Editorial: Online classes are a poor substitute for traditional higher ed

It’s every college student’s dream to attend class without having to leave their bed. But… It’s every college student’s dream to attend class without having to leave their bed. But contrary to the opinions of certain pundits, the downsides of web-based learning outweigh the luxuries.

Last Thursday, Former Govs. Jeb Bush and Jim Hunt took to an Inside Higher Education blog to champion a greater emphasis on post-secondary online classes. Attracting more students to courses offered over the Internet, they claim, will reduce university spending on dormitories, labs and other traditional necessities, without diminishing the quality of instruction.

To lend legitimacy to their proposal, the men cited the Department of Education’s 2010 Review of Online Learning Studies, which found that students who completed a course either partially or entirely online performed better, on average, than traditional learners, as well as another study that concluded that in 70 percent of cases, distance learners outdid in-class learners.

Although we’re staunch advocates of exploiting technology for academic purposes, we doubt entire courses can be taught remotely and achieve exemplary results. So much is lost, after all, when students are removed from a physical learning environment. Real-time, face-to-face discussions are eliminated, as are opportunities to meet a professor during his or her office hours. Sure, you can replace in-class talks with streaming lectures and message boards, and office hours with email exchanges, but these are hardly as intimate. Furthermore, allowing large digital enrollments would dilute the quality of each student’s education — giant classes, as any undergraduate can attest, are singularly impersonal.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve found studies that contradict those that Bush and Hunt cite. This April, for instance, Stanford researchers determined that 100 percent of Pennsylvania’s virtual charter schools performed worse in both reading and math than their public school counterparts, as opposed to 34 and 42 percent, respectively, of brick-and-mortar charter schools. A few years earlier in 2007, the National Bureau of Economic Research enlisted 327 volunteers to either attend microeconomics lectures in person or watch them online. Hispanic students, white students and low-achieving students fared significantly worse in the online group.

Naturally, we’re not opposed to free learning programs like Open Yale, in which lectures are streamed online to any interested user. In this instance, at least, students aren’t getting financially shortchanged. What we are concerned with is an education system that sacrifices quality instruction in the name of efficiency — a system guided by the fallacy that learning on the web is, in all respects, as good as attending a class in person.

An exclusivity-based higher education business model is indeed, as Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun told the New York Times, “insanely uneconomical.” However, that doesn’t mean that we should allow online enrollment for innumerable interested parties, and pass off their degrees as equal in value to those of traditional four-year students.