Ask Lemmy

As someone who was was an adjunct before and during the pandemic, I can tell you from first hand experience that a lot was lost when transitioning from in-person to remote learning.

The most obvious impact was participation. Even at the college level, when students aren't physically in the classroom they are less focused on the class.

However, even beyond that there are a lot of things that suffer:

• The ability to just walk over to a student to see how theyre doing (whether they want you to or not).
• In class exercises and group collaboration.
• The ability to easily dive into questions and tangents (drawing programs online are very hit or miss).
• Not to mention audio and video issues.
• Ability to read the classroom (going to fast, something wasn't clear, etc.)

It may not sound significant, but it really adds up. Not to mention that the impact from covid in education is very visible at all levels of education.

Look at it this way, I paid £3,290 per year in tuition fees to attend university back when I went. The price of tuition has since nearly trebled to over £9k.

If I paid £9k per year for online courses and was denied the student experience of actually attending a university campus (as many teenagers who went to uni during COVID had to), I'd be fucking livid!

My education credentials: I am a flight instructor.

Classrooms are a terrible place to teach. Laboratories are better. I can give you a 9 hour lecture on the aerodynamics of maneuvering flight, with a lengthy powerpoint presentation with pictures and such...or I can give you a half hour briefing and a one hour flight lesson and you'll come away knowing more than you would have from that 9 hour lecture.

A degree you earned from sitting in a classroom watching powerpoint presentations and doing homework on paper is going to be useless. They're going to teach you how to fill a page of paper with calculus or an MLA formatted essay. No one actually does those things. Maybe. Maybe. something like computer programming or the like where the student can bring their own computer could be done entirely from home, because a laptop is sufficient lab equipment for that field of study. I can think of very few other degrees that should be granted based on listening to a professor talk and answering trivia questions about what he said.

Biology majors need to cut a creature open. Engineering majors need to design and build things. Psychology majors need to talk to people. Chemists need to mix shit together. Aviation majors need to fly a fucking plane. If your degree program doesn't include a fair amount of practical lab work like that, you're either in a diploma mill or you're majoring in business. Either way, just unenroll.

As someone with ADHD, I do horribly when I try to learn online. If it's not being forced to the forefront of my mind by going to a classroom every few days, I never get any assignments done and I end up failing.

People learn many different ways. Online learning is not right for everybody.

I've got a master's degree and I've also been a teaching assistant and I strongly disagree with the notion that online teaching is more effective. Putting all materials online is useful, but explaining something to someone is way more effective when you're standing next to them.

Things like lectures I agree are actually better online than in person, but there’s a lot about university learning that can’t really be replicated online.

The most obvious thing being physical demonstrations and hands on projects, which I had in several physics and engineering classes.

Also I think in-person works better for discussion sections or office hours, where talking it out and writing it on a board is often easier to do in person than online (although there are tools for these things online).

Another big thing you’d miss out on by studying online is the whole social aspect of living away from your parents and with other people your age and making friends and going to parties and such.

Institutional inertia

I can’t even get my postgrad course to record class sessions for the english as a second language international students.

Because American educational institutions are not and haven’t been about academia and learning for some time. It’s a good ol’ boys club you pay with daddy’s money or massive amounts of debt to be a part of, to give you a piece of paper you can use to virtue signal to other people who wasted similar amounts of money in the same place.

Hiring in IT has been an eye opener, I actively distrust people who present their degree as their first and foremost point of hirability; because they’re usually useless.

As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.

I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.

What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

The MSc Sustainability from Cranfield University is all online besides a 4 day residential each year.

Seems to work really well for them.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn't give them the hands on practice that they'll need for real lab work.

Your experience is not representative of the majority.

In practice, online education is worse. Discussion boards are a shallow replacement for real shoulder to shoulder conversations, many students speed through video lectures, and the entire experience seems flattened and gamified. It feels more “effective and efficient” but that feeling doesn’t necessarily match reality.

Also money. If it was all free to get the paper online, who would pay to get it in person?

What are your metrics for "effective?" As someone who is both teaching and taking classes currently, I can tell you engagement is pitifully low in online formats. Education is not just about memorizing facts and going through the motions to get a good grade. There'd have to be some amazing innovation in online education practices to convince me it will be the default anytime soon.

According to everything I have seen and read on the matter, most kids seemed to have a shit time with online schooling during COVID. Too easy to be distracted, frequent technical problems, no hands on activities or labs, no socialisation, no arts programs, no physical education, terrible support for kids who had learning problems or who otherwise required customised education plans, and the much larger class sizes meant an overall poorer quality of education.

For many, it was an unmitigated disaster, and most kids are much happier to be back at school in person. A handful loved it though. My daughter was one, though she also is very happy to have music classes again, so even she prefers being back in school.

Our conservative provincial government liked the cost savings though, so they tried to introduce an online course requirement to get your high school diploma, but due to popular demand, they had to include an opt out option. Since the opt out was so popular, they are now making it harder to access by requiring that you fill out a form for it available only by contacting the school guidance office.

Let's face it, online education is not popular because it sucks unless your program only requires a lecture, you are very motivated to learn and study, you don't need or want to discuss anything complicated with profs or peers, you have no learning or hearing disabilities, and you prefer to avoid people. It is great for work you already know how to do, which is the reason my daughter loved it, and why I like working from home. But default online education? Correspondence school has long been a thing, so if that's you, fill your boots. It seems most would rather pass on it.

I think a great majority of learning in college comes from living someplace other than home. Meeting different kinds of people from different places and spending time with them. Classes are very important but so much learning happens outside of classrooms.

Both me and my wife tried doing online courses for our Masters and ended up opting out that route.

Both of use found they were riddled with people who didn’t show up to the regular online ‘team meetings’ or wouldn’t contribute to the ‘team projects’ until the day of submission.

I know you have slackers in regular university as well but at least there, visibility and contribution is immediately noticed by the professors.

I would also argue that being hands on makes a huge difference in most courses.

In my experience

That's great, and that's why it's an option.

But research consistently shows that everyone is different and has different learning needs.

More ways to learn means more people succeed in learning.

Now your specific question is still quite interesting, with emphasis added to default:

Why it is not the default option for universities?

I think online is rapidly becoming the default for anything that can be learned online, for anyone who can learn online.

But I'm thankful that we have both community colleges and universities for things that cannot be effectively taught online and for people who needs more modes of learning.

I think it's easier to stay motivated when you have contact with other people. Even the OU recognises this and tries to incorporate meetups or at least video conferences.

I can't imagine my experience wold have been better online. The third year was almost all lab work and practical.

But aside from that, one of the best things about my offline experience was getting to spend time with people from other disciplines and honestly, some 20-odd years later, that has been almost as valuable as my degree in my career as well as my understanding of the world.

As other people already named it, personal interaction is one big factor. Being in a friend group, learning together and trying to achieve things together greatly enhances the chances to complete the studies.

Also this is only possible for lectures and most seminaries. Outside of social science and humanities you usually have some kinds of hands on or lab courses, which of course can't be done online.

One thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned is that practically everyone is cheating on online assessments when they can. I've personally seen probably 60% of my masters cohort cheat this way discussing exam questions on WhatsApp.

Grifting is so common and accepted in mainstream media people genuinely don't see the harm in cheating during assessments. To them that's part of the university experience, to win at any costs. And that's why we have nitwits who cannot tie their shoes or write a for loop without having to ask chatGPT.

Anyway where I'm from many exams have returned back to in-person, which is a shame because online exams were so much more relaxing which probably gave a better assessment of people's understanding vs their ability to cope with stress.

Online education isn't exactly great for people with poor self control or focus. At best, online education is good for lectures, but not much else (aside from if commuting or finding a place close by to live is a pain, then I suppose online education may be a tradeoff in that regard).

Everything else is generally better in person. Stuff like group projects and whatnot cannot be done online.

Since COVID, I've found that the growth of technology isn't exactly great for the learning experience. Now a lot of educational work takes place through the distraction vortex (computers and phones are very tempting to do something else instead). Pre-pandemic when education was more paper and pencil based, it is much easier to focus. At "best", you can only daydream or whatnot. Other people would not be as tucked to their phones and laptops like it is since the pandemic.

In a way, online education would also be harmful in reducing social cohesion as well if it becomes the default mainstream, so it's not just limited in excluding certain neurodiverse populations from access to education. Online education isn't exactly more "efficent".

I prefer online learning for sure as a method of actually learning stuff but for BSc the vast majority of what you learn isn't on your course, it's from the folks around you, and I don't mean corporate networking and brown-nosing for jobs, I just mean interactions with folks outside of your bubble.

I did CS and honestly that BSc was just a piece of paper tha helped me get an MSc and a job after that, I don't think I was taught anything there that I didn't know and the vast majority of learning was on my own outside uni for which the actual groundwork was laid during my MSc, which was online temporarily due to covid.

Nowadays I upskill exclusively online on my own and learn far more far more accurately this way. Though you still need folks to talk to about it who are ahead and behind, but it's easier to find that online than IRL anyway.

A lot of people probably want the traditional college experience, but online learning is definitely an option at a lot of colleges.

Because the vast majority of people either benefit or think they benefit from in person interactions. That includes people who end up in leadership positions who make decisions about how content is delivered.

Yes, plenty of people are able to be self motivated to do things online and it is great that the option exists for them. It won't be the standard for most things though, because of how most people tend to interact with the world around them.