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Online Teaching's Disconnect

Today's LA Times has an op-ed by John Villasenor of UCLA about online vs. face-to-face teaching. I think he offers a pretty standard view of instruction, and this paragraph illustrates his key point that the in-person, classroom experience is what is special about teaching:

A course is also made effective by the unscripted interactions that occur as students gather before and after the class, and by the simple fact that the physical act of getting to class requires at least some investment of time and energy. In short, attending a well-run class in person is immersive and engaging in a way that far exceeds anything that consumer technology can possibly hope to deliver now or in the foreseeable future.


Oddly enough, the article is accompanied by a photo of students in a chemistry lecture at UCLA in what appears to be a very large auditorium. To me, this instructional format is not one that offers the type of engaging and interactive learning experience that I enjoyed as a student or that Professor Villasenor describes in his essay. Large lectures, which I experienced both as a student and instructor, seemed to me a pragmatic solution to the problem of how to provide instruction to a very large group of people at the same time, even if the same time part of it wasn't essential. Large lectures typically don't offer much interaction (the use of clickers may be changing this to a degree) because it's not practical when there are 150 or 300 or 500 students in the classroom for a 50 minute class period. Classes like this usually have a separate discussion section where students can interact with a teaching assistant in a smaller classroom. Why not just record the lectures, make them available to students, and allow more time for the smaller group meetings? 


Professor Villasenor does a good job of highlighting the advantages of online classes for those students who can't be on campus for the traditional classes. There seems to be an unstated assumption in his essay that online and face-to-face teaching should be similar. I think we know from experience that an online instructor who doesn't make adjustments when moving from face-to-face to online won't be successful. Just as instruction in a 15 student seminar is going to be different than in a 500 student lecture hall, online teaching methods also have to be adjusted to suit the learning environment. 


Ironically, his emphasis on "showing up" in the face-t0-face classroom:


But policymakers, university teachers and administrators should acknowledge that scientific studies and budget pressures notwithstanding, something is lost when the classroom experience becomes virtual. As we strive to educate our university students in an increasingly competitive global economic climate, among the many costly and complex measures that are on the table for improving their educational experience, here's one that is refreshingly simple: Show up.
is the primary principle I emphasize when working with online instructors. If you aren't present in the online classroom, you aren't teaching. Instructor presence is different online, but it's still what differentiates good teaching from just going through the motions. In that regard, maybe face-to-face and online teaching are not that different, but the methods used to reach similar learning goals shouldn't be the same.

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