Poet Ponders the Digital

One of the serious questions facing proponent of online education is if the current nature of online courses encourages poor teaching methods. The qualities of online courses that contribute to "taking the easy path" exist in some traditional courses. Also, we need to be admit that some instructors are lazy, poorly trained, or truly dedicated to models that others might not endorse. The issues instructors and critics of online education should consider: 1. Class size. When you have too many students, it is easier to assess students via multiple-choice exams and other forms of memory recall testing. If you rely entirely on assessment of memorized data, but have only a dozen or so students, I'd wonder if you are lazy or have an out-dated pedagogy. But, if you teach 100 or more students, nobody can expect you to assign massive individual research projects and reports. The larger the class size, the more automated the assessment we have to adopt to remain sane. 2. Cla...

WETAKEYOURCLASS.COM-  We Take Your Online Class! We Do Your Homework, Tests, Classes For You! What needs to be written about the above link and dozens more like it? Online and distance education are at least slightly more prone to cheating, and I wonder if they are not significantly more prone to dishonestly than their traditional and hybrid counterparts. Students have been able to purchase papers for as long as instructors have assigned papers. We all know that friends "help" each other, and sometimes even parents help compose a paper. Yet, buying a paper reveals a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of an education. Now, we have to deal with students buying class attendance. Forget cheating on tests or buying papers, students aren't even attending the online lectures. Cheating is bad enough, but at least if you were in a classroom there was a chance (maybe only a slight chance) that you would learn something. You might hear one new idea, one inspiring comm...

This column offers solutions with which I disagree, but it is thought-provoking. The Fiscal Cliff for Higher Education - Next - The Chronicle of Higher Education : Moody’s notes that the number of students accepting admissions offers from colleges that the agency rates has been dropping at a fast clip since 2008. That comes even as those institutions are spending more to enroll those students. The trend, Moody’s said, is particularly serious at the lower-rated private colleges, “which are increasingly competing with lower-cost public colleges and feeling the most pressure to slow tuition increases and offer more tuition discounting.” What bothers me is that online education is viewed as the savior of struggling campuses, not for pedagogical reasons but because online courses can generate revenue. Southern New Hampshire could easily have been one of the many struggling small private colleges in the Northeast, but... it has transformed itself into a test-bed for ideas on the future ...

This fall, I resorted to using "anti-plagairism" tools for the first time in at least six years. One reason for this is that what I had been teaching at the University of Minnesota didn't lend itself to plagiarism. My technical writing students had to design a new toy or board game, create a prototype, and develop a product pitch. It's hard to steal another person's LEGO project that uses randomly selected bricks. However, teaching a literature class I found that students either had problems with understanding citation norms or they simply assumed an instructor wouldn't check to determine if a passage was a copy-paste effort. I learned this is a great reason to have two mandatory drafts before a final paper, too. My department head and other colleagues were supportive and I'm now working on a reusable lesson module that will address citations. Student don't quite grasp that simply because you can copy-paste doesn't mean it is acceptable. ...

This story explains some of my doubts about online education. It is not online education that concerns me, but the poor oversight and administration that threatens to further erode confidence employers have in online degree programs. GAO report finds cheating, plagiarism and other violations in for-profit colleges’ online classes - Politics - The Boston Globe First, the obvious question: if the GAO is examining for-profit institutions now, how long before they investigate “non-profit” colleges and universities? I have plenty of questions about education in general, including higher education quality, regardless of the charter of the institutions or their settings. State, non-profit, or for-profit, any institution is only as good as its administration and faculty. Online, oversight is even more challenging than on-campus. It requires more time and energy because it is easy for students (and some faculty) to cut corners online. The GAO examined enrollment, cost, financial aid, cou...