What Makes for an Appropriately Rigorous and Engaging Online College Major?
This year, I'm serving on the systemwide University of California Committee on Educational Policy, and specifically I'm on a subcommittee tasked with developing guidelines for approving remote or online majors and minors in the U.C. system.
As we saw during the height of the pandemic, it's possible to do college instruction entirely online. However, as we also saw, student engagement and learning is often not as good as with traditional in-person instruction. Students show up on Zoom but then tune out, multi-task, have trouble paying full attention. They watch videos at double speed. They are less likely to ask questions. There's less informal interaction before and after class.
Online majors (in which at least 50% of the course instruction for the major is remote) are coming. It seems inevitable that they will eventually happen. I have a chance to play a leading role in shaping policy at one of the largest and most prestigious public university systems in the world, so I want to give the matter some good thought, including hearing the opinions of blog readers and friends and followers on social media. What should U.C.'s policy be on these matters? I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts.
Some preliminary ideas:
(1.) Since evidence generally suggests lower engagement, less learning, and lower completion rates for students in online classes, we should expect that unless special measures are taken to increase student engagement and learning, an ordinary in-person class that is simply shifted to online presentation will have lower engagement, less learning, and lower completion rates.
(2.) Consequently, U.C. should not approve new online majors or the conversion of existing majors to online format unless special measures are taken to increase student engagement and learning.
(3.) Because of the necessity of such special measures, we should expect courses for online majors to typically have lower student-to-teacher ratios than otherwise similar in-person courses and to require more resources to administer. The common image of online classes as cheaper to administer and as capable of supporting high student-to-teacher ratios, sometimes used as a justification for moving online, is likely to create inferior student engagement and learning. Online education should not be justified by expected cost savings. Instead, we should expect additional expense.
(4.) Remotely watching an instructional video is more like reading a textbook than it is like engaging in interactive education. Instructional videos cannot replace person-to-person interactions in real time.
(5.) The opportunity for informal interaction before and after formal instruction, either in the classroom, or just outside the classroom, or in other locations on campus, is also sometimes educationally important, even if the interactions are brief. For this reason as well as lower expected student engagement during online lectures, online instructors should create ample opportunities for one-on-one or small group personal interactions with the instructor, beyond ordinary lectures and ordinary discussion sections.
(6.) Remote instruction, especially timed testing, often creates more opportunities for academic dishonesty than classroom instruction does, and so far there are no fully adequate solutions to this problem that don't objectionably invade student privacy. Reasonable additional precautions might be necessary to discourage academic dishonesty in remote classes. One-on-one interactions can help create student expectations of being held to account for understanding the material and can help confirm student learning.
(7.) Ideally, if someone learns that a student completed an online major instead of an in-person major at U.C., their reaction should not be to suspect that that student received an inferior education but instead the opposite. The aim should be to create a reputation for online majors at U.C. as especially rigorous and interactive, where students have even more high-quality person-to-person instruction and even better learning than in traditional in-person classes.
(8.) Online majors should be justified in terms of creating better engagement and learning than would be possible with in-person instruction. Increasing enrollment and improving accessibility are insufficient by themselves to justify the creation of an online major or minor, unless there are also clear instructional benefits to moving online.