The Trouble With Online College | Hacker News Reader

The Trouble With Online College

nytimes.com

The second point of this editorial highlights what is wrong with higher education in the U.S.:

>>Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.<<

A college education, at the very least, once signified that a graduate had the wherewithal to actually stick with something for four years and finish it. This included figuring out how to pay for those four years, figuring out how to live on your own and provide for yourself, and actually putting in the work to pass the required classes. A degree was a signifier of at least basic competence and dependability. At the very least, any college graduate you hired in 1980 was likely to be a decent employee.

But then we, as a society, decided that a college degree was an end in itself. We looked around and saw that most middle class people had college degrees, so obviously if we wanted to grow the middle class, we just needed more college graduates. And so we turned college into high school, part deux.

Now, a B.A. signifies little more than a willingness to borrow silly amounts of money and have instructors and administrators hold your hand through the entire process.

If those signing up for online classes are “struggling” or failing to even participate in those online classes, is that person really going to be a productive, high-skilled employee? I think the answer is pretty clearly no. So why do we continue to pretend that person needs a college degree?

Not at all. I borrowed a silly amount of money so that when I was learning compilers, I could drop into Alfred Aho's office and ask a question. That's not hand-holding, it's a resource for people who learn better interactively vs just reading a book or watching a video. Does it really say something negative about students if they consult with a TA about something they don't yet understand? There is nothing shameful or wrong about admitting a lack of understanding and seeking an interactive discussion to be able to grasp it. If anything it's one of the more professionally applicable skills college can teach. I'd rather hire someone who experientially understood the value of in-person communication and patient explanation than someone pompous who thinks that people who can't get it on their own the first time are a lost cause.

Attending office hours is a great use of your time at a college, and showing up requires self-discipline and motivation.

Suppose you were to draw a Venn diagram of the subset of students who fail to even attend online classes and the subset of students who regularly attend office hours so that they can more deeply understand a concept. How big do you suppose the overlap would be?

I'm not arguing the point you're making. Nobody is. (Although many would argue that spending silly amounts of money is not a prerequisite to gaining access to esteemed faculty.)

The argument is that it requires more motivation for online students to be successful than those in person. That argument could be wrong, but it does not require students to be total non-attending slackers to be correct.

Since you say you're arguing a different point: What exactly were you characterizing as hand-holding?

You can ask question of the instructor in a MOOC setting and it's actually much more efficient.

If several students have the same question, which is likely, then rather than having multiple individuals show up separately at office hours, a single post in a forum will answer that question for everyone, even those who didn't think to ask. This is a huge benefit to struggling students.

In general, MOOCs level the playing field in terms of socio-economic barriers to higher education. I believe this is the primary reason for their criticism. They erode the function of higher education in separating the haves from have-nots.

A post in a forum is nowhere near the same thing as an actual interaction. Maybe something like webchat office hours would come close, but there are going to be people who are much more receptive to in-person learning.

Given the extensive body of literature in education research perhaps you can provide a citation?

In the last MOOC I took, I didn't see answers on the forums. I saw the same questions asked over and over, people asking for sample solutions to the assignments once the due date was passed, people asking for answers to the quizzes once the due date was passed, and nothing. If MOOC's are going to be so great then the people running them need to put in a little effort.

(Am I the only one who sees 'MOOC' and pronounces it /moose/ in my head?)

The section you quoted suggests to me that, in addition to the "end in itself" issue, we're also starting to treat college the same way we treat primary and secondary education: No child left behind. If the lowest common denominator can't handle it, then we shouldn't be spending money on it.

This actually makes more sense from a for-profit institution's point of view than it does for state-sponsored schools, but for whatever reason it started at the latter. I suppose seeing that attitude shift to the former as well shouldn't be too surprising.

Maybe college is like secondary school because both behave according to traditions that have developed over hundreds of years, whereas online education is something very new and has very different parameters.

I'm going to make an utterly irrelevant comment here, but I think that in general it's better to not use "former" and "latter" like this---it often forces the reader to look back earlier in the text if they want to figure out what you're saying.

Failure should always be a real option for college students. But, that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to have a system that addresses the slightly less-motivated or those whose learning benefits from personal interaction.

I think one of the issues is that at times students are far to separated from the costs. Back in the "good old days" I needed to know where that next class's cost was coming from on top of gas, food, and lodging.

The cost was more "real" to me because I knew where all those dollars came from and where they were going

This article feels intellectually lazy. This passage particularly bothered me:

"A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English. " (emphasis added)

How is that conclusion supported by the facts in the article? Its also possible that those taking online courses are also the ones with the least time for school in general. But who knows!

Similarly, if I found that students attending class at night performed worse than those attending during the day, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that learning is harder at night.

correlation != causation and all that.

I think the editorial doesn't make clear exactly what "online courses" mean.

There are two ways to interpret the phrase:

1) Normal high school students go to community and technical colleges and possibly take online classes. In that case, you are correct

2) In washington state, you can actually take online classes in high school and even k-8 (k12.com) and my understanding is that there have been studies on k12 students and their performance in community and technical colleges as a function of whether they went to a physical or virtual elementary and high school. I am guessing they are referring to the latter (where other studies -- take a quick gander at google -- do draw the conclusions that the article refers to as "well known")

Unfortunately I couldn't find the study that the article is explicitly referencing.

This begs the question. IS there trouble with online learning or online students? Certainly there are factors that would cause someone to enroll in an online class outside of the fact that "it is online".

Anecdotally, when I think back to my learning experience, I found that I had to be very self-motivated to learn in online classes and also take professors to task being available. This actually mirrored my experience with huge (100+ students) lecture hall style classes.

"This begs the question."

No, it doesn't. http://begthequestion.info/

The peculiar meaning of that euphemism in logic and philosophy is going to lose out to the way laypeople understand those words. The fuddy-duddies should pick a new less-confusing phrase to mean "assumes the conclusion". Might I suggest, "assumes the conclusion"?

I prefer "is circular thinking." Most people have no difficulty understanding the idea of circular reasoning even if they have no idea what it means to beg the question.

Educated people saved the word "ironic" once. "Begs the question" isn't dead yet.

Actually, it does. The article assumes that the reasons people did worse in these online courses is because of the set of students enrolling, when the question is 'does the set of students or the presentation of the course matter more'?

It's not an article, it's an editorial. Which means it's both opinion and severely space constrained. I think it's fair to assume the opinion is based on more information than is presented, and they link to studies.

I'm not claiming they're right, but "lazy" is ridiculous.

Hard to prove they are lazy but they certainly put very little effort into actually understanding or explaining the current state of online eduction.

Would it be lazy not to be familiar with articles on the subject published in your own paper?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-o...

Maybe I'm slow. Please point out the part of that article at odds with the opinion in the editorial? The only area of overlap I could see was this passage:

> Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr. Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

My point was that the nameless editorial writer did not seem to be familiar with the basics of the recent developments in online learning despite it being covered repeatedly in their own paper. For example the highly pertinent fact that they are much more cost effective (most MOOCs are free and teach vast numbers of students - 13,000 in a single class in your quote). Or how about the huge numbers of students with no access to university education for many reasons (can't afford, have to work, live far from any college, live in 3rd world, etc.) that can take classes online. Or the ability to replay or even slow down parts of the lecture that you don't understand immediately. Or the impracticality of short lectures in the traditional classes.

Maybe the rhetoric of an editorial is disguising some deep understanding of the issue but what actually appears on the page is hardly convincing if not actually misleading to those not familiar with the subject. See the many other comments here.

Not saying this will solve all out education problems but sure seems like one of the biggest advances in a long time. Can you think of anything else of comparable potential impact?

Also low completion rates in MOOCs is a red herring. These are FREE class where you have to "enroll" to browse the material. It would be like counting everyone who read the course description, visited the class webpage or flipped thru the textbook in the bookstore as having enrolled in a traditional class. Not an apples to apples comparison.

It is more likely that the opinion in this editorial reflects those of the vested interests of our current education system than clear thinking on this issue.

We're talking past each other; a few points, though :). The content dissemination part of these MOOCs isn't new. You can get short lectures by VHS tape. Most classroom lectures are watered down versions of the textbooks/research monographs. PBS has had objectively fantastic educational content (not saying that all of their ed. content is fantastic, just that some of it is) for decades. It was before my time, but I think that people were initially most excited about the educational possibilities of TV, so, a priori, there's been comparable potential impact before.

What's (probably) new is the ease of entry and the communication & coordination between students and instructors.

The low completion rates aren't necessarily red herrings; these are students that are self-selecting into online classes, so they're probably more comfortable with computers than most other students. They're also choosing classes that are particularly well suited to online instruction. So it goes both ways.

If you have links, data, whatever, please share it. Otherwise it looks like you're giving your anecdotes and opinion some sort of privileged status and I'm sure you don't mean to do that. I still don't know what point you think the article you linked to makes or refutes. And the original editorial makes two recommendations:

"Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses."

What's wrong with those recommendations?

As I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, you'd probably consider me to be part of the "vested interests of our current education system" since I teach at a university. I'd bet, though, that the deans and university administrators of the world are short sighted enough to think that they're going to benefit from this direction in education (they like to cut costs). Most faculty are too busy to pay much attention. The only "insiders" that I'm sure are on top of this are the textbook publishers and standardized testing organizations, and they're pretty flexible about their revenue streams.

I'm not sure I would agree that video tapes or television has had the same impact on education as the internet but they were certainly useful tools. As you mention the new thing about online classes is the interaction. As a professor how do you think your interaction compares with that on a well designed MOOC like Coursera? I was pretty impressed with the responses from other students in addition to that from the professors and TAs.

On completion rates perhaps we are talking past each other. Think of this: if you class was free and took 5 seconds to enroll how many more students would sign up?

An interesting issue is self-selection. The editorial mentions that "those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges". Do you think these students might be self-selecting, perhaps they work and can't come to class, and thus invalidating any statistical significance of this correlation, not to mention causation.

Frankly the two recommendations are worthless. First as the editorial mentions online eduction is already widely deployed. Are they calling for a roll back until the classes are improved? Who decides when they are good enough? Should everything be improved - sure. I have had some pretty poor professors. How can we get those improved?

The second recommendation's sentence structure is quite convoluted but seems to say this: remedial students should not be allowed to take online classes until the are successful in traditional classes. I looked briefly at the Columbia School of Education site but didn't see any evidence to support this conclusion. Don't remedial student currently have a hard time in traditional classes? Shouldn't they improve this before they widely deploy them?

You seem pretty thoughtful so I hope you are on the side of better eduction for all. If university deans and administrators are short sighted then universities will struggle to adapt when the world changes.

If you have not already please take a class on Coursera. You might learn a thing or two and I'll pay for it. :)

I think that most universities will probably be totally fucked by the upcoming changes in education. :) If it leads to better and/or cheaper education overall, I'm fine with that, even if it could be slightly inconvenient for me personally. I doubt that the MOOCs will do it on their own, even though they could eat up a large source of revenue for these colleges, but whatever comes a generation or two after them should be really interesting.

I wasn't clear about the tv/video analogy; I meant that there have been people (in the past) as excited about the effect those technologies would have on education as people are currently excited about MOOCs, etc. I agree that tv, etc haven't had as big of an impact as the internet seems to. I plan to take a coursera class soon to get first hand experience but haven't gotten around to it yet, so I can't really make a comparison. I would not be surprised at all if it were just as good as or better than a large lecture, but I'd want decent data before making up my mind. Not because I think that there's a lot of "personal attention" that students get in a 500 seat lecture, but because showing up in person and participating with groups seems to (anecdotally) somehow matter in lots of activities.

re: completion rates, I know that a lot of the students who sign up for these classes have no real commitment to take it to completion. But I'm pretty confident that if you did a random experiment and assigned students to online or in-class courses, the students assigned to online classes would have a lower completion rate. I don't know how much lower, and it's quite likely that for some classes, the reduction in costs and the increase in access would make up for the decrease in completion rates, and for other classes it wouldn't.

The recommendations aren't totally worthless, because (at least as I read it) they're pretty specific to colleges replacing traditional lectures with online courses. There's a lot of enthusiasm among (many but not all) university administrators to do this -- to offer online versions of existing classes along with or instead of the traditional version -- as a cost cutting move. I haven't seen a lot of concern or resources for adapting the material to be a good fit for an online course, making sure that the students get adequate support (most resources for student support require the student to be physically on campus), etc.

I see a number of comments already in the direction of "if I am a highly-motiviated individual then I ought to be able to ..", with which I completely agree.

However, in my experience teaching at a respected but not top-ranked college, the percentage of people right now who are charged self-starters is not high. Unless the nature of students changes then I don't believe that education will undergo a phase shift to online-driven. I'm not knocking the students -- it is a characteristic of any population of people that the percentage who will do a very hard thing on their own is small.

It is more likely that mainstream college education will absorb online models, giving credit to the typically advanced students who do well in such courses but still running a large number of traditional classes or perhaps a set of classes that span a range of blended-ness (as most schools are moving toward now). A good change, but not really a revolution.

I agree that many people are not self-starters, and that this is a problem (in general, not just in college). I don't think it's because of an inherent defect in the people in question - much more likely it's because they spent too many years being herded like sheep - but it is still a problem.

I put it to you, however, that the solution is not to spend even more years herding people like sheep.

I attended online college to get my degree in Computer science, for at least half of my undergrad, and I can say that it is just as challenging as attending the reals classes at a brick and mortar university. The challenges were different, such as not having the professor breathing down your neck to get assignments in, and having to self motivate to get things done. However, that doesn't make the knowledge I acquired any less real or any less valuable, I simply had to read the book do the assignments myself, with a professor helping me from across the country. My exams were proctored (impossible to cheat on(well not impossible but difficult), and I learned a ton. I think there will come a time where people will realize that doing a mixture is a great thing. Part of college is the social aspect, meeting peers getting to know other people in the field, which can't replaced online (although this is a great business opportunity if you can) and the other part is learning. This part is easily and affordably done online, and possibly more effective for some people.

"This part is easily and affordably done online, and possibly more effective for some people."

That sums it up for me. I work full-time along with my side projects and I still chug along at getting a degree, running all over the city is not in my favor for taking classes. Online classes have not only saved me money but created more time to take on other projects that pay for more classes.

In regards to cheating, honestly it is just as easy to cheat in class as it is online. BUT this is not factoring the personalities. Some people cheat because they do not really care, others do NOT cheat because by cheating (in my mind) you are cheating yourself.

Lastly, online classes have taught me something far more valuable than a brick and mortar class - RESPONSIBILITY. For me (key phrase) going to class was not only troublesome in my day to day but horrifically boring. On top of which with campus classes you get more of the professors personal opinions on matters rather than actual material that you can base your studies off of to generate your own opinion or hypothesis. With online classes I plan my weeks in advance from quizzes and tests, to writing papers and doing research and of course incorporating my needed day to day duties.

As a student who has taken both campus classes and online classes, I would have to say that online classes are more challenging.

  The challenges were different, such as not having the professor breathing down your neck to get assignments in, and having to self motivate to get things done.

I'm not sure what you're inferring here. Assigments were given a due date. That's it. No breathing on anyone's necks.

...and are you saying that students at traditional univeristies do not have to be self-motivated?

EDIT: Re-reading, this could be interpreted as sounding harsh, but I certainly don't mean for it to be so.

I'm not convinced that dropout rate is meaningful at all for free online courses. Personally I've signed up for way more Coursera courses than I could possibly complete, just so I could dip into the most interesting lectures, come back to them later, etc. Seems to me that's a good thing.

I did come close to completing a couple courses. When the certs start to mean something I might work harder on the last bit of effort to get them.

Paid online courses with college credit are another matter of course.

Let's be honest here. The fact is college is more necessary then ever, its also desirable. The political conversation today is focused around jobs, and job creation. But its kind of deceiving. Our problem isn't that we can't find enough work for people, its that we can't find enough unskilled, or low skilled work for people. If you've ever spent months looking for a person, in this "high unemployment" era. It'll be obvious to you too, and it's not simply a matter of having unrealistic expectations.

We've entered a new era of employment. It used to be that you could just take a high school student, assume he'll have what you need, then spend a few years mentoring him to fill in the rest. Today, that generic mold doesn't work. A lot of companies are carving value out of doing things more efficiently, and often that means finding people with very specific sets of skills.

Online education is EXTREMELY useful for this. I personally was able to get my current job by watching online lectures. I certainly wasn't an expert on the subject, but at the very least I was capable of demonstrating how capable i was to learn it on my own. Formalizing this process would only help this process!

If online education isn't working for some students, I don't think we should be questioning whether online education is the right path. Clearly it's necessary, and the small successes its had now has proven that it has potential. Instead of going backwards, we should be asking how we can go forwards.

One of the things about physical vs online higher education that I see as under-discussed is the ambient learning that takes place when you are in physical location with a bunch of curious people learning similar things to you.

I know that I learned so many things in college just because I happened to be sitting around, talking with interesting people before or after class or while working on assignments together. Just living in a dorm with people in that sort of "adult life with training wheels" setting and being able to hang out with totally new people who I might not have sought out on my own was REALLY valuable. There is so much to be learned outside of the classroom at college and online education is going to struggle to emulate those things.

Yes there are all sorts of social places online that can augment this, but there really is something valuable about learning and interacting with people in person. Yes, there are local clubs and hackerspaces and meetups, but there really is something to be said for having all of these things right at your fingertips (almost) all with in close proximity and (almost) all populated and run by your peers. A good college just lowers the barrier of entry for all these things.

Online education is awesome. It gets information to people in a way that was never before possible and that's a great thing. But I think that formal education is only one benefit of a good college experience.

The online courses I took at Jr. college were mostly horrible, which is why I took as many of them as I could.

A class with "discussion credit", multiple choice quizzes, and one-size-fits all writing assignments, is pretty much junk. At my Jr. college, these classes were the most likely to be made into online courses. As such, a student was insane if they were required to take a course like this and didn't elect for the online version, because a physical class only wasted even more of your time.

A physical course had extra value for students who lived on the pass/fail line. They get a chance to display their problems to the teacher, who may feel bad and give them extensions on their busy work. Sympathy was harder to garner online, which is probably why online courses saw higher failure rates.

"discussion credit"

Discussion credit was the bane of online classes, in that most classes of this type were "regurgitate the text back to me" so there is an inherent hierarchy of "correct" answers ranging from best to worst, so the first poster gets the best comment and so on down until the folks later in the day have a terrible struggle trying to find something to repeat back to the instructor. So rather than having to be in a lecture hall at precisely 2pm or 6pm on Wednesdays, you had to be online at precisely 9am on Monday so as to be in on the discussion credit feeding frenzy at the instant the unit opened, and I hated that component of online classes. This completely eliminates the 24x7 advantage of at least some online classes. Discuss one of the three defining characteristics of object oriented programming as per the text... well the fourth guy who waited to post at 9:01 am is pretty much outta luck until next week... if he's lucky.

One interesting observation of the article is it equates all online courses as being the same. The state-U MBA program, the regional hybrid private-U CS degree, the 250K person MOOC classes, all the same. If they tried that with brick and mortar they'd be laughed at.

Also I feel based on experience the sympathy card was harder to garner because, after all, its theoretically a 24x7 online class. You'd think superficially that not having to be at a lecture hall at 2pm would eliminate "flat tire" as an excuse, however, fundamentally, a flat tire eliminates a couple hours outta your life, the specific time doesn't actually matter. If I was going to do my classwork online at 3pm and instead spent my time at the tire repair shop, it has to be realized that missing time at home is just as damaging to productivity as missing time in class, if you're doing classwork in both locations.

Of course it wont work when the idea is to simply take a not-so-great physical concept (a course syllabus and weekly test structure) and just digitize it. It doesn't matter what industry, this will always fail.

Online shopping, for example, isn't just a easy access to the products found at a brick and mortar store; it is an entirely different way to shop. Amazon realizes this and knows that sometimes people want cheap (hdmi cables) and other times good quality (chef knives).

Khan Academy gets it. You don't take a 'math course' but you answer questions and watch videos and you know how well you are doing in a general area. You know when you should study something more and you know when you are solid.

I would love to see all online courses abandoned and instead follow a khan academy approach. Drop the course idea and instead have thousands of goals where each goal can be tracked by how well you handle problems.

I used to teach in colleges and the number one reason a student became confused wasn't because they weren't as smart as the other students but something small that they missed. It could be as simple as not knowing how ftp works, or not being used to a *nix environment, or not knowing where environment variables are set in a windows environment. This same person might have decades of ide-based-java experience but struggle when asked to compile on the command line. The khan academy approach would distill all of these concepts into goals and would determine what should be your next area to study (looks like you got lost on using ftp, let's cover a few videos of that before we move into the next section).

"have thousands of goals where each goal can be tracked by how well you handle problems."

My children are experiencing this in K12 math via xtramath as part of their school curriculum. Reforms like this bubble up from the lower levels, so my children will have decades of this method of teaching before I'll get to finally experience it with advanced cryptological number theory or whatever. You may be surprised at how heavily your new idea has long been implemented at the lower grade school levels.

Three closely related, yet somewhat different examples are the * koan projects where * is pretty much every trendy language, project euler, and traditional paper and pencil Kumon math and reading classes.

The article fails to deal with selection bias. It never establishes that the populations that enroll in online courses are sufficiently similar to the populations that enroll in traditional courses that such things as attrition rates, etc., can be directly compared.

Bingo.

It looks like every comment here is picking apart the reasoning of the New York Times editorial kindly submitted here. The editorial includes a paragraph relating a rather troubling factual assertion: "A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English."

Taking the statement "Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn" (college-level subjects) at face value, which I will because I have seen multiple sources that report the same phenomenon, let's see if the editorial makes sense. The editorial does NOT say that anyone has done a treatment/control study of taking beginning college students of matched preparation and then having some take online courses by random assignment while others take brick-and-mortar courses by random assignment. It is that kind of study design

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that would be necessary to blame the online nature of the courses for lack of "success" (completing the course and going on to another course) by the students in the course.

If bad preparation of students before they attend college drags down the success rate in college courses (as seems plausible to me), then the policy response is to research better preparation for K-12 students. Fortunately, many researchers are working on that important issue.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/measures-...

But if an online college course makes the difference between a college-age student attempting to take a course versus not attempting the course at all, and is meanwhile less expensive for the taxpayers who subsidize higher education, let's give the online courses some more tries and attempt to refine and improve those. This doesn't have to be an either-or choice. Students who are adults attempt to find college courses while fulfilling their other adult responsibilities, such as earning a living. Sure, let's improve courses for learners at all ages. But let's not reject an entire learning model if it is chosen willingly by some students who may not be able to choose any other.

This assumes that everything is just fine and dandy in the brick and mortar college world. It isn't.

Also, in a lot of cases the choice isn't between taking a class online or taking it face-to-face at a college. It is a choice between taking it online or not taking it at all (for all sorts of reasons: money, geography, timing etc).

Btw, I just finished one of the algorithm courses from Coursera (taken at night, from Sweden, for free). The course was excellent, I've reviewed it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...

Many of the comments here seem to be variations of, "I don't like editorials." I don't either, but their main point and recommendation seems pretty uncontroversial:

> Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

They mention some studies (that I haven't read because I'm at work; I'm sure they're not bulletproof) that are broadly consistent with that recommendation. It would be great to have a truly randomized experiment, but that's unlikely to happen (although one could approximate a randomized experiment w/out too many ethical implications. For all I know the studies do that, but I don't know).

But, as someone who almost never attended lectures as an undergrad, all of the same arguments about online lectures can be made (and I have made) about learning directly from the textbooks. Most people seem to find that difficult, so I wouldn't be totally shocked to learn that there is a tangible benefit to actually being in the same room as the instructor and asking for clarification at the moment of confusion.

Disclaimer: I teach at a university. For the 250 student intro lecture I teach, I would be unsurprised if it could be taught just as well online, but I would want decent data on it before making up my mind. For the small classes I teach, I'd be surprised.

A silly article by someone with an obvious bias.

Those who opt for online courses at community colleges are:

   Those with childcare barriers (poor Moms)

   Those with 1 or more full time jobs
   
   Those who are intimidated by the college atmosphere

   ELL students

   Disabled students

   Those who want easy education with little effort put
   
   Those living in rural areas

These are the groups least likely to succeed. The selection bias in this case is impossible to get around without a legitimate RCT.

It's eye opening to see the backlash against an emerging trend that does nothing more than offer educational opportunities to more people at a substantially lower cost. Who loses? The guy writing the editorial most likely.

So the crux of this argument is that students who are struggling in traditional brick and mortar colleges struggle even more when taking online courses, and this is supposed to be damnation of online courses? Yes, of course there are students who need the extra hand-holding and support that personal, face-to-face attention and tutoring provides. If they have the money to pay for that very expensive service, then I say go for it. If, however, a student is a self-starter and doesn't require one-on-one attention to effectively learn, they should be able to get accredited for far cheaper than they can today.

Sounds to me like the bigger issue is with the people taking the classes. I've taken a few online classes, and it was hard because it requires that you be on top of the work; otherwise the whole class can quickly slip away to a point where you can't catch up and have any expectation of decent results in knowledge gained or grades earned.

Not every class should be taught online, not every professor should teach online, and not every student should take online classes. That doesn't mean online classes are inherently bad; they're just different and require different people/circumstances to provide a successful experience.

I obtained my MSLIS via UIUC-GSLIS's online program, known as "LEEP". http://www.lis.illinois.edu/academics/leep

It is somewhat unique among online education programs in that lectures are streamed live on a schedule, instead of consisting of a set of recorded videos. They are recorded, but students are expected to attend the live lectures, which involves signing into a chat server much like IRC. Relying on the recorded lecture archives often means missing out on live group activities conducted on the chat server during class.

It was an excellent program, superior to my on-campus undergraduate engineering school experience in some aspects. In particular, I appreciated how the chat-based lecture attendance allowed students to ask and answer questions without interrupting the professor, which allowed us to learn from each other. In cases where students might not have an answer, the chat transcript allowed the professor to answer questions during breaks. There were also a set of web-based forums for each course, where students could hold discussions and ask questions between lectures.

The only downside is that the live online lecture model has sort of ruined me for the recorded video model of online education. I keep signing up for Coursera classes and then not having the motivation to watch the lectures.

Does an editorial titled "The Trouble With Online College" make no mention of colleges that only operate online? That seems... odd, I guess.

Ignoring that bit of my personal pedantry, this editorial was disappointingly shallow. I get this is a newspaper editorial and not an essay, research paper, or some sort of manifesto but still...

The author's position seems to pivot entirely on class-time (or, more broadly, face-time) with teachers. I posit that there are many more equally-pressing issues.

For instance (anecdotally speaking), first-year students either know what formats and incarnations to expect from traditional classes, or they are able to quickly learn what to expect; online courses often have very little in common with one another.

Online courses differ in interface, necessary/compatible software and hardware, and how and what course information is available. Online courses are still young and improving.

I'm still not sure how online course developers will ultimately tackle the most fundamental issue with online courses: trust. How can you as a teacher or course administrator be confident that the person on the other end is who he/she says he is and that the person isn't using contraband resources?

I was hoping for more depth in this article because determining and implementing the appropriate mix of technology in education is objectively necessary.

Is it possible online classes are difficult to make it through for the same reason that traditional classes are difficult to make it through - because the classes are boring?

I've tried several online classes, ranging from Sustainability to JavaScript, and I've found them all incredibly boring. Perhaps, we need to rethink the value of having someone lecture for an hour several days a week.

The best way I've learned to do things is to go out and try it, and figure out why it did or didn't work.

I'm currently doing a CS degree entirely over the web at my local university. I already completed 4 classes and I have an easier to time to focus and learn than when I was in class with other students, in which case I was constantly distracted by social interaction.

>>The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return.

I'd be interested in seeing the full statistics here. In my case, the course material is the same online than for the in-class students, and the exams are the same, given at the same date, same place. I've seen the exam's average result for both online and in-class groups on my math course last session, and the average was higher on the online group.

Maybe it depends on the type of online course. I'm doing synchronous courses, but can watch the replays at any time. We have a web site dedicated for each course, with forums and can always easily talk with the teachers and get quick answers for anything. I believe asynchronous courses would be much harder to follow.

I am taking two classes at the moment and the only option the college offers for them is to take them online. (One is supposed to be a hybrid but only in theory.) What I have found is that the workload in one of these online classes actually compares to one of my MBA grad school classes. Many times the assignments do not have adequate instruction provided from the text in order to complete them. For these reasons, I have been left me really desiring that this was a traditional class with a real instructor and instruction provided in the classroom. There is something to be said for classroom interaction for sure. It would at least have been nice to have been given an option to take the class in an actual classroom setting. This way I could actually be taught the content rather than left trying to figure it out by with a learning lab instructor or by myself.

In my 5 years of University in Germany, probably 95% of my courses had at least 300 students and there are exactly 2 professors who know me as more than "the random person who just raised his hand". Simply recording the lecture with a camera and putting the content online would have already been a huge improvement. Obviously closer supervision/contact with professors is a superior model, but sentences like "these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed" sound almost laughable from a German perspective. Would I have enjoyed the personal experience of a good US school? Probably yes. Would paying $20,000 per year in tuition for the privilege instead of no tuition at all have been worth it? In my case, definately not!

This is one of the reasons why German universities consistently underperform in international rankings.

Yes, it's actually exactly the same in the US, despite the strange propaganda claims in these daily anti-online-education articles that suggest US college is like kindergarten, with the professor holding every student's hand at each step of their mutual journey of self-discovery and personal fulfillment.

In real life, undergraduate classes at well reputed universities may have 100, 200, or even 800 students for some freshman courses. You may go the entire semester and never once see the well known professor appear in class. Often the entire class is taught by a TA who speaks English with an incomprehensible accent due to his recent arrival in the US as a grad student being his first exposure to the language.

The notion that american professors closely and personally interact with and tutor each student, with special focus on those from underprivileged backgrounds so that every student has the same chance at success, an idea being pushed in these articles, is complete nonsense and simply does not happen in large US institutions.

The article seems to unfairly groups multiple types of online courses together. Many of community college online courses that students withdraw from or fail are very different than the Stanford courses one could take on Coursera. Also, the article mentions students wasting money on these courses, but doesn't mention the possibility that some of the students who failed the online courses would have enrolled and failed in offline courses and wasted substantially more money. Perhaps the reason the completion numbers are lower online is that it offers students who are unsure of their ability to commit a low cost trial run? These are all questions I'd like an article like this to investigate.

I think it is important to realize that most students take online courses in college for classes they don't like. Most my classmates take classes they find interesting in person and classes they just want to get done with because it is a required class online. This may explain why students do poorly in online classes, because in general they are classes they don't want to take in the first place and are therefore unmotivated to do well in the class. I have plenty of friends who failed their online English class but use Khan Academy to learn something for fun and do well in it. The difference is that the latter is a subject they care about.

There is a possible flaw in the statistics. In many cases it is simply ...the customer walking away. (not the student failing)

For example not everyone is after "credits". I have enrolled for some online courses and have found the quality of instruction low, or the pace wrong for me. As my purpose was to increase my knowledge, I just bought a couple of books on the topic (much quicker and more in depth). On a current course with coursera, I am enjoying the course and the lecturer Michael S. Roth, especially as the course is diametrically opposite to my day to day working life. Not too sure if I can afford the time to write the essays for the assignments.

At first I thought the writing had taken another hit at NYT and then realized it was an editorial. I don't doubt that for students who show up at college unable to learn, having those students attempt to learn via online teaching would be similarly hard if not impossible for them.

The editorial is worried that 'online college' will disenfranchise those students, but there isn't any evidence to suggest it would. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that online course would suddenly replace teach student interaction in all colleges.

So basically I am left wondering what was the point.

The supposed 90% attrition rate for free classes always cited in these articles is irrelevant. (It's also odd to cite the MOOC rate and then instantly change tact mid-article to analyze instead paid classes with an online component that are offered by colleges: it likely gives readers the idea that the paid classes for credit offered to enrolled college students also have a 90% attrition, which is not established.)

Significant numbers of people who enroll in MOOCs do not intend to complete every class they enroll in. And that is perfectly fine. There are various reasons. Some are curious about the material. Some are only interested in watching some of the lectures. Some are teachers checking out the MOOC scene but not wanting to spend the time to do assignments. Some are 10 year olds doing it on a lark. Some are people who realize they don't have all the requirements after trying a few problem sets. Some sign up weeks in advance but by the time the class starts they have forgotten about the class, become too busy, or lost interest. Even among the serious students many will sign up for 10 classes at a time, then end up sticking with the ones they find the most fun or interesting. None of these cases are where the class has failed.

The real numbers to look at are the number of people who successfully complete the programs. These numbers are astounding and encouraging. Often 6000 students each time will pass with flying colors. There are no tuition based programs that come any where near that level of amazing success. In many cases the classes have provided to thousands of people throughout the world, at nominal cost, Ivy League quality classes from colleges such as Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Yale. Most of these are people who would never be able to attend these universities or have access to this teaching.

As far as the unmotivated students, they also fail at a high rate in brick and mortar classes as well. Excepting the top colleges that pre-filter out unmotivated applicants, college attrition for freshmen is very high nationally. 37 million americans have started college but left without completing a degree. Nationally half of people starting college drop out. This is for people who are at least motivated enough to be willing to pay for the experience and arrange their lives so they can physically attend classes in person.

What percentage of MOOC enrollees that start with the needed prerequisites and have a serious intention and time to complete the class completes it? Probably about the same, but we don't know since no one is keeping track of this number yet.

It seems that the NYT article misunderstands what online courses are for. The purpose isn't to replace four-year undergraduate college, but to serve the vast majority of people for whom that model is impractical. There are a lot of people who want to learn things who can't afford this American institution of playing aristocrat for the 4 years in which society judges them to be economically marginal.

The 90% attrition rate of MOOCs, by the way, is the result of a course model that's still being fleshed out and the fact that, absent a high degree of previous investment, social expectations and abundant free time, very few people are going to stick with a long-term program. Ten percent yield for a free MOOC is great! For my part, I think the question of whether these courses should be served synchronously (with schedules and deadlines) or asynchronously is unclear, and I'm not sure how the trade-offs of each will be balanced. It's an exciting space, though.

I don't think online education will replace the university, but it might replace the institution of four-year college. Academia brought this on itself. The majority of the leading professors have long held the attitude that teaching is commodity grunt work and research is what they really do. Technology is responding, by bringing teaching to the masses. If the result of this is that middle-class families stop dedicating 850 millihouses per student to tuition, then I can't see how that's a bad thing. I'd like to see undergraduate college live through this, but I wouldn't mind seeing it shrink back to something for people who are genuinely interested in learning the material, and something affordable for people of average means.

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