With that said, I know there are still a lot of schools (hopefully not schools of education) recording lectures and delivering them as “distance education.” Is this you? Tell me about it. How long is each video? What kind of student feedback are you getting? What other instructional strategies are you using? What’s the ratio, video to other? Is this working for you? If not, and if you want to change your approach, are you facing resistance? From whom?
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