How Does The Online Version Of A Standard College Course Compare To The Live Version? (1 Viewer)

[belljr]

My son had some online classes at college 4 years ago so the same

 

[bostonfred]

From my experiences all of that is true.

1. There are a lot of teachers who like to do things how they do them and aren't jumping at the chance for change. Many are resentful of someone with little or no teaching experience coming in to tell them how to do their job better. 

2. The IT people in schools usually have no education background. They are just there to maintain the networks, fix a computer if it breaks, help someone figure out why they can't connect to the network printer, update virus software, etc. 

3. Even when teachers are taught how to use new technology, its usually a one time 3 hour session with no follow up so it's easy for it to get lost. The days are extremely busy with little downtime so once the ball gets rolling, most people fall back on what they know. 

4. There is a difference in being taught how to use a tool and being taught when, how and why to use a tool. A carpenter could probably train someone who isn't very handy how to use a miter saw in a short period of time. However, there is a difference between knowing how to operate a miter saw and actually being able to identify a project and say, "this will require a miter saw and this is how I will use the miter saw to complete this project and it will turn out nice." I've seen teachers earnestly try some new things and it wasn't the right lesson for that tech so it didn't work that well or something went wrong in the middle and it was beyond their capacity to fix on the fly. There is no tech expert providing them feedback, it's usually just "show and go". To really learn and grow, people need practice with feedback. 

A big part of the problem is that most people in management are poor at choosing the right education for their teams. There's a huge difference between technical education and change management, so when we have a major change like this that involves technology, they provide technical education and think they have done everything right. 

Technical education is telling people what the tools are and what all the buttons do. Go to Zoom, click Share and choose your screen or choose a specific application. Go to the chat and pick a name from the dropdown to send a private chat or a public chat by choosing "everyone".   

Technical education might give examples of how the tool should be used by certain audiences, but not specific to this particular team.  "You can create a breakout room" is great... but who is going to create it? Will there be a second teacher or aide who can do this?  Or if I'm the teacher with 25 students in the main room and I make a breakout room for 2 of them, will the rest of the room be left alone until I'm done?  Are there any good activities I can give them or a short video I can play for them while I'm gone? 

Those are process questions, and they rely on good processes being designed, and change management. 

Change management addresses the actual use cases you expect to encounter and some you might not.

Some of these are generic to all teachers.  What should I do if one of the kids logs in without using their real name?  What do I do if someone logs in twice?  Like if I log in from my home PC as bostonfred but then log in from my phone as shuke and start typing mean things in chat... how do you stop that?  How do you figure out who is doing this? These are real issues for grade school teachers but not likely to get covered in the online tutorials. There are resources (including forums like this) where teachers can swap war stories, but what percentage of teachers use them? Who has time?

Other things are specific to your school, or may differ from school to school. Like if you have a hybrid model and there are kids in your physical classroom while you teach other kids remotely... how do you make that work?  Do you teach it like an in person class and have your camera pointed at the front of the classroom? How well will the kids at home be able to hear you?  Do you present to everyone online including kids in the classroom?  If so, what do they use for devices? If they have to bring their own, what happens when they inevitably forget?  And how do you keep them from playing games and texting each other when they are using their tablets?

There are so many use cases to discuss, and decisions to be made about how to handle them.  If you were going to implement these changes permanently, you would take your time and do a thorough job analyzing  all of your requirements and designing solutions then training the teachers on how to do this stuff... but this is being done with a few months of lead time, in the middle of a public health crisis, while teachers are supposed to be on summer vacation, and you have parents demanding one thing, administrators another, the local state and federal government getting involved... 

And you don't have the best and brightest in the industry available to train the teachers at any given school.  There's a finite list of people who know how to implement these changes and it is much shorter than the number of schools that have to make the changes. That's why you need a federal or state level plan that can be shared down to all of the schools, but that's another political football. 

The whole thing is set up to fail. I want to be optimistic but I'm not at all.

 

[Otis]

This shouldn’t be close. 

 

[MAC_32]

In your opinion, what % reduction should there be for tuition if it's remote? 

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, but I am surprised more schools did not copy what Cleveland State did. 

 

[Don't Toews Me]

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, but I am surprised more schools did not copy what Cleveland State did. 

That's interesting. Don't think I've heard of another school doing that. Good way to give the freshman an incentive for not delaying their first year.

 

[Don't Toews Me]

This older NYT article indicates that colleges have taken on massive amounts of debt building extravagant buildings and resources to attract students. Repayment of that debt is being put mostly on students. Room and board costs are sky high, a lot of which is to pay for all of those on campus extravagances. None of that debt repayment goes away just because students aren’t on campus, so all of those resources still need to be paid for even if they’re not being utilized.

And let’s face it, there are very very few institutions that set aside money as a contingency just in case something happened; either because they simply were scrapping to get by or because they believed that there was essentially a zero percent chance of on campus attendance ever cratering. 

I think it’s a very real possibility that many smaller colleges could be forced under financially if their income drops by the amount it would drop with no room and board and reduced tuition. Rather than admit that and charging students tuition saying they need it to keep afloat, they’ll either insist it’s safe to come back on campus and then just lock everyone down in their dorms when the virus spreads and charge full tuition plus room and board for students to learn online from their tiny dorm rooms, or they’ll go virtual and still charge full tuition saying that the education is still worth it.

There will be exceptions, but those offering discounts will almost certainly be the incredibly wealthy schools who have massive endowments.

The entire model needs to be changed in a massive way. Universities clearly have little incentive to reduce spending and reel in tuition/room/board costs. At the risk of straying into the political, the idea of government paid college seems insane to me without massive changes to the system to reduce expenses.

They've taken on that debt without concern over the years because they couldn't imagine a possibility where another form of higher education emerges to challenge them or that enrollment would ever decrease. It would just keep going up and up and costs would equally keep going up and up. 

Not sure how to change it, but I'm with you. It needs some alterations. 

 

[beer 30]

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, but I am surprised more schools did not copy what Cleveland State did. 

That's a great idea. Also takes $ out of the colleges pocket.

My guess why, its Cleveland...so no one pays attention to academics.