Has online learning all but destroyed the university experience?
Photo courtesy of Gratisography
An article published online by one of the major UK national newspapers caught my attention this week. The headline writers excelled in capturing interest with the title "Online learning has all but destroyed the university experience.
If you've spent any time working in online education, you're likely familiar with headlines of this nature. You've probably also encountered negative perceptions, ranging from subtle criticisms to outright attacks. So much so that it's all too easy to adopt a defensive stance when faced with such headlines.
The global pandemic amplified the longstanding debate on the effectiveness of online versus in-person education. This led many, including myself, to become somewhat overly protective. At times, this defensive instinct may have caused us to overlook genuine innovations that emerged from the constraints of that period, as well as to undervalue the challenges to the pre-2020 online education orthodoxy.
In response to this headline and article, it would be easy for me to defend online education and criticise the newspaper based on its well-known political biases, which, let’s just say, don’t align with the preferences of a significant portion of the higher education community. Instead, I thought it would be more interesting to step back and explore the article in a more thoughtful manner and see where that leads.
The central arguments…
For those who have not read the piece, the central argument is that traditional campus-based courses at UK universities now include a larger proportion of online learning, which is seen as problematic for several reasons.
The writer argues that this shift is pedagogically sub-optimal, based on the assumption that in-person teaching and interaction are superior. This perspective ultimately leads to questions of value for money. Because, if the gold of in-person teaching is being traded for the bronze of online teaching then students are not getting value for money. They also suggest that the motive for increasing online learning is "cost-cutting convenience" for universities.
The article concludes that more online learning in on-campus courses may lead to, or risk, students becoming isolated in their accommodation, thus preventing interaction and socialisation with peers and educators. It also reduces opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, which, taken together, could be detrimental to mental health.
Are we really talking about online learning?
My first reflection on this piece is that the discussion actually revolves around blended learning or some form of digitally facilitated learning, rather than fully online distance courses that lack any in-person component. This distinction is tacitly acknowledged by the author, who suggests that students interested in online study can apply to a dedicated online provider, such as the Open University.
While the tone of the article doesn’t exactly give the impression that online learning is viewed as particularly efficacious, at its heart, this article is about the concerns the writer has with the evolution of the on-campus course experience for young adults (let’s assume under 20 years old).
The primary concern is that traditional course experiences with a significant online component reduce incentives, obligations, and opportunities for in-person engagement. This, in turn, potentially harms the learning experience, mental health, and arguably diminishes what is traditionally seen as a crucial formative life experience, though this last point is not explicitly stated.
Digital technology’s impact on mental health
I can certainly understand concerns about the mental health of young adults, especially if you're a parent of someone that age or know people who are. There are widely acknowledged and justified concerns about the increasing number of young people experiencing mental health issues, with numerous credible sources that have highlighted this growing problem.
Attributing causality to these issues though is complex. However, it would be naïve to exclude digital technologies from the discussion. These technologies have transformed our world and lives, and that has undoubtedly had significant impacts.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business, is a prominent figure in the discussion on digital technologies' impact on young people's mental health. His book “The Anxious Generation” argues that...
"the generation born after 1995 – Gen Z – became the first in history to experience puberty with a device in their pockets that diverted their attention from their immediate surroundings to an exciting, addictive, and unstable digital universe."
...and he claims this has had a devastating effect on young people’s mental health.
Whether involved in digital and online education or not, engaging critically with research and opinions like Haidt’s is valuable. However, the greatest challenge may lie in avoiding knee-jerk defensiveness, particularly when perceiving these views as a direct challenge to your work and advocacy over the years.
One of the primary challenges today is being able to hold two seemingly opposing things in tension. However, it is possible to work in online and digital education while recognising both the inherent problems and the benefits and opportunities of digital technologies.
Is online learning doing enough to support healthy study habits?
If we fold some of this back into online distance education, then I think we can certainly be better at acknowledging and factoring in the types of behaviors that online distance study might incline us towards that could be detrimental.
When designing and developing online courses, insufficient attention is often paid to how experiences can aid learners not only in achieving learning outcomes but also in developing attributes, habits, and dare I say, a lifestyle conducive to effective study.
In designing online courses, we should consider how much effort is put into guiding students towards becoming effective self-regulated learners and evaluating the efficacy of any methods employed. Self-regulation is a key attribute for online distance learning, but it would also be worth considering how to foster good overall habits that benefit study.
Daisy Christodoulou recently discussed what she termed "screen-based" education, highlighting that "current on-screen education is not as good as it could be" and suggesting that "learning on-screen might intrinsically be difficult". She argued that the design of our devices, ease of internet access, and the way educational technology mirrors consumer entertainment draw us into a distracting ecosystem.
Although her focus is not on post-secondary education, she ventures into a critique that could be seen as advocating for a more subtractive approach to online and digital technologies. This, I think, is a welcome warning against our perhaps more common inclinations to be additive when it comes to online and digital technologies. We should more often ask ourselves how we might strip things back, make things simpler, reduce distractions, and also how we might offer non-screen based options more often.
Video and on-screen text are all too often the go-to formats for online education, but they leave learners tethered to a screen. Audio, while not a panacea, is continually under-used and one of its affordances is a screen-free study option.
We should also aim to mitigate information overload and create learning constraints that prevent unnecessary or unhelpful study time through overly comprehensive materials or a plethora of extension diversions.
Promoting prolonged study sessions can lead learners down a path of diminishing returns in terms of attention, stamina, and learning impact. Sometimes, online learning design inadvertently creates an overwhelming abundance of content rather than promoting a balanced learning approach or strategic breaks that enhance learning.
One out of three types is a poor return…
I've digressed a bit there, but returning to the article, a central criticism was that campus-based courses now incorporate too much online learning, which reduces student-to-student and student-to-educator interactions, thus diminishing the opportunities for learning.
The writer's remedy would be to eliminate online learning from campus-based courses to achieve those types of interaction through exclusively in-person means. I suppose in the same way we might describe a degree as fully online, this model could be called fully in-person.
It's reasonable to question how digital technologies might have reduced in-person interaction and socialisation. In the excellent documentary Rams, there’s a moment when the great German industrial designer Dieter Ram says:
“It honestly worries me that people are no longer looking each other in the eye. They are staring at their tablets and walking across the street like that. It is significant, how humanity has changed.”
This reflects broader concerns about digital technology's impact on us. However, in respect to the article, it's essential to consider whether universities' teaching and learning approaches are driving these perceived negative changes, or if these are manifestations of broader societal shifts occurring on campuses. Recently, many within universities have lamented decreased attendance at in-person events like lectures and this may be them simply experiencing the effects of these wider changes.
In a way, all of this is a much bigger debate, but if I was to address the issue of interaction in online learning within campus-based courses, I’d also want to make the point that the thing that’s being judged is all too often one dimensional.
If we were to use Michael G. Moore’s Three Types of Interaction to evaluate typical approaches, I think we’d find that in the majority of cases there’s a lot of learner-to-content interaction, with minimal deliberate and effective design of learner-to-learner and learner-to-educator interactions in asynchronous online learning components.
Although blended learning is especially tricky to pin down, if the online learning component is merely content, its potential is significantly limited, or you could even say sub-optimal. To my mind, one of UK higher education’s biggest cognitive distortions is the belief that post-pandemic the sector has moved to a blended learning model. In lots of cases, what’s happened is akin to tying an anchor to a car and calling it a boat.
So in a way, I think a critique of the online learning component of on-campus courses has some validity, but on the basis that it is limited and does not typically support those two people-centred types of interaction.
Ultimately, the current system makes integrating asynchronous online learning & teaching into on-campus courses a struggle. The universities model closely resembles Dee Fink’s castle top model, where in-person activities are seen as the primary vehicle for any kind of interaction, separated by periods of individual study or content engagement.
This model doesn't easily adapt to facilitate the continuous interaction seen in asynchronous online learning. Broadly speaking, there's a lack of experience and capability in adopting a short, frequent, and often rhythm of teaching, and in some instances, a fundamental reluctance to embrace such methods.
So has online learning destroyed the university experience?
The headline writers have done their job but that’s not really the core issue here. The essence of the issue presented seems to be how digital technologies have transformed people's behaviour and society at large, particularly among young adults engaged in a campus-based university experience.
This article also presents a quite decadent view of students, because the reality for many is that the choice of attending in-person has been taken out of their hands by the necessity of working to fund themselves.
In so many ways, an in-depth exploration of these things would’ve been a really interesting focus for an article like this, because these things are one of many recent examples of how longer term shifts in society and shorter-term challenges collide with the monolith of the time-honoured university experience that the writer reveres.
