The Truth About Online Learning
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For those with Internet access, free online classes from Ivy League universities, taught by some of the world’s top professors, are just a click away. But to a grassroots coalition of organizations representing hundreds of thousands of college and university educators, there’s a reason this promise seems too good to be true.
The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE), comprised of the California Faculty Association (a financial supporter of Capital & Main), the California Community College Association, American Federation of Teachers, along with dozens of other education and labor groups, is urging the public to not believe the hype. The CFHE is also asking the top three promoters of massive open online courses, commonly known as MOOCs, to tone down their claims and come clean about their main goal – to make a profit.
Online courses have been available since the1990s, before MOOCs (think University of Phoenix), but they were usually high-priced and not always known for their quality. MOOC promoters say they are simply attempting to make the world a better place by reducing the cost of education and expanding access to low-income students of color worldwide. But Lillian Taiz, a history professor at California State University at Los Angeles, and president of the California Faculty Association, points to the dismal success rates of students who enroll in these types of classes.
Studies have found that 90 percent of students who take such courses never complete them — and that most enrollees already have college degrees to begin with.
A recent University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education study also revealed that MOOCs have relatively few active users and that user “engagement” falls off dramatically, especially after the first one to two weeks of a course. Perhaps worse, few users persist to a course’s end.
“None of us oppose online education,” Taiz tells Capital & Main. “If used judiciously, it can be positive but we object to the hyperbolic claim that MOOCs are going to save the world.”
Taiz says that MOOCs are creating tiers in educational access: Students who can’t afford to go to a high-priced university are being offered massive online courses, which don’t provide any faculty-student interaction, a critical component to success for many students.
“Across the board, kids who are struggling don’t do well,” Taiz says. She points to a failed experiment that took place at San Jose State University last year, in which completion rates and grades for students taking MOOCs were worse than for those who took regular classes on campus. “It simply didn’t work. Those Online Learning:
