Online Education Leaves Too Many Students Behind

In my opinion online education is failing because:

1- people are not accustomed to it and online education companies do not spread a "methodology" to approach online education. Students that need help are supposed to at least use discussion forums but often they don't

2- online education target the low hanging fruits, usually offering "just" master's degrees. I dreamed to be able to get my bachelor's by an accredited institution, on-line and for a reasonable fee but that dream never came true.

So at least in my opinion, online learning didn't really happen: the promises of "disruption" and "revolution" haven't been kept.

You still need to go to a regular university to get a bachelor's degree, and then you can (maybe) enroll in a master's degree, assuming regular universities aren't better/cheaper than online ones.

The premise of the article is right in that those students who need extra attention for learning the actual course material fall to the bottom while other disciplined and receptive students learn more. This widens the gap, and you can see it during online course discussions. The former group usually respond later and with much poorer quality, but they fulfill the requirements to earn the grade.

This is where my objection to online courses come in. The checkboxes for what is needed to complete the course are much easier to tick online with far less scrutiny of the actual work than in-person classes. (Then there are those in-person classes which use online platforms for work, but that's a whole other topic)

Even for those who are willing and able to learn efficiently from online courses, a simple search for what professors see on the backend of the platform used administer the course will show what metrics they use to decide whether the student did the work.

For example, in Instructure's Canvas platform professors know when you've copy and pasted, how much time you've spent on the system (and specific modules), which areas of the course have been opened, and other details on students use. Professors use different methods with the data they have access to, and some use none at all. Once a student figures out the professors hidden methods for determining gradable work, that's what can become the focus for the student and not the course material itself.

I do both. I figure out the professors hidden methods, usually after a couple of graded assignments, and then I make sure I check those boxes as well as fulfilling the assignment requirements. So even if a student is good at learning online, they can game it enough to make it easier to get a better grade. This further widens the gap because those who care less about the grade but just passing the course likely never think about these variables.

Ultimately, a student can pass an online class and not learn a single thing, while others can learn as much as the course offers, but likely retains less than an in-person course since they're able to have a crutch with tricking the system.

Needless to say, there's more to the story for success with online courses. Anecdotally, I learn far less from University online courses than I do from high quality tutorial videos that I find for subjects I want to learn online. Oddly, more and more professors are using these videos to supplement their curriculum. I don't know how I feel about that, as it seems to cheat the whole idea of paying them to teach me. Let me supplement the course material with outside material on my own, and don't integrate into your lecture.