Online Learning: More Than MOOC’s

It was never a dream of mine to become the sort of professor who teaches online. I’m willing to bet that most starry-eyed Ph.D. candidates—when they can stomach thoughts of their uncertain academic futures—imagine themselves captivating a lecture hall of hundreds. Or perhaps sensitively orchestrating a rousing seminar discussion. They dream about teaching in the flesh, in a meatspace classroom.

That was my dream, too. But when a 20-car pileup on the snowy interstate left me with a broken nose, a mild concussion, and a totaled vehicle, I was grateful that my spring section of “Introduction to Philosophy” was scheduled to be online.

My decision to teach online was practical. I’m a Ph.D. student who works as an adjunct to make ends (just barely) meet. Teaching online cut down on the time and money I spent on my commutes. I also had a vague sense that it would be a useful experience, as our academic world becomes increasingly virtual. I’ve never pretended that it was a glamorous, or noble, choice to make. But something about Mark Edmundson’s op-ed essay in The New York Times this summer, “The Trouble With Online Education,” raised my hackles. After reading it, I found myself getting defensive about online education.

Of course, Edmundson’s home institution, the University of Virginia, was recently traumatized by attempts to speed up its entry into this brave, new academic future. His skepticism seems reasonable. But his claim that “online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor” is misleading. What he doesn’t make clear is that he seems to be talking only about massive open online courses (MOOC’s), offered through companies such as Coursera. The error is forgivable, as MOOC’s seem to be the only type of foray that most elite universities (such as the University of Virginia) are making into online education.

The pedagogical approach of many MOOC’s is bare-bones: Students watch videos of brilliant professors giving lectures, do assignments that are corrected by a digital auto-grader, and in rare cases engage in forums or get “real” feedback from peers in the course. Thousands of students can enroll, simultaneously, in any one of these classes, most of which are offered free.

The good thing about a MOOC is that it kicks open a door or two of that old ivory tower and freely lets hearty, tasty information into the world. The bad thing is that the student is just a number. Professors aren’t building relationships with students—the kinds of relationships that allow them to see what a student can actually do with an idea. That was, in a nutshell, Edmundson’s point.

There are, however, hundreds, perhaps thousands of instructors across the United States who are down in the virtual trenches, trying to develop pedagogical approaches that echo or play with the college-seminar format. Class size is sometimes capped (often below 20 students), with a premium placed on interactive conversation between students and professors. For example, my students do a lot of writing. I read it. All of it. And I make tailored comments about all of their coursework: papers, exams, discussion-forum conversations. I get to know the students through their ideas, and I work hard to give them feedback that will challenge them to refine those ideas.

Edmundson argues that “a real course creates intellectual joy,” while “I don’t think an Internet course ever will.” He argues that online education simply doesn’t work—that a professor working online will never be able to make any real pedagogical magic. But how can he really evaluate online courses if he doesn’t know what it’s like to teach one?

During my first semester teaching intro to philosophy online, I logged on late one evening and opened an e-mail from one of my students. She was writing to thank me for a comment I’d made in our most recent discussion forum. On the forum, she’d mentioned—with obvious apprehension and apologies for her morbidity—that the conversation we were having made her think about death. I quickly responded to the post and affirmed that philosophy had long been a proper venue to reflect on such questions as the purpose of life and the nature of death. Several students weighed in, and her comment was folded into a lively conversation.

In her e-mail to me, she admitted that she thought about death frequently. She was relieved to know that my course would give her the opportunity to do more reflection. In my response, I encouraged her to do some research and posted links to a few texts that she could easily sample using Google Books.

Several days later, I received another note from her. She wanted to let me know that she’d taken a look at some of the books. They had inspired her to do something she’d been meaning to do for a long time: sit down with her aging mother and speak calmly, with some degree of abstraction, about death and dying. She was able to broach the topic as “something she was learning about in philosophy class.”

I’ve never met this student in person. I don’t know how old she is. I don’t know how old her mother is. I can’t picture what their conversation might have looked like. Nevertheless, I was moved. I could be wrong, but I’ve convinced myself that this is an example of philosophy making a real difference in an individual life. I’m geeked when this happens in the traditional classroom setting. I’ll admit, I was a bit shocked to learn that it can happen online as well. I’m glad that it did. I couldn’t stand to teach in any setting where students didn’t feel safe to think and inspired (if only in fits and starts) to learn.

Higher education in America is in trouble. It actually hurts me to think about it. The virtual classroom is often presented as either a panacea or a deadly virus. It is neither of those things. The virtual classroom is a space, a territory, where learning can happen. If we bring passionate, thoughtful teachers into that space, my hunch is that some students will really think and really learn.