We come to university not only to get a degree that will help us get a good job and lucrative career. We also come to university, at least a little I hope, for education itself. Online courses may be effectively lowering the bar when it comes to actual learning.
I had an interesting opportunity thrust upon me this quarter—the opportunity to take a fully online course at Portland State. I have never held much love for the online course, personally. There is something about the classroom environment that seems to me to be essential to a robust education—especially a college education.
Nevertheless, the only course available to me was one entirely online through the Blackboard system. For the sake of progress and necessity, I decided to dive right in and see what it was all about.
After a couple weeks of readings and quizzes I realized, to my dismay, that this course was, quite bluntly, a joke.
The quizzes are made up of multiple-choice questions pulled straight from the book—often the quiz consists of questions from practice quizzes found in the e-book for which the answers are readily provided. The essays are simple fact-stating and book-regurgitation that require no citations or individual thought. There is no midterm and no final.
The entire workload for this course is maybe half an hour a week on average, yet still counts for four credit hours.
This is a course that many people would consider below par for junior high, let alone a university. There is no critical thinking, no incentive to do more than spew out the course text, and no stimulating discussion of any kind.
The course does have a discussion board in case anyone wanted to have a real conversation about the materials. Unfortunately, the board has over 200 posts about technical problems with Blackboard and quizzes, or complaints about how expensive the e-book was.
Now I understand that sometimes people need a break from “real” schoolwork and may turn to an easier online course for a short respite. But there are also people who are earning their degrees with a majority of online courses—courses for which the standard of learning and achievement have been significantly reduced. The School of Extended Studies even offers fully online degrees in social science and liberal studies.
Portland State may not be an Ivy League university, but is this really where we want to take our college education? Lowering the bar for even one course diminishes the quality and importance of everyone’s education, and the bar here has been lowered substantially.
Just imagine if the next time you told someone you go to Portland State they replied with “You mean that online university?”
It embarrasses me to think that there are individuals out there getting college degrees with courses like these, courses with close to zero difficulty that do little more than encourage repetition and regurgitation. This is not what a college education should be.
An important part of the classroom experience is being around other individuals who think differently than you do and having discussions with professors and students about the material. Online courses are essentially providing the opposite, while simultaneously diminishing the importance of hard work, study, and critical thought altogether.
There is something to be said for progress. As technology evolves, so do the ways and degrees to which we use it in all facets of life. It’s only natural that this would extend to education and the university setting.
But we need not lower our standards of excellence to incorporate technology into our learning experience. Online courses could still be challenging and rewarding experiences if anyone gave a shit. It seems now that some are content to debase our university for the sake of convenience and expediency.
We need to preserve the importance of the classroom experience and the wide range of perspectives that come with it. We are more than just memorizers and regurgitators and our education should be consistent with that.
If this is the direction of progress I’m glad I won’t be in college any longer to see what happens when we get there. Don’t insult students’ collective intelligence by trying to pass off a joke of a course as the college experience.