Virtually learning

Most colleges offer many systems to help students who either live too far away or just simply have a hard time making it to campus. They go by many names, such as distance learning, online classes and now the virtual classroom.

But what if we could take not just some, but all of our classes online? Here in the Portland area, Reynolds High School is offering the option starting next fall. If such a system moved to universities, it could be disastrous.

Although Reynolds High School’s plan is not new to the state of Oregon, it is at the peak of the ever-growing online trend. Reynolds wants to open up more availability to students hoping to bring improvement, so it seems natural that the trend would continue to the university system. We already have the option to take some classes online, so it would seem that we could take even more classes to the virtual world.

The biggest issue I would have with having a majority, if not all, classes offered online would be the lack of face-to-face contact with professors.

Some instructors of more general education classes might have an easier time covering material online, but I imagine my book design course would be difficult if I didn’t have a collection of books to physically examine trends and quality.

Also, I wonder how efficient professor-to-student response time would be. In a classroom, you can ask if something comes up that doesn’t make sense and have it answered there, but online you would have to type your question and wait for the response.

Some of the classroom issues can be resolved with live chat or webcams, if the school offers these capabilities to the professor and if the student has the ability at home. Even with those technologies, the student is still separated from the professor and may not get the most out of taking a class.

Something has to be said about the student-professor relationship. After all, if you don’t get to know your professors, who will write letters of recommendation to get you into graduate school?

I’m curious about who’s at home with the student. It doesn’t seem to be addressed in the debate about online classrooms, but I think it could be a major problem. Can we be sure that he or she is the one answering the test questions? It could be an older sibling, a parent or a friend giving a little assistance to help out the grades. Even schools that have the webcam precaution don’t know whether the student is alone or if there is someone else there, giving extra help.

According to Education World, students who already cheat in the classroom are more likely to cheat online. But it does make it easier to have people and the Internet to carry you through.

Grades given by these online classrooms don’t seem very reliable. These students are competing with the students in the classroom who have to take tests under the watchful eye of a professor and have the pressure of being in a completely quiet room, watching the clock tick. At home, students can listen to music and can be alone enough to not have room tension. Students at home could also pull off an open book test, not recalling any information from memory.

In the future, will universities that offer all classes online be accepted as legitimate schools? Probably not, because they will most likely not carry the same weight as a physical university, where students are intimidated by the professor and the other students.

Not only is intimidation a factor in legitimacy (hey, Harvard is what it is because of centuries of intimidation), but so is the idea to commiserate with peers and educators. A lot of the actual learning that comes from universities happens outside of the classroom, with study groups, mentors, office sessions and extracurricular activities. Virtual classrooms isolate individuals from a social learning environment.

With all that being said, online classrooms have their purpose.

They work best for students with disabilities, ones that live outside the college area, or even working students who can still take class at their leisure and not on some specific time restraint. Reynolds High School comments that they started it to attract both home-schooled students and dropouts.

Yet will those be the students who actually volunteer to take the classes? Or will it be the students who already cheat and are unhappy at school? Realistically, these online courses will only be successful in basic or core courses, whereas anything too complicated will be more challenging to learn online.

The advantage to having so many online courses cannot be totally ruled out. It does work in favor of many students to stay at home to study, but what is the price they’re paying in return? Do they lose out on their education from not having personal connections?

In our technology-ruled world, online courses are a necessity for keeping up with the times. They must not, however, become the sole method in teaching, because nothing can replace the actual classroom.