Online courses sparking debate

Sue Alman’s daughter won’t take online classes.

“I never see her without a cell phone or… Sue Alman’s daughter won’t take online classes.

“I never see her without a cell phone or laptop,” said Alman, the director of Distance Education and Outreach Services at Pitt. “But she won’t go near an online class.”

As Web-based courses become more readily available at colleges and universities nationwide, students like Alman’s daughter are beginning to realize that while online learning makes courses more convenient, it certainly doesn’t make them easier.

Going against the assumption that online courses are easier, some say “e-learning” forces students to be more self-motivated and self-disciplined.

“It’s a lot easier to roll out of bed and go sit in a classroom than to force yourself to get online and become involved in a discussion,” said Alman.

This assumption has always been at the heart of the argument against online learning, said Alman. For many skeptics, online learning’s effect on a student pales in comparison to in-person settings.

“There are stereotypes that people feel, [like] ‘Oh, online can’t possibly be as good as face to face,'” said Gaea Leinhardt of Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center. “I think that’s the wrong direction to think about it.”

In fact, according to Ross Donehue, chairman of the e-learning committee for the Pittsburgh Council of Higher Education and interim director of distance learning for the Community College of Allegheny County, older students who didn’t grow up with Web technology respond better to online learning than younger freshman or sophomore students. It all comes down to discipline.

“That’s huge,” said Donehue. “The technology is nothing.”

The maturity and self-motivation of older students drives their success, whereas younger students aren’t used to the independent learning style, said Donehue.

A study by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics in 2000-01 found that 56 percent of degree-granting institutions in the United States offered online courses. Last March, a joint study by Eduventures, a company that develops online courses, Babson College and Sloan Consortium, a consortium of institutions committed to advancing online education, showed that 64 percent of universities now offered some sort of online course – an 8 percent increase in six years.

The problem is becoming less about developing online learning programs and more about familiarizing the students with the medium, said Donehue.

In many cases, students enroll in the courses believing they will be easier, only to learn the workload is the same as or greater than in a traditional class.

“You have to be a stronger student,” said Donehue. “You have to be better organized. You have to have higher self-motivation.”

“It kind of looks like it should be less of all of these things,” he said. “But it actually requires more of them.”

Another key issue with online learning is the program itself.

Janet Schofield of the Learning Research and Development Center at Pitt said the quality of communication between students and teachers has to be a top priority.

Leinhardt, who coordinated the evaluation of Carnegie Mellon University’s online program, knows how hard it is to develop a high-quality online course.

“To design a good online course is harder than writing a good textbook,” said Leinhardt. “And writing a good textbook takes several years. So it’s very hard and very costly.”

But Leinhardt believes online learning does have potential benefits some face-to-face settings can’t offer.

With most universities there are a number of face-to-face classes with 100 to even 300 students. These larger classes often rely upon multiple-choice assignments graded by teaching assistants who are “modestly supervised” by the actual instructor. The most interaction students usually get from these courses is during recitation with the teaching assistants.

But through online learning, teachers and students can interact much more closely. Teachers can keep track of a student’s work more easily and send individualized messages if a student is doing poorly or neglecting the discussions.

At CMU, many online courses have what are called “comprehension checks.” As students read online materials, they are stopped every so often and asked to think about how what they are reading applies to real life situations.

Jessica Bauer, director of PittOnline, which is made up of around 80 online undergraduate courses, said this sort of interaction is the biggest advantage to online learning.

“You can’t just sit in the classroom and listen,” said Bauer.

The faculty member knows you are participating in online courses through your contributions to the discussion board or your completion of writing assignments, she said.

“Your presence is felt through your voice,” said Bauer.

A lot of this, according to Alman, depends on the instructors.

Alman’s graduate online program at Pitt uses the same professors for the online courses as their face-to-face counterparts. This, Alman said, ensures the content is the same. It’s the same assignments and same presentation materials, just a different delivery.

Megan Hafer, a fourth-year nursing student at Pitt, had to take an online course last year.

Hafer’s required course, Introduction to Legal Nurse Consulting and Forensic Nursing, was only offered as a “hybrid” course – four face-to-face classes throughout the semester, two of which were tests, and the rest of the classes taught strictly through online material.

But to Hafer, the class’s lack of personal interface with the professor and unregimented structure made the class less valuable than a traditional class setting.

“I wasn’t attending lectures and taking notes,” said Hafer. “So I wasn’t looking at the material weekly or thinking about it on a regular basis. Also, the learning materials were mainly PowerPoint slides, a few articles and the book, which sometimes couldn’t cover the material as well as I feel a real person could have.”

Both Hafer and Alman said this setup was most likely the instructor’s choice. But this lack of structure is at the root of the argument against online learning, said Alman.

Pitt’s Laudato said lack of structure and regimented assignments can certainly lead to lagging work ethic from students.

“Humans being humans,” said Laudato, “we tend to procrastinate with things that don’t need to be immediately done and do the thing that’s yelling at us right now to be done.”

This causes some students to put off reading materials or wait to do assignments until the last minute.

“Unless assignments are due every week, the students can wait weeks at a time until something is due and then just look at the materials needed to prepare for it at that time, which is then easily forgotten,” said Hafer.

As far as the pros and cons are concerned, Donehue believes the online medium just might not be for everyone.

“It’s not for every professor, and it’s not for every student,” said Donehue. “It’s not a better modality and it’s not a lesser modality. But it is definitely different.”

Editor’s Note: In this article, Eduventures is a research and consulting firm for higher education. Also, Sue Alman is the director of online education for the School of Information Sciences. The Pitt News regrets the errors.