Teasing out the meaning of “online classes” — Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help: NYTimes

The NYTimes published an interesting piece on the state of online education today. Increasingly, online education is being used in schools as a response to students failing in face-to-face, traditional classrooms.  If you’re not making it in the regular class, try it again in the online class.  The article describes how that’s not working. Students who fail in traditional classes need more personal contact and support, not less.

I love that the name of the column where this article appeared is called “The Economic View,” because that’s exactly what it is.  We do now how to teach every student well — give each child a well-educated teacher for their particular subject (Bloom’s two-sigma effect). We can’t afford that, so we make do with less.  But we should aim to do no harm.  Current practice with online classes is clearly doing harm.

The NYTimes article is reporting on empiricism.  We cannot empirically determine what might online classes become. The author, Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan, is reporting on current practice and on the result of policy.  Can online classes help students?  Absolutely, and the OMS CS is a good example of that.  Can we build online classes that work better for students who struggle with traditional classes?  Maybe — it’s hard to see them in this study. At the ECEP 2018 meeting, Caitlin Dooley (Associate Superintendent for Georgia) said that their online classes do better than face-to-face classes, in part because of caring (“mama bear”) teachers who support the students outside of the online classes.  The online classes that Susan Dynarski is studying are clearly not working well for struggling students.  There may already be models that work well, but they’re swamped in a general study of policy across different kinds of online classes.  Dynarski’s article may just be telling us that the current average practice is insufficient. There may be better models (maybe still in research) that could correct these ills.

Dynarski’s article is fascinating and is sounding an important alarm. It should be even greater motivation for those of us who are working to invent better online education.

Online education helps school districts that need to save money make do with fewer teachers. But there is mounting evidence that struggling students suffer.

In the fully online model, on the other hand, a student may never be in the same room with an instructor. This category is the main problem. It is where less proficient students tend to run into trouble. After all, taking a class without a teacher requires high levels of self-motivation, self-regulation and organization. Yet in high schools across the country, students who are struggling in traditional classrooms are increasingly steered into online courses.

Source: Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help