Ask Lemmy

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

Institutional inertia

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

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

Seems to work really well for them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I played wow during almost all of my online courses

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

I think hybrid is the way to go. You won't connect with your peers online the way you do irl, and I it's healthy to leave home from time to time. I also work better in a dedicated office space versus at home.

But as a student in an IT related field: God do I hate the uni pcs. They. would. not. run. unity. once. because of some obscure bug with my user profile and I had to waste my lecturers and my time switching users, trying to install the right version every single lesson. For two semesters I could not parttake. On my own PC at home I could have fixed that within minutes because admin rights and decent internet. Heck, I even asked the IT department if I could have admin rights which they denied, quite understadably. Sorry this turned a bit into a rant.

But cutting commute time and getting up shortly before lecture sure is nice :3

i prefer it too, but I've heard complaints from others saying they can't learn well that way.

I like online learning because I'm autistic and in person learning makes me uncomfortable. I can tolerate it but it gets really tiring eventually. I'm currently a senior and am almost done with my computer science bachelor's which I've done entirely online.

Online discussions suck, but so do in person discussions. Talking to neurotypicals is stressful just anticipating having to do it and trying to pretend to be "normal" really wipes me out.

I agree that some majors and classes are way better in person and I get that some people need to go in person to motivate themselves, but also going in person ends up being worse for some other people. I don't think people should be forced to learn online, but I think the option should be there if it is reasonable to do that class online.

Most posters here are talking about the benefits to the person taking classes as to why online classes aren't the norm, but let's be honest here.

When you own a monopoly, you don't give it up. More online classes would send the message that the "college experience" isn't as necessary, which would lose the college money.